I’m bubbling like a pot of thick and hearty pea soup at the prospect of attending another St Jean Farm Days. I once took this small but vital farm show for granted, but after the pandemic struck down this and so many other regular farm gatherings I vow to never again be blasé about the events that allow so many of us to get together, chat, wander, look at new stuff, and hear from smart people about important matters. St Jean Farm Days is held every normal year at this time in the small southern Manitoba town of St Jean Baptiste, a community in the heart of the Red River valley, in a wide floodplain of rich and heavy soil, surrounded by thousands of acres sown each spring soybeans, wheat, canola and corn, and populated by a dynamic mix of French, Mennonite, Hutterite and other heritage populations.
Will everything be the same as back in 2020? I intend to employ my spider-senses to assess that. Will pea soup still be the main lunch offering, served by the Knights of Columbus? Will the speakers address a standing-room-only crowd in the narrow hall? Will all the regular trade show booth folk be there? Will the main street of St Jean be lined from one end to the other with pickup trucks by the time I get there, forcing me to scramble down the road hauling my bag of reporter gear and forgetting my coffee in the car? We’ll soon see.
St Jean is the first of a rush of multi day events that are heading my way. After St Jean Farm Days it’s Manitoba Ag Days in Brandon, the Keystone Agricultural Producers annual meeting, the Manitoba Swine Seminar, CropConnect and then the Canadian Crops Convention. I’ve covered all those for two decades, but the pandemic interregnum is likely to have brought some differences. Time hasn’t stood still, so perhaps there will be some happy surprises when we all get back out there together in farm-meeting-country.
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?
On Friday I got a glimpse of how different things could be when I spent the day in downtown Winnipeg, checking out many of my old haunts from the 15 years I had an office at Portage and Main and from the 22 years I’ve been covering conferences and meetings downtown. There the pandemic’s impact is definitely lingering, with only about one-third of the people scuttling through the underground concourse as before, with many shuttered businesses and dark storefronts blighting the streetscapes, and with little sign of downtown returning to a pre-COVID normal. It was hard to locate an easy public place to set up and work around Portage and Main, with all three Starbucks permanently closed, with Nathan Detroit’s restaurant and Cafe Asanté gone, and with the food courts seeming to be bereft of grain industry folk. Perhaps I should have checked out Bailey’s and the Fairmont’s lounge. It looks like downtown Winnipeg’s going to take a long time to bounce back.
I’m hoping the changes at the farm shows I’m about to attend are positive ones, the product of fresh ideas and progress rather than of struggle and woe. The farm economy has had a better time than the rest of the economy for the past couple of years, so that’s a distinct possibility.
Maybe things won’t be different much at all. In a way that’d be best. Wouldn’t it be nice to get back to a normal “meeting season” after the last two years of cancellations, restrictions and other disappointments? I’m hoping for something like normal, just a bit better, and to be able to roll back into some of the things we used to take for granted but will perhaps now appreciate.
