Growing up in Saskatchewan you are bound to hear stories of Saskatchewan heroism. Of helping your neighbour. Fire destroying a barn and everyone coming together to rebuild it.
As a province, we were built on the foundation of family farms.
Communities grew based on rail lines, homesteads, and agricultural industry.
Annaheim is still viable because of Doepker Industries who started, and still does, on farm machinery, as well machinery for the forestry and oil and gas sectors.
Michel’s Industries, Bourgault Industries, Schulte Industries, and many other industries that have come and gone filled that need for local materials while farmers worked the land.
The agriculture sector is a tricky business. The world needs to be fed but this must be balanced with business success.
Niche and large scale is now the norm.
Educated farmers are now the norm.
Farmers who left school before even hitting their teens are no longer acceptable in today’s world as most producers have university degrees instead of a grade 8 education if any.
Being the product of a family farm, it is hard not to mourn what Saskatchewan has lost.
Between 1901 to 1939, the number of homesteads grew from 13,000 to 142,391 across the province.
That number has been on the steady decline as some farmers were able to make a go of it while others could not.
Talking to any retired farmer, you hear about how it used to be; the lands that fed a dozen families while now it is farmed by one.
Driving down Hwy. 2 especially, one sees the old, abandoned homesteads where a family tried to build a life.
Shells of communities dot the province, places like St. James and St. Gertrude just to name a few.
Bigger is better and the agriculture industry is not exempt from that. These are the ruins of those who could not keep up.
“New technologies available to farmers led to economies of size and scale in agriculture—the larger the size of the operation, the lower the per unit costs of production,” they say in the Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan.
In his memoir, An Honourable Calling: Political Memoirs, former Saskatchewan Premier, Allan Blakeney laments the failure of family farms “that continue to decline although the volume of production may not.”
In the attempts to save small town Saskatchewan, the lack of funds to help keep the family farms, the blame falls of on the 1970s federal government, says Blakeney, who could not or world not support subsidizes that would support small farmers.
Although it is hard to argue that the old world was better, I cannot help but lament my lost history, a lost way of life that built this province. The romantic ideal of the old pioneer way of life.
What will happen to rural Saskatchewan as it continues to shrink and vanish?
Who will be left to tell the stories of Saskatchewan farmers?
This is the reason I applaud programs like Century Family Farm Awards. Although my family farm did not make it to 100 years, celebrating farms that did is a way of keeping our heritage alive.
