After 40 years of farming, Bob Farris has been told it’s time to quit.
The farmer from Andrew, Alta., was told by his bank he had two choices: sell his equipment at auction or have it seized. Half his land is also for sale.
“The bank wants to call my loans and this spring they wouldn’t give me an operating loan,” said Farris.
As other farmers are starting harvest, Farris is washing the dust off his equipment and having it hauled 300 kilometres south to a Ritchie Bros. sale yard in Nisku, Alta.
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After the sale, he plans to hire a neighbour to take off his crop.
A combination of low commodity prices, high input costs, early frost last harvest and an unharvested crop the year before combined to drag Farris under.
“I didn’t have any reserves to cushion that blow.”
Since the notice went in the paper announcing the Sept. 7 sale, many of Farris’s friends and neighbours have offered their sympathy and said they’d like to help if they were in a better financial situation on their own farm.
“All my creditors are telling me I’m not the only one,” said Farris, who has farmed since 1966 when he was 14 years old.
“All I wanted to do all my life was be a grain farmer.”
In the past there was always one good crop. One year the price of oats would be high or he would have a bumper canola crop. Other years high barley or wheat would carry the farm forward. In recent years there have been few bumper crops and high prices for crops are rare.
On Aug.18, the Alberta government announced a $261 million disaster aid package to help struggling farmers like Farris.
Wayne McDonald, senior manager with AFSC, the provincial agency that looks after the Canadian Agricultural Income Stablization program said that since 2003, the price of fuel has increased 40 percent and the price of fertilizer has increased 70 percent.
The disaster program is designed to help offset the rising price of fuel and fertilizer through the federal and provincial CAIS program. It’s expected to be in farmers’ hands by fall.
The aid is too late now for Farris, but some kind of assistance earlier in the year may have helped, he said.
“If I would have had $200,000 in the spring, I would be sailing. I would have gotten through,” he said.
“I’m your typical grin and bear it farmer. I keep on struggling and hope for better times to come.”
After spending his life building his farm, Farris doesn’t know what he will do next.
“I still haven’t come to terms with what I’m going to do in the future. I can’t face that. I don’t want to come to terms with the fact I have to start a new life,” said Farris who enjoyed the solitude of farming.
“You’re all by yourself and you rely on your own resources. It’s just you in the field by yourself with your own thoughts. That’s the life farmers choose.”
