The Struggle

FTLComm - Tisdale - Sunday, May 19, 2002

The long weekend in May, it should be a happy time with green grass, sparkling new leaves on the trees and a time when the earth is damp and new crops should be beginning their lives. But the long weekend of 2002 is a cool and windy affair. The temperature as the day moves onward will get up to about sixteen but the twenty-five to thirty knot wind from the Southeast is stealing whatever little moisture is to be had either in the soil from what remains of sloughs and dug-outs. The trucks were busy loading treated seed at the Beeland Co-op last night and this morning (right) a farmer is busy putting seed and fertilizer into a dusty field just South of Louis Dreyfus terminal. The dug out below is just West of town on the South side of highway 3 and will soon be completely dry as the merciless wind evaporates what little water is left in the bottom of this reservoir.

As in all struggles the weather is really only a small component in the sum total of opposition to the crop of 2002. No farmer before in history was as well informed and so well educated in the economics of modern Canadian agriculture and the knowledge that US farmers will be able to bring their crop to market with most of their production costs covered by the government allowing them to overproduce and flood the market with corn and soybeans that will devalue our barley and canola to the point that even if a crop is produced its value will be well below the cost of production. So really the struggle this year is to face the weight of these conditions and place optomism and some faith in what you are doing before the stark reality of both awesome drought conditions and economics that are simply ruling this year's production as economically unviable.