HARDING, Man. – On the fifth day of the Milk Run, it’s so hot that the tiny ink stars stamped on hands at the gate melt away before they set.
The only thing brighter than the brilliant canola at the edge of the fairground is the glint of the sun as it hits the sweaty back of a well-groomed Limousin bull.
Underneath the weathered wood planks of the four-riser grandstand, four generations of the Kent family
finish their picnic lunch.
It’s a brief oasis of calm amidst the seven-ring circus that is the Harding fair. Granny Grace Kent secures the spot first thing in the morning, getting close enough to the cattle barns so the kids can get back to their 4-H calves.
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The Kents help organize the fair. They show cattle here. They bring gingerbread cookies and matrimonial cake and white dinner rolls to the contest in the exhibit hall.
It has always been this way.
This is a day when great-grandson Cody must start to learn that cattle are raised to feed the country and why he must sell his 4-H calf at the auction on day six of the Milk Run.
And it’s a day tinged with sadness as the Kents remember son and husband David, who 21 years ago was killed in a collision coming home from the Hamiota fair.
Through good times and bad, the Harding Fair has been a faithfully marked tradition of the Kent family and other families in this region.
Across the Prairies, similar traditions abound. The country fair has been a totem amidst the radical social and economic quakes that have changed the landscape.
But these annual celebrations of rural prairie values are not untouched by time.
The irrevocable forces testing the mettle of the family farm and the Prairie town also weigh on the country fair.
In Harding, now-overgrown sidewalks are a reminder of a more optimistic time, when a school, grain elevator, curling rink and several businesses graced the streets.
These days, as the locals say, more dogs than people live in Harding.
But this fair swells the hamlet, attracting up to 500 people in some years.
This year, it was half that size, the smallest crowd auctioneer Jack Curry has seen in a long time.
He would know. He has been the voice of the Harding light horse show for more than 30 years.
“In a small town, you get a job and you have it for a long time,” he said. His auctioneer father held it before him.
Harding is the smallest Manitoba town to host a fair and the people here like to say it’s the best one-day fair around, the jewel of the Milk Run.
Every third Sunday in July, the Milk Run starts in Oak River, then follows a route almost all locals above a certain age can rhyme off on their fingers.
Strathclair. Shoal Lake. Hamiota. Harding. Oak Lake. A fair a day for six days, with not more than a half-hour’s drive between them.
Back in the heyday of these fairs, when farmers had a quarter-section of land and a little bit of everything, they took a week with their families to go from town to town, returning home twice a day to milk the cows.
The Harding Fair is the youngest fair on the Milk Run. It started in 1904.
The people who first farmed these parts came from Ontario and Britain and brought their own memories of fairs with them.
Homesteaders built farms, churches, then schools. They formed agricultural societies to learn how to make life better for their families. The societies organized fairs.
The fortunes of prairie fairs rose and fell with what happened on farms.
Many fairs sank during the Great Depression, faded away during the Second World War, or were scared off during the cattle-killing foot-and-mouth disease epidemic in the 1950s.
Despite the trials of 100 years, most fairs have changed very little.
The concept of inflation has escaped prize monies. A blue-ribbon horse may win $10; a bull, $30; a pie, $4.
But money is not why people enter fairs. Rather, it has something to do with the ribbons.
Ribbons are everywhere at the country fair – pinned to directors and judges, clutched by dust-covered children dragging their favorite goats to the pet show, hanging from well-aged rafters above cattle stalls.
They are a symbol of the satisfaction Prairie people take in a job well done.
With pride, farm families bring the best from their kitchens, gardens, fields and barns to see how they measure up to their neighbor’s produce and handiwork.
These fairs are a co-operative effort, bringing together large groups of volunteers.
And like few other events, they were custom-built for families, catering to each generation.
At the Tantallon, Sask., fair, the odds are excellent for winning a ribbon.
There are fewer than half the horses and riders that once loped around the ring in figure-eight patterns.
There’s a running joke among the directors of the agricultural society here that a $2 membership buys them the right to work their butts off.
There was talk before the fair that this could be the last time people gathered on the floor of the gently sloping Qu’Appelle Valley.
They weren’t joking. The stamina of volunteers is wearing thin.
“The older ones are quitting and the younger ones are not taking over,” explained president Ron Swanson.
“I can’t figure it out.”
Brad Polvi sees the dilemma, but doesn’t have answers.
He hopes the fair survives. It brings the shrinking community together and gives kids memories, he said. His daughters surrounded him on a break from a farm safety lesson.
He remembers riding the ferris wheel and tearing around with a big pack of kids.
Polvi, 32, said he knows it’s time for his generation to take the reins, but how?
He works full time at the potash mine, his wife works too and they farm five quarters. Time at home is precious.
“There’s nothing left to start volunteering and organizing,” said Polvi.
Jackie Coulter, 29, is more hopeful she’ll be able to help.
Watching her two-year-old Jake take his first midway ride at the Hamiota Fair, she recalled the terrifying thrill of the Zipper at the fair in hometown Dauphin.
Coulter can see herself helping out one day, or entering home goods in the fair, but not until Jake and infant Emma are older.
Other women say the delicate balancing act of being bread maker and bread winner leaves them no time for making jam, growing vegetables or knitting socks to take to the fair.
And their volunteer labor is in demand at school, after school, and in caring for older parents.
Yet in Oak Lake, where there are 369 residents, there are 400 fair entries in the craft section alone.
And at every fair, there are reams of pies. At least 150 pies of 10 varieties grace the lunch table at the Oak Lake Fair.
People are willing to bring pies, but hesitate to make a bigger commitment to help put on the fair.
