“Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
Most of my time is spent at my desk pushing my keyboard-plow, but this week I had the chance to go out to a colleague’s grain farm with some students. It was a great example of a small family farm – if you can count 1200 acres as a ‘small farm’. Although this is an order of magnitude more than a farm in BC or Ontario, it is also an order of magnitude smaller than the mega-agri-business conglomerate farms in SK: lots over 10 000!
It was a really nice mix of field crops: canola, barley, oats, and peas; animals: sheep, beef cattle and kitties; fruit: sour cherries, seabuckthorn, 2 kinds of raspberries, saskatoon berries, huskap, and apples. I think I sampled everything, and mowed down 100 cherries of the tree… though it still had lots on it. I also saw lamb’s quarters in the orchard lanes, so I’d love to go back with a bucket (or 10) one day.
Overall it was a very charming place and made me really nostalgic for rural living. One of the nicest parts was the warm reception we got; my colleague’s mum Joan made us cucumber sandwiches and potato salad out of the garden, along with fresh berry tarts and a bowl of awesome local sour cherries. We had a sunny picnic in the garden and topped it off with a multi-treat fika that would make any Swede proud.
There was lots of farm equipment to look at too, but I’ll include that in another post.
Haven’t been here in a while. I love that top photo of you, all windblown and prairie lit. Hugs, sistah.