Alas, a season is coming to a close or is it? Though my house may be brimming with microgreens soon, for the most part the growing season is over. Soil shovels get switched out for snow shovels as trips to the wood shed become more frequent. The beautiful wafting of birch smoke in the air as Canada geese and their cousin the snow goose fly overhead signaling a time of much-needed rest on the horizon and with it comes more time for writing in The Citizen again, which I enjoy greatly.
This season was a season unlike any that we have encountered as of yet on the farm. The 2016 growing season, as I had predicted, was similar in scope to the season of 2011 when it rained and rained and then rained some more. Hay making was difficult this year but achievable. Some crops such as our carrots were stunted due to all the water logged soil, which stayed fairly cold for the majority of the season, while others did well such as the potato crops.
Our interns Danielle and Justin, who grew veggies on our place this year in an effort to learn how to produce large quantities of food, also learned the hardships and labour that is involved with keeping people fed and the meager and unfair earnings that come with feeding the population.
This meager earning deal brings me to an upcoming visit to the former farmer derived populist movement, now ultra conservative home state of Kansas.
Shortly, I will be heading back to the land of Oz (Kansas) to see family and enjoy the circus known as the 2016 U.S elections. While in Kansas, I will be interviewing friends and family on why they choose to vote for Trump and why they believe Trump will be good for Kansas.
Seeing how most readers of The Citizen are only familiar with Kansas from the film and book The Wizard of Oz, I will describe briefly the history and politics of this quirky little state.
Beginning in the 1820s, the area that would become Kansas was set aside as Indian Territory by the U.S. government, and was closed to settlement by whites. By 1850, many white Americans were "squatting" illegally on Kansas Indian territory. Several U.S. Army forts were then built to keep whites safe. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska act was to open land to white settlers and press the indigenous people into small reserves, some of which were forced into reservations in their non-traditional land of Oklahoma.
In 1854, Kansas was given popular sovereignty, which would allow the residents to determine being pro-slavery or anti. With Missouri (Kansas' neighbor) being pro-slavery, many Missourians came to Kansas to try to influence the outcome of Kansas' slavery laws. Many bloody battles ensued and Kansas became known as bleeding Kansas and thus set the stage for the civil war. Kansas did however come out anti-slavery.
Shortly after the formation of Kansas borders, a movement came about from the agrarian world of labour equality and disdain for capitalistic greed which pushed farmers into the dirt while taking all the profits. This movement formed the Populist party. A populist newspaper, The Appeal to Reason, was printed in Girard, Kansas (near my hometown), and at one time was America's most-read publication. During the First World War, the publication's criticism of the war and conscription led the government to remove its mailing rights, which also led to the slow decline of the movement that was nearly extinguished with the "red scare" that would follow.
In 1954, the Kansas court decision of Brown vs. the board of education decreed that segregation of blacks and whites was unconstitutional and thus started the collapse of segregation.
The state seemed to be moving in the right direction toward peace and equality, but something changed.
Now Kansas is synonymous with the bible belt and religious extremism such as the Westboro Church. The state has become extremely conservative and voting Republican even to their own detriment, which has fiscally ruined the state and caused it to illegally pull funds from the education system to keep the government afloat. This is extremely apparent each time I visit the sunflower state. This is a very hard turn in the political spectrum from what formed the state and laid the foundations of a prosperous agrarian culture which can be summed up well from author Thomas Frank.
"Not long ago, Kansas would have responded to the current situation by making the bastards pay. This would have been a political certainty, as predictable as what happens when you touch a match to a puddle of gasoline. When business screwed the farmers and the workers - when it implemented monopoly strategies invasive beyond the Populists' furthest imaginings - when it ripped off shareholders and casually tossed thousands out of work - you could be damned sure about what would follow. Not these days. Out here the gravity of discontent pulls in only one direction: to the right, to the right, further to the right. Strip today's Kansans of their job security, and they head out to become registered Republicans. Push them off their land, and next thing you know they're protesting in front of abortion clinics. Squander their life savings on manicures for the CEO, and there's a good chance they'll join the John Birch Society. But ask them about the remedies their ancestors proposed (unions, antitrust, public ownership), and you might as well be referring to the days when knighthood was in flower."
For now, I'll prepare the farm for winter and my trip to Chanute, Kansas, a rural town built from innovative immigrants of the likes of Octave Chanute (a mentor to the Wright brothers). While there I hope to answer my wife's question of "how did you come from here?"
I'll report back on what I find so long as Trump doesn't get voted in and build a wall on the U.S.-Canada border. If that happens I'll just get a ladder, because there is no place like home and home now is Prince George, B.C., Canada!
