Farm a useful point of reference - Editorial Notebook

I could have been a farmer, but I’m not. I’ve been thinking about this as I prepared to write this column.

Farming is in the family: my great-grandparents and grandparents grew up on farms and became farmers. My mom and dad eventually decided to farm too. And that’s where I grew up, 16 kilometres north of Vauxhall, Alta.

That’s where I learned to drive our pickup on my dad’s knee before I could reach the pedals. I was changing our wheel-move irrigation pipes by 12 and I’m pretty sure by 14 they had me discing and swathing in the spring and fall. A few years later, I got a 3A driver’s licence so I could run our grain truck to town. I loved operating machinery, especially during harvest.

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But as my brothers and I were growing up, I don’t think we fully clued into the economic realities that my parents and other small producers faced.

As I understand it, cheap low-interest-1970s loans became costly high-interest-1980s debt and many lost their farms. Meanwhile, inputs got more expensive while commodity prices sunk, a crisis that continues today. My parents weathered the worst of the storm, but only with a lot of sacrifice and my dad’s wintertime off-farm wage to cover the operation’s losses.

I have fond memories of the farm but I also remember a certain cynicism about it from neighbours and family. “Don’t farm: it’s too hard to make a go of it,” seemed to be an unspoken message from no one in particular.

Even if the economics were better, I doubt I would have become a farmer. I was good at operating our farm equipment, but I sucked at fixing it. I left Vauxhall in 1992 for university, for different jobs and for international volunteer work.

Even though I’m not a farmer, I never stopped thinking about farming and food. When a vegetarian friend first explained to me her reasons for giving up meat, I thought of the farm. In India, when my host-family invited me out early one morning to see how they flood irrigated their cotton fields, again, it made me think of our irrigation techniques. In Colombia, when a colleague handed me a couple of raw cacao beans and some sugar cane to chew (to my amazement, they combined to taste exactly like chocolate), my family’s farm products came to mind.

The more I learn about food, the more the farm becomes a point of reference that helps me understand a little more of what we eat, where it comes from, who produces it and how the bills get paid.

As it turns out, now I’m an intern at the Western Producer learning about agricultural journalism. I hope the farm keeps coming in handy.