Dear Editor
Sponsored by companies to which farmers practically owe their souls, the Farm Progress Show in Regina has come and gone. I suppose everyone who read through the Show Guide believed whatever they read? On one page there was a small ad, however, which caught my eye and held it. It was titled The GOOD OLE DAYS?
Then followed the line, “In 1900, one farmer fed 10 people” After that came, “Todays farmer feeds over 120 people.”
Oh, I say! Doesn’t that seem impressive!
Does it?
In 1900 the farmer in the West would have worked on 160 acres, one quarter section.
He would have used horses and even oxen. I’m not advocating a return to that power; some horses led sorry lives but they fertilized the soil in life and in death and reproduced themselves. I’ll return to that later. Farm families in 1900 were often quite large, so if we keep to the 10 people it would seem the family would have little left to seed, having eaten most of the produce!
Fast forward from that year of 1900 and the quarter section, 160 acres, on which this letter is being written, produced wheat, oats, honey, eggs, cream, apples, plums, strawberries, crabapples, currents, gooseberries, raspberries and roasting fowl. Did it feed more then 10 people?
You bet it did! There were already 11 in the family, and without the aid of anything but skimpy records I’d estimate it fed probably 75 people. It was, however, intensive farming. It was hard labour. Who will do that? Not many Canadians, not today.
Now, to the farmer who feeds 120 people. He sure doesn’t do it on 160 acres, no, indeed. He seems to need almost a township to do it! If you do the math he isn’t actually doing that well. And he owes the machinery company for power which does not fertilize the land nor reproduce itself, he owes the oil company, he owes the chemical company, he owes the bank – that’s not new – and the land is weedy, more weedy than ever because there are weeds all over that we at one time did not have.
And he no longer owns any of the co-operative companies the farmers of 1900 and thereafter worked so hard to create.
And the main sponsor of the Farm Progress Show is Viterra. There’s irony.
Christine Pike
Waseca
