OPINION: Farming is good — good year for crops, lots to be thankful for

I don’t recall a summer that was better for growth than this summer. Many farmers took off four good cuts of alfalfa. That’s amazing. I’m told silage corn yields are double what they were last year. Soybean plants have pods right to the top of the 3-plus foot-tall plants and many fields are going to yield 60 bushels or more per acre. Grain corn will be going over the 200 bushels per acre. It should be a great year for cash-crop farmers. Let’s hope we get good harvest weather.

Pastures never dried up and cattle had ample grass all summer. Wells didn’t go dry. Farmers weren’t hauling water to their livestock. Cattle prices are still high and beef farmers are a cheerful bunch.

It’s been a bumper year for apples. Apple trees are loaded. Gardens had bumper crops. Lawns were lush and green and required mowing every week. No brownish lawns anywhere.

All this growth is because of the very timely and adequate rainfall during the hot summer months of July and August. Some areas got too much rain and that has been bad for some crops and for market gardeners. Here in my neck of the woods we had 118 mm in July and 144 mm in August. Compare that to last year when we had 64 mm in July and only 26 mm in August. September was even drier with only 14 mm.

This September, up to the 20th of the month, I measured 47 mm in my rain gauge.

Farming is good. The downside is that the cost of new machinery is incredibly expensive, and expensive to operate. But you can find real bargains when you attend a farm auction sale. That is if you want to farm and work the land like we did some years ago with a plow, a disk or a cultivator and a seed drill. Nobody, it seems, wants them anymore. They want the big air-drill planters.

I was at a few farm auctions this summer and at one farm there were no bids on a really good five-furrow plow. That plow would have sold for $20,000 when it was new. A cultivator and a disk met with the same no interest. It was like they were relics of the past like a Model T car. The seed drill did sell but it went cheap.

At another farm auction a three-furrow 3-pt. hitch plow went for $40. One-furrow walking plows at another sale didn’t sell, no bids.

The news media and opposition politicians like to bombard us with news of the “high cost of living” and the “high cost of groceries.” I would again challenge that and give a positive voice to that message. I sometimes can’t believe how inexpensive some things are, including food.

I needed a new swivel chair for my computer desk. The old one was 20-years-old and needed to be replaced. An office supply store had nice swivel chairs at over $400. I happened to be in a local box store looking for shoes when I spotted a very neat swivel chair priced at $65. It was made in Vietnam. I sat in it and it was perfect for a big guy like me. I bought it. It has five caster wheels and a hydraulic thing for the height you want. It came in a cardboard box with one Allen wrench to put it together, which was simple. I’ve had it for over a year now and it is still perfect. I sit at my computer every day so it gets used. That’s just one example and there are many such good buys.

One of our local grocery stores sells hot ready-to-eat barbecued chicken for $10. If they don’t sell that day they are priced at $6.99 the following morning.

Good solid old-fashioned produce such as potatoes selling for $1.99 for a 10-lb. bag, a 10-lb. bag of carrots and red beets for $2.99 and green cabbage for 49-cents/lb. are real bargains in the grocery stores.

Low food prices to be thankful for.

I am thankful that our federal government under Mark Carney has made some good changes and gone are Steven Guilbeault, Chrystia Freeland and Justin Trudeau.

Canada’s Prime Minister commands high popularity and robust approval ratings for his handling of international trade tensions and economic management. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Maynard van der Galien is a Renfrew-area farmer writing columns for over 40 years.