We’re back on the road – we’ve been away from Buchanan for just over a week now. We started off with my Class of ‘79 reunion weekend in Saskatoon. There’s a small group of us who have been getting together the weekend of the 3rd Saturday in July for a very long time now. It was a smallish group this year but we had just as good a time as we always do.
We stuck around in Saskatoon until Wednesday morning so that I could attend the 1st ever Ag in Motion outdoor farm show. I’m glad I went but I don’t know that I’d bother going again unless it gets a lot better. I was surprised by the number of seed companies there that I had never heard of. They had put a lot of work into their booths with most of them having seeded extensive plots of new varieties and – apparently – hauled water to them to keep them going through this summer’s drought.
The big disappointment to me at Ag in Motion was a combination of who WASN’T there as well as who WAS there. Who WASN’T there was the bulk of the prairie equipment manufacturers including such notables as Bourgault, Morris and Seed Hawk. Who WAS there was a plethora of tillage companies. Tillage manufacturers ferchrisakes!! In a year where we flat out wouldn’t have a bloody crop if it wasn’t for the fact that we have largely given up on tillage for the past 10 years, the big new equipment event at the first ever outdoor show is effing bloody tandem disks. I couldn’t believe it. There I was waiting to see the latest seeding technology in action and instead what I got was a great bloody lineup of big 4WD tractors hooked to shiny new tandem disks. WTF?? Mind you, the politically correct term now appears to be “vertical tillage”. “Tandem disk and harrowing the crap out of land until its black and ready to blow away” sounds so yesterday after all. If we have as little rain in the next 12 months as we have had in the last 12 I predict that none of those high tillage machines will be back for a third year, assuming the show itself survives that long.
From Saskatoon we moved down to Lucky Lake where they have a delightful little campground tucked in on the north side of town. We’ve had the place completely to ourselves until tonight when a few other trailers have started to show up for a big wedding this weekend. I bundled up the cutoffs from the garage project and brought them along so that SWMBO could have a bonfire and so far she’s had one each night we’ve been here.
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