Community matters most 

 

By Keith Roulston

 

One of the farm papers we receive had a story recently on a farm in western Canada that got too big for its own good.

Monette Farms and its affiliated companies filed for creditor protection after not being able to pay its bills. It owns farmland in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, British Columbia, Montana, Colorado and Arizona – about 274,000 acres in all – and leases a further 218,000 acres. It also has seed-processing and produce-storage facilities. It recently sold off 13,000 acres to raise $54 million to help pay off its debt.

The story brought back memories for me. Way back in the 1980s we had a company in our neighbourhood which was accumulating huge (well, huge for us at the time) amounts of land for European investors. It was also a time of incredibly high interest rates that got many farmers who had recently expanded into some real trouble.

One day James Roy, who had founded the Blyth Festival, dropped in to say hello to Doug Whitmore, who ran Blyth Printing and had been a board member of the Festival. Doug suggested James should have his wife, Anne Chislett, an award-winning playwright, write a play on the subject.

Anne felt she was too ignorant of the situation to write the play herself. She reached out and asked me if I would be her co-author and provide the needed information.

I remember talking to all sorts of active farmers caught in the bind including Brian and Gisele Ireland.  Bruce County was one of the hardest hit areas by the high interest rates.

It was a time of penny auctions, when friends and neighbours of farmers attended farm auctions where banks were selling off farms and intimidated other buyers from bidding actual values, instead buying machinery and land for pennies on the dollar and letting the farmer buy it back for very little.

The banks got the police involved and I remember one of the most  tense scenes in our play involved a police raid on a farm home to search for records.

I still recall the opening night of Another Season’s Promise, the play we created, as one of the most remarkable nights I’ve ever had in theatre. Ontario’s Minister of Agriculture, the late Jack Riddell, was there. I remember talking to the Irelands and other farmers involved, after the show.

The play was a smash hit and returned the following year, 1987, for a second year, then toured throughout Ontario and Alberta. 
That whole crisis was so long ago that it’s barely remembered these days. Meanwhile the bankruptcy of Monette Farms is very much in the news today. The company needed debtor-in-possession financing since crops could not have been planted otherwise. In addition about 600 employees would lose their jobs.

For the average western Ontario farmer all this is beyond understanding. Although we have large landholders here (the rest of our farm aside from four acres for our house is leased by a large farming operation but it pales in comparison to Monette Farms).

I have little sympathy with that company. The structure of rural areas – the family-owned farms – is important to the sense of community we have created. We need farm kids in our schools, and on baseball and hockey teams, to bring urban and country communities together. 

Here in Ontario, no matter how big farming operations grow (at least for now) they remain part of the community. We still have stores and ball parks, soccer fields and arenas.

Farmers are the heart of the community. That’s what the play was about 40 years ago, and that’s what Monette Farms shows today.◊