I attended a family function on the weekend — one of those milestone celebrations — and as these things do, it reminded me of how fast life changes.
The attendance of a friend from west of Saskatoon took me back to the mid-1990s, when I took a day trip out to Biggar, Sask. Biggar was enjoying a bit of a boom, and a community profile was called for.
The boom, it turned out, was partly related to the fame of the Hanson Buck, the spectacularly antlered white-tail bagged by area farmer Milo Hanson in the early 1990s.
Read Also
Agriculture needs to prepare for government spending cuts
As government makes necessary cuts to spending, what can be reduced or restructured in the budgets for agriculture?
That resulted in a fair amount of hunting tourism, not to mention press curiosity.
Biggar is also a beautiful little town with several other claims to fame, including Prairie Malt and being the hometown of Sandra Schmirler.
I met a lot of interesting people that day, but I learned the most from a farmer I bumped into. I asked him about the crops, and the typical yields, and the usual weather.
“Getting much rain this year?” I asked.
“Well, I am,” he replied, with emph-asis on the “I.”
I looked at him, apparently, with a puzzled expression on my face.
“Got two inches the other day,” he explained. “My neighbour over the hill got nothing.”
How far away is “over the hill?” I wanted to know. A couple of kilo-metres, he estimated.
Well, that blew my inexperienced mind. How, I wondered, could he get a two-inch drenching when his neighbour got nary a drop?
That was my first glimpse of understanding into how local weather works, not to mention soil conditions and even insect infestations.
In those days, no one even hoped to guess whether their section would catch the bounty of the errant raincloud, or if it would burst open on the farm down the road.
Widespread systems, of course, are a bit different, but even then, rainfall amounts or damaging winds can be very local.
All that has changed. It isn’t perfect — likely never will be, considering how unpredictable weather is — but today, technology can narrow down weather effects, or tell you how many aphids are in your field, or help assess nutrients in the soil.
As they say these days, there’s an app for that.
And it has all happened just in the decade and a half since I visited Biggar. That blows my mind, too.
