I took the family to one of the neighbourhood parties at the Fisher place down on the River Road over the holidays. It was a pretty typical mix of farm and small-town families. The men stood in the heated garage, holding beers and moaning about the price of pinto beans and foliar fungicides. The women were gathered in the kitchen sipping fizzy drinks and moaning about their impossible children. I came to a halt beside my son and two of his cousins who had come up from the city to visit for a few days.
Read Also
Ground rules for farm family communications
Establishing meeting ground rules can help your family find ways to communicate that work for your farm. Here are some…
“So what exfoliant are you using?” I heard my son ask the other two. This made me stop dead in my tracks. Lofty is a philosophy major and couldn’t tell you the difference between oats and barley. One of the cousins is studying freshwater biology and the other is doing exercise science. They are all originally from the country but even if they put their three heads together, they don’t have the agronomics to grow a carrot. So, it was pretty odd to hear them discussing crop inputs.
“No, Dad,” sighed Lofty with that bemused expression he uses for ancients like myself who have become decoupled from the popular culture. “We’re talking about exfoliants for your face. You know, a deep cleanser.”
I glanced over my shoulder nervously. “Is this the sort of conversation that men should be having?” I asked.
“Of course,” said Lofty. “Every man should scrub the dead skin cells off his face. It’s the first thing you do when you get out of bed. After the exfoliant you should wash with a hypo-allergenic soap and follow it with a good moisturizer. Don’t you do any of that, Dad?”
I explained patiently that a farmer would rather sit through the Ice Follies than scrub his face with apricot pit and lingonberry abrasives. The cousins looked intently at my cheekbones and one of them asked:
“Do you mean to say he’s still using a bar soap?”
“That’s right,” I replied. “Pit run, hotel-grade, bar soap. You find it anywhere they sell straight razors, whalebone corsets and Dixie Peach Hair Pomade.”
This last joke was lost on them because they all apparently plaster their hair down flat with modern-day pomades, in various aromas of apple and spice, which explains why they all look like they just stepped out of Fred Astaire’s backup line in Flying Down to Rio.
The boys tell me that exfoliation exposes the face’s hair follicles, allowing for a better shave. And we all know that a smoother shave is at the top of the list for a man’s morning ritual.
As I listened to them I thought these young sophisticates could be looking at one of the last big, untapped markets in Canadian agriculture: an exfoliant for farmers. Of course, there will have to be some careful marketing. The trick will be to convince the farmer that exfoliating is a manly thing to do, sort of like going out to the shop to sand a dresser. It probably might help to explain to him that there is something living on his face that needs to be killed. The product should have a name like FaceSaver XL and the TV ads could use football and military metaphors, with a voiceover by Sam Elliott.
It would also help if the product could be delivered in bulk by truck. The sell sheet message should stress the short window of opportunity for application so that there’s some pressure to get moving early in the season. The usual discounts would apply to early orders. In the second year we could announce a shortage due to interruptions in the Brazil pomegranate harvest and soften them up for a stiff price hike.
You’ll know the campaign is getting some traction when you overhear a conversation like this in the diner:
“Where’s Larry?”
“He’s exfoliating.”
“Oh, jeez, I guess that means he’s going to miss the moose hunt.”
I looked at my own grizzled chops more carefully in the mirror this morning. The lad has a point. Something needs to be done. But where does it stop? French cologne? Lace cuffs? A powdered wig? In the end, I did what all old farmers do. I broke the ice on the rain barrel with a hatchet, splashed my face with cold water and scrubbed dry with a feed sack.
