Spring has always been a special time in the world of farming.
Of course it is the time of obvious renewal. Farmers have planned out their cropping intentions, and with just a bit of cooperation from Mother Nature they will follow that plan through the coming months.
But that is only part of what this time of year is about.
While today rural roads are such that winter travel is not a problem that was not always the case. I spent more than a few days away from school growing up because roads were simply not passable by the school bus. That seems like a near thing of the past these days as rarely are rural roads that bad now.
But there is that near tradition of farmers being somewhat confined to the chores at home over the winter, although more a mindset today than a reality.
Still, as spring arrives farmers get in their trucks and head out to socialize.
In my job as a journalist covering agriculture I see the element of spring socialization among farmers manifest itself in a number of ways.
There are seminars and workshops in spring, and of course meetings of organizations.
As an example from April 20-22 the Saskatchewan Association of Watersheds Conference will be held at the Gallagher Centre in Yorkton.
And the Yorkton Spring 4-H Show was just held in the city. It might be targeted at youth in the showering, but it is a chance for their parents to talk about what lies ahead in terms of the new calf crop now on the ground on many farms, or what crop they think might generate the best return in the months ahead.
It was the same thing when I attended a Charolais bull sale on the Neilson farm near Willowbrook recently, and will be again as I attend similar events in the coming weeks.
While there is the serious business of seeking out the next bull that will be half the genetic package of some 200-plus calves in the coming years on the farm, there is also plenty of time to socialize at bull sales. In fact you will find a number of people at such sales who are not there to buy a bull at all. They are simply there to support the producers whose stock is on offer, and to spend time with other producers talking shop.
That is one thing that I can say as a journalist I envy among farmers. They are always just down the road a few miles from someone in a similar line of work to bounce new ideas off, or to simply vent over the lousy price of oats, or the lack of a rain cloud in the sky for weeks.
In my line of work the next newspaper journalist, other than the ones I work with who generally face the same collective challenges of working on a common publication, are a major community away, and rarely do our path cross.
It’s not like on the farm where producers will have days in the coming weeks when the fields are still too wet to get a tractor onto so they will head down the rural road to attend a farm auction or two.
Most in attendance will not drag home a new air seeder, or sprayer. They probably won’t even toss out a bid, but they will buy a friend a cup of coffee, may chomp down a hotdog, and they’ll spend the day swapping stories with others cut from the common cloth of those willing to gamble on the weather and world commodity prices to make a living as a farmer.
It’s never been an easy life, from the time the first farmer collected wild seeds and decided to plant them in a row, but it has always been important work.
And sometimes you need an informal support system for it all to make sense, and that is just what farmers have reared over the years each spring turning farm auctions, bull sales and similar gatherings into a time combining business and socialization, both equally important as they prepare for a new year of challenges in the field.
Calvin Daniels is Assistant Editor with Yorkton This Week.
