YORKTON – When one looks at the modern machinery of a Canadian Prairie harvest it seems almost like something out of a Robert A. Heinlein, or Isaac Asimov novel I might have read as a youth in the late 1960s or into the 1970s.
The computer technology for recording yields on the fly, the technology that allows the combine operator – if it’s not self-driving – to take control of grain carts, the global positioning tech involved, it seems more starship than grain harvest.
Such thoughts ran through this writer’s head when I was out taking photos of the Health Foundation’s Farming for Health harvest at Yorkton.
But maybe even more amazing is that agriculture has already been ready to adopt new technology through the years.
Really in the grand passage of time farming on the Prairies really started a mere ‘blink’ ago – remember Saskatchewan only came into existence as a province in 1905 – and at that time agriculture was still very much horse-powered – horses pulling the plows and binders and sheaf wagons.
Just how dramatically different that era was is brought into tight focus each year as the Yorkton Threshermen’s Show is held, and demonstrations of binding, stooking and threshing machine harvest are held.
Then one day an email arrives and there are photos sent of the threshermen’s club out binding up sheaves to store away for the 2026 show, and I was left trying to envision how all the acres were covered back in the day of binders?
Of course farms were generally a quarter section or two, and more producers each working their few acres, but it still is hard to envision.
That came into focus more sharply as Kevin Hursh spoke at the recent Yorkton Brick Mill Heritage Dinner, and he noted the larger combines not only chew through the acres in the field, but the cash to buy them, with a price tag north of $1 million.
The scale of modern farming is rather obvious when you consider a single combine unit costs that much. Farming is huge business.
Yet whether in the days of horses or million dollar harvesters a continuing aspect of farming has been its importance to local rural community and provincial economies.
In the past of Yorkton for example, the brick mill now being refurbished and added too, was critical locally as a market for farmer’s wheat creating economy via value-added processing.
Flash forward to today and Yorkton is home to two of the largest canola crush facilities in the world, and their combined impact on the local economy is massive – agriculture being critical to the community and province just as it always has been.a
