This is Agriculture Week. in Saskatchewan. A number of people in the rural community where I live (people who are not farmers) ask why we need a special agriculture week, in Saskatchewan of all places.
My answer is always the same: to think, really think, about agriculture.
About the farmers who feed us.
About the thin layer of topsoil that sustains life on this planet.
About where we would be without a healthy agricultural industry.
Everyone on the rural prairies is connected with agriculture in some way.
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It’s not the same in the cities and, given the nature and depth of the rural-urban split, it is easy to see how agriculture can be taken for granted.
In one of my lives, I run a community newspaper. Sometimes I get so caught up in the business of running the paper, I have to take some time off and walk up and down the street and into the stores where the paper is sold. When I see someone actually buying a paper, I get a jolt: I remember that people really are reading it, and why I am running a paper and it’s not just so I have the joy of filling out another government form.
It’s the same with farming. We live close to the land and we take it for granted. That’s why we have an agriculture week: to give us all a jolt.
Speaking of jolts, I had a pleasant one recently. I read in a magazine the first few paragraphs of a book excerpt.
I read a lot of books. Once. Seldom do I come across one that I know I must have for my library, that I will pick up again and again. Just from the few paragraphs I read in that magazine, I knew that The Pullet Surprise by Michael Kluckner was one of those. I have since read the book, twice, and I was right.
I consider this slim volume must reading for every person who lives on a farm, who has ever lived on a farm, who wants to live on a farm or has any connection in any way with agriculture.
The Pullet Surprise is a tale of city folk who went farming. “We knew it had as much to do with dreaming as it did with agriculture,” Kluckner writes.
The book combines his story, mixed with practical farming advice and a look at the history of agriculture and the place of farming in the scheme of things as seen by Cato, 95-46 B.C., and a succession of other authors down to the present day.
If one gave Agriculture Week presents, a copy of this book would be my gift to every farmer I know.
