As I write this, it has been raining and snowing for five days.
One day there were patches of sunshine, just to tease us, I’m sure, and then the rain returned.
And how it returned! Night and day it has rained, with no let up. Water is lying in the fields and in the potholes. Sloughs are overflowing.
Tractors are motionless in the fields and will remain so for days to come.
The last time I remember a rain like this was 23 years ago when I was housebound waiting for our first born and the neighbors and the doctor were all phoning to see how I was. As it turned out, she was 19 days late and by the time she arrived, the sun was shining, the roads were dry and we made it to the hospital with no problem.
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It used to be, when it rained, people were all smiles, because rain is moisture.
This time around a lot of people are downright ugly. Granted, days of grey skies can make one depressed, but I believe it’s more than that.
It’s just another thing to go wrong in an already bleak year.
An article in the Saskatoon StarPhoenix recently put it this way: “High costs and debt loads, low commodity prices and no faith in a national farm aid package is breeding depression and despair, particularly in Saskatchewan.”
The article tells of a suicide watch in one part of the province, where 11 families “check on each other daily to make sure no one has pushed the panic button.”
There were some telling figures in a National Post article last week.
While the trend of moving off-farm into the city is not new, the Post article says the same amount of land has remained in cultivation. In other words, farms are getting bigger.
In 1941, there were 732,800 working farms in Canada; in 1996, there were 276,500.
In 1941, 3.2 million or just over 25 percent of the population lived on farms. In 1996, that had dropped to 851,400 or 3.25 percent.
While numbers on-farm continue to go down, the rate of decline appears to be slowing: in 1986-91, the farm population shrank by 5.6 percent and from 1991-96 by 1.7 percent.
Red Williams of the University of Saskatchewan contends that the producer must become involved in manufacturing as the closer a raw product gets to where it can be used by a consumer, the more money there is in it.
I have no doubt that Red has hit the nail on the head. A few days of sunshine wouldn’t hurt either.
