Difficult times in farm country

Today in Brookdale, when I stopped to visit with a number of farmers in their fields, I got an earful. It's been a poor wet year, with prices for crops like canola and wheat too low, and costs for inputs like gas and fertilizer too high. One farmer put it bluntly "The problem is here. And it is ___(expletive deleted)_____ serious!" For some the situation is precarious. For young farmers, the situation is particularly troubling. It is tough to make a living from farming when you have to work half a year in the oil fields of Alberta to cover your losses on the farm in the rest of the year. Farming is a wonderful lifestyle – but it is doesn't work if you can’t make a viable living out of it. Clearly, something has to change. There needs to be better certainty for farmers. Somehow, farmers deserve to get a larger proportion of the final sale price of the bread or other products produced from their crops. Manitoba farmers, with all they have been through this summer, also deserve more help from provincial and federal governments than has come so far this year.