Progress
When one looks at modern agriculture, one wonders where it is going.
A farmer reaches retirement age and his offspring have all left the nest so he sells out to his neighbor. His neighbor buys a bigger tractor and an air seeder to handle the expanded acreage.
The neighbor now has 3,200 acres or five sections of land. When the country was homesteaded 12 families lived on that property, raised large families and paid taxes to the rural municipality.
They supported a country school, various churches, a local of the Saskatchewan Grain Growers and the Saskatchewan Co-operative Elevator Company. Shipping day was a busy time at the local stockyards.
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Now a big chunk of the township is owned by one farmer, one taxpayer, and the family may well live in the nearest town or city rather than on the acres farmed.
So who will be the municipal councillor, the chair of the unit board, the Pool committee man, the church elder, the Worshipful Grand Master of the Masonic lodge, the organizer of sports days and agricultural field days? Indeed, who will there be to come to gatherings?
North American society is in the throes of deregulating agriculture, of removing all protective devices that helped farm families to farm despite recurring natural and man-made disasters.
What’s next? Will burgeoning population force a new wave of immigrant farmers to move in from Asia, eastern Europe and elsewhere to practise subsistence farming, surviving with much less than we have come to regard as necessary?
Already we are seeing today’s farm families relying more heavily on off-farm income and that indicates only a favored few have the resources to farm in the big leagues.
This is progress?
