THANKSGIVING Day gives us all a moment to appreciate the good things that come our way that are not entirely of our own making. It focuses our attention on what we are given and what we share.
Most farming cultures have a long tradition of gathering to celebrate the harvest bounty. Farming people know how plentiful the gifts of nature can be.
But we also know from first-hand experience the terrible losses that nature can inflict.
Knowing our reliance on forces beyond our control cultivates a healthy humility. And appreciating our reliance on our neighbours during a harvest disaster reminds us of the wisdom of co-operation.
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There are heart warming stories again this harvest of how farm communities pull together when a neighbour is struck with particularly bad fortune and can’t bring the crop in without help. Prairie farm families have lots of experience that teaches us the benefits of working together to limit the vulnerability of individual families, including our own.
We are all better off and more secure when we share the good and ameliorate the bad. Spreading risk and limiting losses is better management.
Thanksgiving has an added note of gratitude for grain producers this fall as grain prices strengthen. Our viability depends on prices as much as on weather, it seems. And predicting grain markets can be as risky and uncertain as the weather.
The events of this summer illustrate the risks of abandoning co-operation in favour of individual risk-taking. Opponents of co-operative grain marketing through the Canadian Wheat Board have argued for years that they could make more money selling grain individually.
Sure that their personal marketing smarts would allow them to cherry-pick the top prices, they could not be swayed by arguments for co-operation or justice.
Never mind about sharing both the lucrative and the lower priced markets. Never mind about the losers, as long as they were winners.
Anticipating that the government’s move to remove barley from the single desk was legitimate, some farmers demonstrated their individual marketing expertise by signing contracts early.
We would not have learned about these private business deals but for their angry public denunciations when the judge ruled in the wheat board’s favour.
In press releases and interviews, these farmers claimed to have signed contracts as high as $4.75 per bushel for malting barley. They railed against those who would deny them the opportunity to be big winners.
The most recent pool return outlook for malting barley is well above that price. So it is the good fortune of these farmers that they too can now benefit from the market intelligence and expertise that is achieved by working together.
They and the rest of us garner the added value the single desk achieves and we share that good fortune fairly with pooled pricing. Co-operation widens the circle of winners.
Our well-being is interwoven with the well-being and stability of our neighbours, our communities, our country and our world. Thanksgiving is a humble, sometimes joyful and wise recognition of how dependent and interdependent we are.
Nettie Wiebe is a farmer in the Delisle, Sask., region and a professor of Church and Society at St. Andrews College in Saskatoon.