Better transportation makes it easier to get to the fair, but sometimes harder to find the time to make it. As rural society gets thinner, distances grow.
Mick Gould, a farmer who helps organize the Central Butte, Sask., fair, noted that a generation ago, parents drove only half an hour to take their kids to play hockey. Today it can be a 21Ú2 hour drive.
Better vehicles and roads also make it possible for farmers to skip over the small fairs on their way to regional centres, where prize pots are bigger.
This is not a new phenomenon. Circa 1963, the author of a history of the Tantallon Fair wrote: “Our civilization on wheels is making it a lot harder to keep the home intact and functioning as a home should.”
And farms have changed.
They are fewer, specialized and efficient and larger. What can generalized fairs offer?
There are fewer purebred breeders. Many of those left see little return from taking their cattle to the local fair.
For fear of disease, swine are gone altogether.
Fewer farms mean fewer kids, and fewer 4-H beef clubs needing the training ground provided by showing at the summer fair.
In Oak Lake, community donors offer more trophies than there are 4-H beef club members.
Fairs without 4-H shows struggle to find relevant activities for a generation raised on television and computers.
“They’re much more worldly than we were,” noted Donna Jack, a Tantallon fair organizer.
Midways can provide some allure. But these days, insurance costs are so high that only large fairs with lots of traffic can attract rides.
Still, fairs remain relevant because they fill a void left by the loss of quilting bees, square dances and card parties, said Edna McCall, president of the Abernethy Agricultural Society.
“It’s the one time when we get together as a community,” she said. “It gives people a reason to take time from their busy schedules to spend time in one place and see their neighbors and friends.” Reunions and hometown visits are often planned around fairs.
The death of the fair is something few people want to consider. But it happens. Agricultural societies move on and try other things. Some fold altogether.
The agricultural society in Holland, Man., gave up on its fair a decade ago after trying all the tricks members could think of to boost crowds from 75 people.
“Basically, we were losing $1,000 per year,” said president Brian Drummond. The society decided to stick with harness racing.
Few seemed to mourn the fair’s passing. “The town hardly even realized it was on,” said Drummond.
In Central Butte, where the fair can attract 1,200 over a weekend, Mick Gould doesn’t know if it will be around five years from now.
“I’m not really optimistic about that,” he said.
In Tantallon, Loretta Common said fair directors always wonder why they bother before the fair, but feel great once the day arrives and they see people having fun.
“It’s been here for so many years,” said Common, who has helped for 26 years. “I just can’t see it ever dying.”
In Nampa, Alta., the agricultural fair took a rest for 30 years. A dozen years ago, it came back with a slightly different angle.
It bills itself as the Nampa Family Fair, and organizers keep it old-fashioned, simple and cheap.
Susan Bowling works part-time for the agricultural society, and part-time for the town.
She said the fair gets all the volunteers it needs because the society owns the rink, and each group that wants good ice time at a cheaper rate helps out.
They run a penny carnival and a fun farmer olympics.
They also make sure their fair doesn’t compete with the one down the road the following weekend.
Judy Reimer, who works with the Saskatchewan Association of Agricultural Societies and Exhibitions, said she thinks more fairs should look at how to work together.
A society could run a fair every second or third year, and during the years off, help other societies or community groups.
But Reimer said she doesn’t think she will live to see this happen. “Old habits die hard,” she noted.
This year, the people who organize the Milk Run fairs took the unusual step of gathering to talk about working together to make all their fairs stronger with prizes for people who take their cattle or quilts to all six fairs.
Like farmers, fairs also face rising costs. Organizers are loath to raise gate fees or entry fees for fear of more people staying away. (continued next page)
Increasingly, they find themselves in a long line of volunteer-led organizations canvassing the same shrinking group of businesses for donations.
Except in Alberta, governments also have pulled back.
The federal government canned its fairs funding in 1995.
Saskatchewan gives its 62 ag societies $310,000 and 55 have fairs. Manitoba gives its 62 ag societies $370,000 and 56 have fairs.
Alberta, on the other hand, gives its 280 small-town agricultural societies a total of $8.6 million. Half hold fairs.
Most societies own rinks and buildings, and the grants help finance the upkeep.
The Alberta government sees agricultural societies as valuable contacts for rural development, explained Shauna Johnston of Alberta Agriculture.
In Manitoba and Saskatchewan, fair volunteers also are fundraisers who work dinner theatres, bingos and derbies.
The Fairmede Agricultural Society serves meals at auction sales. They do a brisk business, said Clark Lewis, who has been secretary-treasurer for 26 years.
When Lewis and wife Ann sold their Wawota, Sask.-area farm in June, the fair made $1,200 in meals.
The fair is one of the few things that mark Fairmede, he said. “Even though we’re small, we think we’re pretty important.”
His grandfather helped start Fairmede Fair in 1892.
Lewis, 74, continued the family tradition, and expanded the vision to lobby for fairs across the province.
He believes the future of his fair and others like it depends on the future of family farms, just as they always have.
Somewhere in one of the unpacked boxes in Lewis’ new house in Moosomin, Sask., is an answer for anyone who ever wondered what happens to all the ribbons at fairs.
There’s a scrapbook with ribbons and photos from close to 60 years of fair-going, starting when Lewis showed his first calf at age nine.
Closer at hand, he keeps a more recent addition to his ribbon collection. Inside a dark green velvet box lies a silver medal held by a green and gold ribbon.
Under the provincial crest, it reads, Nos ipsos dedimus: We give of ourselves.
Lewis is honored to wear the Saskatchewan volunteer medal, but modest, not too proud.
“You do what you can to make your community a little better place to live in,” he said.
