Reading Time: 4 minutes When Elaine stepped inside the Hanson Acres cleaning plant she found three generations of Hanson men all focused on the same thing. Her father-in-law Dale was balancing at the top of a six-foot ladder, trying to hold on to one end of an eight-foot iron shaft as he pulled it out of the fanning mill. […] Read more
Carry the load
In for the long haul
Reading Time: 4 minutes Cousin Allison’s wedding dance had reached the point where the women were discoing to Village People songs, small kids were roaming the hotel ballroom like a pack of wolves, and Allison’s father had cut off the flow of free liquor. “I got to the bartender just in time,” said Dale Hanson’s nephew Mark, almost spilling […] Read more
Keeping it together
Reading Time: 5 minutes The countryside isn’t immune to the trendlines in divorce. Recently I was at a party chatting with another farm couple when the subject of divorce came up. They told me they knew eight farm couples in their area who are in the process of splitting up. I was shocked, but as I talk to more […] Read more
REFLECTIONS
Reading Time: 2 minutes In the movie The Adventures of Tintin a young crime reporter named Tintin forms an unlikely alliance with a sea captain named Haddock. At one point the captain says “My memory is not as good as it used to be.” Tintin queries “What did it used to be?” The captain replies “I can’t remember.” Memory […] Read more
Don’t put up with dry skin
Reading Time: 2 minutes Everyone experiences dry skin at some time, and in our climate dry skin is extremely common in the cold, dry months of winter. Preventing dry skin is definitely better than experiencing the flaking and itching! Your skin covers the entire exterior of your body and has a surface area of close to two square metres […] Read more
Saving face on the Sideroad
Reading Time: 3 minutes 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 […] Read more
You’re never too old for shingles
Reading Time: 3 minutes Even if you have never been affected by shingles, you probably know that it is an extremely painful skin rash with blistering. However, what you may not know is that shingles is caused by the reactivation of the virus that causes chicken pox, known as the varicella zoster virus. Chicken pox is a childhood viral […] Read more
Add it up
Reading Time: 4 minutes Kids learn about production agriculture at their parents’ knees. They ride in the tractor cab when the crop goes in, they learn to identify weeds when they go along on scouting trips, and they soon get asked to help feed the calves or milk the cows. Learning to become a farmer on the farm is […] Read more
Trouble comes to the farm
Reading Time: 4 minutes Everything was ready to go. With another week or so of warm weather, the Hansons would be ready to start putting seed in the ground. They planned to seed as much of their 6,000 acres as they could get on to — anything that wasn’t still too wet after last year’s flood. The machinery had […] Read more
A farmer’s hierarchy of needs
Reading Time: 3 minutes In the same way that spring produces the first gin and tonic moments on the veranda and frog songs that waft up from the marsh in the evening, it also produces two famous lists on the fridge: those things which must be done and another that fantasizes what might be done if we had the […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
