YORKTON - Few things bring the passage of time more into focus than the scale of today’s farming.
This journalist is at that stage where the hair I have remaining on my head is white, so I have a few years experience on my resume but some 60-plus years still does not seem like that long, but the farming of my youth is like some bucolic fairy tale of old while today it’s more something Isaac Asimov might have created for a sci-fi novel.
Admittedly my Dad’s farm was smallish even in my youth in the 1960s – a mere three quarters of land, and a small herd of registered swine – but he generally made it work.
That said the die was cast toward larger and larger farms. My Dad would point to this quarter and that one and not how in his own youth a family lived and farmed there, but slowly they began selling out to the bigger producers.
That trend – one generally occurring worldwide since the war years – has accelerated to the point you would find a functional three-quarter land-base farm difficult to find today.
As acres have jumped the machinery has grown in response.
I have a difficult time imagining how Dad seeded with a mere 12-foot press drill. The boredom of travelling around a field with only 12-feet of seeder was likely part of the reason I never took to driving the tractor.
Let’s jump ahead to the present. There is an article at www.producer.com noting Bourgault is introducing a new family of 7-Plex 3545 PHD drills for the 2026 season. They will be available in working widths from 80 to 100 feet. My Dad, now long gone would not be able to imagine that scale.
Likewise I recently interviewed a local collector of pull-type combines. One fairly common, they are simply no longer made for the Canadian farmer.
I could literally reach to the top of the grain hopper on a couple of the models.
Today I am barely as tall as the tires on come large combines, the kind that with some attachments and technology added will cost the farmer new $1 million.
That new combine will basically drive itself and the grain cart it empties into autonomously, the operator close to being a passenger only.
Again my Dad would have no reference point for either the tech involved, or the dollars involved – he didn’t even read sci-fi preferring a Zane Grey western any day.
Add in the truly alien-looking high clearance sprayers and the use of drones, and the sci-fi analogy only strengthens.
That leaves only one unfathomable question – what will farming look like in another 50 years?
