the old family farm

https://tan2tents.podbean.com/e/the-old-family-farm/

When i was born there were no hills. They came up later, so i know a thing or two about the olden days, shall we say.

The small southern saskatchewan community in which i was privileged to grow up, which happens to be the same place that the real Homer Simpson inhabited, before he became better known to the world, was full of small family farms. The town of my distant past, had 2 grocery stores, 2 garages, a skating/curling rink, a post office, and 2 grain elevators with a railroad branchline attached, and it’s own public school. All of this was supported by the farmers living in the region, and all of that is now vanished.

In the nearby town of Swift Current, named after the trickle of water that sometimes winds through the town, i went to buy some steel for a welding project and thought i’d check the blood pressure of the business so i asked the guy behind the desk if they were having any trouble finding enough help. He replied sadly, that their guys had nothing to do. Genuinely shocked, i said i would have thought that all the old farmers would be busting old stuff which needed repairs, but it turns out that the problem of the disappearance of the family farm has resulted in large corporate farms taking over…. He left it at that, and allowed me to figure the consequences.

Large corporate farms buy huge new machinery, and if you aren’t aware, the advances in the industry are nothing short of shocking. Farmers these days watch tik tok videos on their phones while computerized combines move over “great Yhuge tracts of land” picking up the crop and navigating by gps. Very little physical work is required. Grain farmers these days scarcely require soap, as nearly everything is done mechanically. Even the dairy farms are fully automated to the point where the expression, “milking cow hands”, as one high school girl in my youth was teased as having, sadly goes unused for decades.

It all happened gradually, like some sort of a strange pregnancy, where the baby is a collection of all the babies of the past, and becomes a monstrous human being, stomping across the earth and devouring everything in sight. Sorry i do get carried away with my analogies at times. Have to work on that. Anyway, you get the picture and the picture is shocking like, oh never mind. The point is that southern saskatchewan has changed in about fifty years from a mile or two between thriving family farms to vast areas of literally no farm yards and mere remnants of the farms of the past. Last winter i noticed the huge distances between sightings of cattle on farmyards. Few exist and those that remain are operating what i would call large operations involving hundreds of cattle.

The family farm culture is all but completely kaput (that’s german), mopped up by prospering self-contained hutterite colonies and corporate interests. Does it matter? Well, it kind of does when you consider that all those kids which used to grow up on farms, kids who developed a strong work ethic and understood the meaning of real not fake, produced value, have ended up mostly in the cities and towns, many “currently receiving social assistance benefits”, paid for from the tax-base, which is relying more and more on the central banking “industry” and it’s owner-families who shall not be named, and less and less on the actual production of the land. Clearly, the gravy is going to stop flowing at some point in the very near future, at least for many or most of us.

And on that topic, considering how our genius overlords are shutting down what they call the fossil fuel industry, are we headed for disaster? No fuel, no farming, no food?

In the town i mentioned, Swift Current, a few days ago one of the hardware chains which i always considered to be quite successful and a fixture, announced their closure. They supplied agricultural products to the community and surrounding area, at reasonable prices, which may have been their fatal error… The 2 local larger shopping malls are full to the rim of nothing, most of the shops have closed and only large grocery outlets and dollar stores and a few diehard stranglers remain. You have to wonder how many months those have left before they join the throng of the departed. It was kind of shocking to realize that the only spot in the mall parking lot that was jammed was the one in front of the local mal-wart. What a beehive. Maybe there was a yuge sale of toilet paper or gerbil food, idk, but obviously some sort of a thing is occurring which is driving whole populations into there, like some sort of enormous shopvac which not only gets the dust on the floor, but all the tools off the shop wall too. Oops, there i go again, sorry.

Here in canuckistan, we have this thing called canadian tire and it’s been interesting to watch it’s development over the years. A long time ago, shortly after the hills first popped up, they used to advertise they were more than just tires. Then the ads shifted to convincing everyone that they had the lowest prices. This was the focus of their advertising campaign, to convince people that they provided the highest value for their monopoly money. Well, clearly, propaganda works because because this is one business that has succeeded. Once everyone was convinced that the prices were the lowest in canadian tire, where do you think they headed when they needed a thing? Currently, their major focus appears to be on spitting out weekly flyers into everyone’s mailbox, and again, “special sales” are ubiquitous, also they are everywhere.

Anna way, there are trends, and if you add up the whole picture, what you see is collapse of the family farm along with the small businesses they support, with huge corporations taking over entire townships, masses of people relying on gubbermint bux for their daily sustenance, borrowed from ultra wealthy banking families, with their own governments financially incentivized to reduce theses very masses of people. Is this the “sustainability” being discussed in Davos Switzerland, because the situation does not sound very sustainable to some of us. In fact, wonkyness might sum it up a lot better.

Clearly changes are in the wind, and the idea of hiding from what’s happening by focusing on the today’s version of bread and circuses reminds of that old ostrich in the desert who buries his head in the sand and…

Hope you are well and you have some AU and AG and some gumption to weather the financial and social upheavals that appear to be on the way. After all, if a farming community which appeared to be eternal as little as fifty years ago can vanish completely in just a few decades, what do you suppose might another few decades bring about?

Anyway, no fear. More good things happen than bad. If some idiot can get exactly as old as i am, there is hope for you too my friend. And here is a piece of a free golden idea for you as a little reward for suffering through this “article” of mine: buy a few acres of shoddy land nearly anywhere, cover it with some productive soil, arrange a water supply, build a shack on it, an rv, a teepee, whatever, and grow something to eat. It might take you five or a decade but how many years does it take to pay off a mortgage in the city?

You’re welcome.