It's something you really, truly can't understand if you grow up as a city person in a household where the pay cheque comes in every two weeks regardless of the circumstances.
It's something you probably can't even understand if you grow up in household susceptible to the uncertainty accompany running a small business.
Farming brings a particularly unpredictability to one's existence, an uncertainty like no other occupation.
You still hear a lot of fuming and fretting from unionized city folks _ especially ones with government jobs _ about their wage increases not keeping pace with colleagues in other provinces or how stressful their jobs are. Sadly, a lot of them don't have a clue what it's like to work all year and not have a pay cheque at all.
You probably hear as much fussing from small business types about the stress of having to make enough profit to cover payroll and how much tougher it is when you have to sign the front of the pay cheque rather than the back. Well, try not having any revenue flow after you've sunk everything into your input costs.
Even in a province like Saskatchewan where, supposedly, everyone still has one foot on the land, there are a lot of people that just don't get it. It's only when you are actually living off the land in that very special way we call farming that you can truly appreciate how tough this special way of life really is.
The thought has crossed one's mind a lot during this summer of incredibly difficult wet weather, but no more so than the Wednesday of each week when the provincewide crop report comes out.
Take the report for Sept. 9 covering the first week of this month. It stated that a mere 13 per cent of the crop had been combined while an additional 31 per cent was swathed or ready to straight-combine.
These numbers were as gloomy as the weather than ensued that week. According to Saskatchewan Agriculture's numbers, the five-year provincial average from 2005 to 2009 indicated that an average 35 per cent of the crop is normally combined by this time of year while about 50 per cent is swathed or ready to straight-combine.
Just as most of the province was drying out from a huge rain (three inches in Regina that started pounding down mere moments after the end of the Labour Day Classic football game), farmers were hit with even more rain that halted the combines in the field.
As is always the case, some areas are faring slightly better than others. At the point of the Sept. 9 crop report, the southwest had 22 per cent of the crop combined while the southeast 19 per cent in the bin. However, the northwest, and west-central regions had only seven per cent combined. East-central Saskatchewan had eight per cent combined and the northwest were six-per-cent finished.
But they all share the same dilemma. With each passing day that followed, farmers everywhere in the province have suffered from lodging, flooding, bleaching and sprouting that increased both disease and more down grading with pending frost.
It's something that the rest of in the cities need to think about the next time we smirk about farmers getting supposed $100-an-acre disaster relief cheques or hear about supposedly "whining farmers" wanting improvements to crop insurance.
Believe me, few people whine more about their money situation than city people. Yet few can comprehend what it's like to watch a year's wages get washed away.
Well, if anything good comes from this wet year, let's hope it's a better understanding. Let's hope the rest of the province gets behind the notion of better safety nets to survive years like this one.
Let's hope they begin to understand how truly farming is in Saskatchewan right now.
