By: Pat Daley
When you get dressed for work on Monday, don't forget your straw hat and overalls.
February 21 is Heritage Day and this year's theme is "Our Farming Heritage". Federal agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief made the announcement with Heritage Canada executive director Brian Anthony three days after a shooting threat ended farmers' week-long sit-in at the Saskatchewan Legislature.
| Glitzy Heritage Day poster celebrates farming while farmers struggle |
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It's a chance to focus on our fascinating farm buildings and on the importance of food products in our daily lives, they said. The problem is that the more I reflect, the sadder I get.
Like so many Canadians, I have happy memories of the farm - once mixed farming, then a market garden and eventually a greenhouse operation - run by my grandparents, uncle and aunt. And memories they'll remain. My uncle finally sold the farm this time last year. Out of 25 grandchildren, one is a cattle breeder and does some milking. I'm not sure that any of our parents would have wanted us to go into farming.
The farm crisis seems as much a part of this country's heritage as anything else.
Too bad farmers haven't figured out that to get real help from the federal government they should stick a Walmart sign out by the road.
Here's what I'll be thinking about on Heritage Day:
- the 13-year battle my neighbours have been waging against a Simcoe County proposal to put a garbage dump on prime farmland that, in 1998, won its cultivators first prize in the Forage Masters class at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair
- the new fight other neighbours are starting against a proposal to put a massive golf course in a little-known (i.e. outside the Greater Toronto Area) section of the Oak Ridges Moraine - a proposal that could be approved because it means new revenues for a township trying to keep its farming base and stave off housing development
- the farmers who defend genetically modified foods because they see a way to increase their yields and bring in some more money
- the way low food prices, fertile soils, and - for the most part - co-operative climates have combined to allow recent generations of Canadians to raise healthy families and live long
Finally, I'll remember "Idyl," written more than 30 years ago (before both widespread feminism and metric) by The People's Poet Milton Acorn:
Hooray for the farmer,
aching backbone of the country.
Bless him he's got more things to fix
and less to fix them with
than anybody,
and talk about early rising
Why at 5 a.m. he's woke up by
a bloody ignorant calf bawling in his ear
and before city folks are awake
he's tearing along the highway,
sixty miles an hour
on one damn errand or another.
He's got two-three times as much land
and two-three times fine shingly ruins
(good kindling) and owns
a TV, a truck, a tractor,
and maybe one wife
somewhat less mechanized
Oh prosperous free enterprise
that replaces two blades of grass
with two and a half, five
husky devils with one, and
leaves him all their worries.
Pat Daley is a freelance writer and editor in Athlone in Simcoe County, Ontario.
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