Toban Dyck: Farmers getting ready for another growing season, with all its unpredictabilities
Any day now this will all change. Any day now the things that consumed famers during the winter will be abruptly and happily put aside. Any day now I will turn the lights off in my home office, close the door and head outdoors. The growing season is about to begin.
The starter pistol fires at a different time on each farm, but when it does, it signals the peak of an excitement that for many farmers has been rising beneath the surface since mid-March.
Marketing whatever you have left in the bin and keeping an eye on the futures market for the crops you’re about to grow are still priorities, but they take a back seat to getting the planter ready for seeding. Agricultural policy remains interesting and on the radar, but it pales in comparison to spending the day outside getting the yard, the farm and the machines ready to grow a crop.
Amid the heated, protracted discussions surrounding the U.S. trade war with China, India’s pulse tariffs, carbon taxes and the infinitely deep well that is technological advancements in agriculture, farmers still have to physically go out and farm.
To start the first tractor, to hook on the first implement — the small, opening, pawn-like moves of a season full of unknowns — will be exhilarating. It always is.
Farmers plan as best they can for the months ahead, but there really is no telling what the growing season will look like or how it will unfold.
It’s difficult to think about anything else. And it would be impossible to take this specific column in any other direction. The next few months are full of unknowns and a lot of hard work. Thinking about it is consuming me. Farmers across Canada likely feel the same.
I will be purchasing my first parcel of land in the next few weeks, a natural move for someone wishing to take over the family farm. But it’s a terrifying one, all the same. The farm will have to start generating enough income to service debt and operate with enough left over to cover the inevitable and unforeseeable expenses associated with mechanical failure, accidents and other incidentals.
The farm needs to be sustainable, and I’m entering a phase during which that will be tested. Can a farm this size make payments on land at $6,000/acre and still have enough to operate? The mere act of writing out this question is working me into a frenzy. The books will be lean for a few years. “Land is a wise investment,” is what I will keep telling myself, right before “This is what I signed up for.”
But, in keeping with the excitement of spring, this looming reality and the related anxiety will subside immediately, once I’m no longer theorizing from my office chair and can start playing in the soil.
This year, we will be growing wheat, soybeans and canola, a typical rotation for the Canadian Red River Valley. Since I moved back to the farm in 2012, I have yet to grow canola, a distinctively Canadian and beautiful crop. I look forward to doing so under the experienced tutelage of my parents.
If you were near my farm, I’d urge you to visit when the canola is in full bloom. The vibrant yellow is breathtaking and it will be growing on either side of our half-mile driveway.
Our planter sits under its tarp, where I left it last May. Our tractors and trucks sit in a line in the machine shed. Our fields are covered in ice and snow. But all of that is about to change. Any day now.