I joined the crowd in the corner booth of the Kingbird Café this morning and noticed a copy of the Globe and Mail lying open on the table. This is never a good thing.
“75% OF FARMERS WILL RETIRE IN THE NEXT TEN YEARS,” announced the headline. I looked around the café and did a rapid mental calculation.
“We already did the math. We were at 66.6 per cent at this table before you came in,” said Vern Bunton mildly. “If you sit down we go up to… let’s see.” He tapped on his calculator. “71.4 per cent. We’re still ahead of the curve.”
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…
“Wait a second,” I said. “Farmers don’t retire, do they? They just die.”
“Gad, the man’s right,” said Vern. He leaned over and scanned the article again nervously and then he pitched the newspaper over to the window ledge. “What am I doing?” he scoffed. “It’s not like it was a horoscope or something.”
This is all a sensitive subject for Vern. His son Matt just took over the farm and is busy with ambitious plans to get into on-farm processing. Vern is still doing the field work for him, but Matt now sits at the heavy end of the teeter-totter when it comes to business decisions.
Bob Pargeter patted Vern on the shoulder. He was in good spirits because he and his younger brother Bert were the only ones at the table with any shelf life left in them. “We’re right behind you, old man,” he said kindly. “For that matter, we’re all dinosaurs because we’re still reading a newspaper.”
“Not me,” said Bert. “I’m wired. I made my first post just last month.”
Bob shook his head. “Who’s got time for that? It takes me half a day to send an e-birthday card to my mother.”
“There’s the thing,” said Bert. “I was out spraying corn and I noticed there were purple streaks on the leaves. So I stopped and posted a question asking if anybody knew what that was. In about 30 seconds I get a reply from a guy in Illinois. Now I was expecting him to say ‘get a soil test’ or something but he asks me if I’m seeding into fallow land. I said yes and about 10 minutes later he sends me a page and a half on white grubs. Really interesting stuff.”
Bob shrugged. “That’s great but who the heck has time to type out a page and a half for some stranger 500 miles away?”
“That’s what I wanted to know,” said Bert. “So I asked him. And he sends me another note back explaining that he’s sitting in his sprayer, too, and he’s on auto-steer. I guess they’ve got fields in Illinois where you drive in a straight line for a couple of miles at a time. He’s got nothing to do and all day to do it, and so he’s sitting with his face in his laptop visiting with me.”
“Wow,” I marvelled. “And you got your problem solved.”
I had a thing like that myself. I needed a new muffler on my old lawn tractor but the small-engine shop in town wanted $250 to replace it. So I went on eBay and there was the same one for 90 bucks. I never do this normally, but I read all the money-back guarantees and security promises and I took a chance and threw it on my credit card. The muffler came in the mail two days later. The holes were in the top instead of on the side but I spent an hour with the welder and a hacksaw and made it work. The whole experience has changed my life.
I thought about all of this on the way home in the old truck. If the way of the future has us visiting more often and solving problems without a consultant and paying less and working at the tool bench in a cloud of welding fumes to fix old stuff, it should offer just a tiny bit of comfort to an old guy who is shuffling off to his final reward.
