Duncan Diary Installment One – Farming

I spent the summer learning that learning to be a farmer takes a lot more than one summer. It all looked so easy “twelve acres” they said, “just the right size to start with, get yourself a little tractor, and away you go.”

It was all so easy. In my mind. Plough the back five acres, put in some fence posts. An electric fence they said. Then get a couple pigs. They’ll dig it up. And manure it. “Then you’ll be ready for cows.” It was the cows I really wanted. Ever since last years Calgary Stampede I’d had pictures of them in my wallet. Waist high cows, Irish cows, called Dexters. I fell in love with them and I couldn’t wait to lean on the gate, with a straw in my mouth, looking at the cows. My cows. Everybody else in the valley had cows, big black and white ones and big brown Jerseys, walking about in the fields, mooing. And I’d be the guy with the little cows. Walking about in my field, mooing. Pretty cows, with pretty names, like Christina, and Shelley, and Buffy, and when I called they’d come over, all big eyed, and moo. Little cows, little moos.

I moved in just before Christmas. Very cold. Walked down to the creek the first morning, stood on the bridge (just a little bridge) and watched the water. There seemed to be a lot more of it than last summer, when I first started dreaming of my farm. It was higher and faster and noisier, and then the bridge broke away from the bank. I fell in. It was cold water, and the house was even colder the heaters didn’t seem to work, the taps ran cold, and there were no lights. It seems to be a feature of country living that the electricity fails. If you fall in the water it fails immediately, otherwise once a week. And on Christmas Day, I spent the day in bed.

Next morning was no warmer, still no electricity, so I walked over to the neighbor. Hello, come in, you look cold, want coffee? Splash of rum in it? We’re just having breakfast, like bacon? More rum? By lunchtime I’d discovered that it was too cold and the ground too hard to plough, that pigs were stubborn and difficult, that sheep were stupid, cows didn’t respect electric fences, that there wasn’t any money in farming, nobody could expect to make a go of 12 acres unless they had a rich wife and a day job . By evening, I knew that hawks ate the chickens, rabbits ate all the vegetables, deer ate all the flowers, that the bridge (my bridge) broke away every winter, that the only way to keep warm in my house was to wear ski clothes over woolen underwear. Getting the lights back on was complicated in my house because the previous owner had strange ideas about electricians secretly complicating the nature of electricity so that ordinary people wouldn’t understand it and would therefore have to hire an electrician even to change a light bulb. So he did all his own wiring, using old telephone wire, and the main switch for the house was out in the barn and after a power failure it needed someone to be out there and shout to someone in the house about exactly when to switch on the circuit breakers or none of this worked. “And if I were you I’d get the whole place rewired, before it burns down.” We drank quite a lot more rum (it was Sunday all that day) and decided that my tractor wasn’t big enough (apparently one of the main problems with farming is the size of tractor, always too small or too large), and the solution is a newspaper called Buy and Sell which comes out every Tuesday and is filled with advertisement for tractors, (big tractor owners seeking smaller ones, smaller ones looking for bigger).

Then we got on to fence posts, which are wood or metal or fiberglass (wood rots, metal rusts, fiberglass is useless), taxes (much too high), barn roofs (“yours looks like it needs replacing pretty soon”). We also touched on fishermen collecting Unemployment Insurance, Ministers of Agriculture (“don’t know an apple from an onion”) Revenue Canada (” think I’m making a fortune”), and, as the bottle was now empty, the high cost of rum.

It’s now a year later. I’ve got some fence posts in (not electric), a new bridge, the same tractor, new wiring (the roof can wait) and I know quite a lot of the neighbours. We all agree that the price of rum is too high, that everything else is too big or too small, that farming is a ridiculous occupation, and finally that there’s nothing else we’d rather do. And I still have the pictures of the Dexters in my wallet.

James Barber