Rural Farm Life

[lakenheath]

I am a young farmer, only 28 years old, but I have been around long enough to hear the countless number of stories from old farmers in our area.

The sense that I got was that they worked harder, had very little for possessions, but they seemed to have more fun times and enoyed life more than we do nowdays.

Today seems like a mad race to get rich so we can have what our neighbour do or don't have. Purchase the lateset in material possessions that advertisers insist we need. Back then it was more about survival and community. Lots of dances, gatherings, cards, suppers, events and the list goes on. Seems nowdays we isolated ourselves farming more land and focusing less on community and more on our bank accounts.

I know we can't go back to those days, but it sure would be interesting to have lived back then.

[coppertop]

Television is one reason that people don't look to their community for entertainment and social outings. After working either on or off the farm all day its so much easier to settle down in front of the TV than it is to go out to a function in the community.

There was no choice but to work as communities to provide any entertainment years ago, in many cases people lived a long way from the nearest urban centre and roads weren't like they are today, neither were vehicles so people went to each others homes for card parties, or to the local school or hall for social events. Drinking wasn't the social life then like it is now either, mind you there was the odd bootlegger around rural Alberta, so I have heard !!! ( Cowman, maybe you can enlighten us on that one )

The sense of community has weakened a lot in rural Alberta and likely Canada for that matter, one reason is that the population is transient vs the same families living in a commuity for generations.

[cowman]

Well coppertop I came from a very religious family of teetotalers (Prespryterian)so was an innocent about booze until I got a little older! My maternal grandparents ranched back in the hills though and one of their neighbors did nothing but make moonshine! Raised 8 kids doing that and the oldest one owns one of the largest service rig companies in the country!
I grew up at a time when there was lots of community events, especially sports? Lots of kids around as it was the baby boom...and not much available for birth control!
The farm on one side of us had 9 kids(7 boys) and the one on the other side had 8 kids(4 boys) and my Mom and Dad had 7 kids (1 boy)...so you can see we had a lot of "tom cats" hanging around!
Now let me tell you with that many boys around we had some fairly decent baseball and hockey teams! Some of us eventually graduated to the town teams and one neighborhood boy became a star in the Professional Fastball league. I was a pretty good fastball player and got called up for a couple of games in the pros but wasn't good enough to stick. As an aside my mother played professional womans baseball for one year during the war.

[coppertop]

I honestly think that socially things were better back in ' the day', but I certainly would not want to live the way my mother and grandmother did.


I tend to enjoy my creature comforts far too much to regress to a lifestyle of washing on a scrub board and hitching up the team and wagon to head in to town !!!