Jess in a Little Trailer on the Prairies

They say that on the prairies, you can watch your dog run away for four days. What the dog is hoping to find, however, is a mystery to me. Out here, after four days running – in any direction, from just about any starting point – you will inevitably find yourself somewhere that looks uncannily like the place you just left.

Grasslands  – endless, golden grasslands, rippling out into golden oceans. Every now and again, an old wooden barn sits sadly amongst the grasses, red paint chipping and domed roof rotting in on itself. Crumbling with memories and a lost romanticism, these monuments to the prairie’s pioneers can only look on mournfully as they resign themselves to the inevitable presence of the pert new farm buildings, shiny and boxy, that now stand guard over their acres of land. This is cattle country, naked and exposed. Furious, whipping winds creep up and catch some days unawares, seizing plans and dreams and roofs and throwing everything into turmoil. But they leave as suddenly as they came, and during these months, they leave in their peaceful wake hot summer suns blazing out of blue skies that arch so high it sometimes feels like the firm grasp of the horizon is the only thing keeping them from floating away.

And that’s all there is.

Grass.

And wind.

And sky.

And occasionally farms.

And now me, in a little rusty trailer opposite a big red wooden barn, world-weary monument to the prairie’s pioneers, and behind which some of the best sunsets in the world play themselves out every evening.

Greens, Eggs and Ham is my home, a little oasis of sustainability in lands sweating under the weight of industrial agriculture. Ever increasing quantities of oil, machinery, fertilizer and investment are being poured into the fields around me in a desperate bid to fill supermarket shelves. It is ruthlessly bland, and the waste of it is as mindboggling as the scale.  Sitting upon some of the world’s best soil you will find some of the world’s worst urban sprawl, and while millions of us go malnourished, acre upon identical acre produces grain destined only for animal feedlots. I have been inside cool, dark warehouses, the size of Wembley Stadium, filled with nothing but potatoes. Miles of potatoes, enough to feed a small town for months, dragged out if the ground by huge machines in a process so ‘efficient’ and, subsequently, so damaging that immense quantities of them will be dumped because they are just not  pretty enough for the supermarkets.  Not even composted. Just dumped. Who’s got the time?

But nestled deep within this madness, and against all the odds, a crazy Canadian and his family are trying to do something different. On their 10 hopeful acres they grow greens and vegetables and raise ducks, and do everything they can to make sure that the way they do it makes sense. (Improbably, they also share their home with nine birds that appear to use English as a common language.) They get stopped at every turn by a system that simply doesn’t understand, but they persist. And here I drive tractors and plant garlic and get geeky in greenhouses, and find some hope that common sense still persists in the world.