39 Follow us on Twitter: @PrairieFarming Better Farming | May/June 2024 Tractors, Trucks & Growing Grain SUCCESS OR FAILURE What will it be? By Ron Settler I once met a nice young fellow who had a small restaurant in a small town on a main highway. We got talking and he told me of his forefathers who had settled north of Regina. There is one prominent farm on that road with a nice set of older buildings. He said it was his great-grandfather who had built that farm. He paid for all the buildings with one good flax crop. Another success story starts back in the dustbowl of the 1930s. A lot of farmers were walking away from their farms because of the drought. One of the farmers stayed and was allowed to farm the land for free by the banks who owned the land. They were happy to have someone try and keep the weeds down and try and farm the land. The farmer planted fall rye because that’s all he was able to grow there. Fall rye wasn’t worth very much at the time, so he kept most of it. He filled the barns and houses of abandoned farms with fall rye. Then one year, the price of fall rye hit the roof, and he sold it all. That set him and his descendants up for a successful farming future. Failures On the other side of the coin, there have been uncounted stories of failure in the farming industry. Once we had a large pork farm company in our area. They were hard-working and ambitious owners, and soon they had five new hog barns and a feed mill built. However, the gods of industry did not smile on them. The prices of hogs dropped while the price of feed skyrocketed, along with several other factors. They were soon out of business. Another compaMake sure you are working smarter and working at things that will make you money. Tracy Miller photo
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