He’s often discouraged by how little the constant lobbying and arguing seem to have accomplished for farmers. “To me that’s kind of like talking to that power pole over there,” he said, nodding his head to the yard. In his role as a farm organization spokesperson, Cawkwell has often found himself talking to politicians and bureaucrats, an experience he doesn’t remember fondly. “I’d like to stay involved, but it’s kind of like banging your head against the wall, it feels good when you stop.” In recent years, he’s been scaling back his off-farm activities in order to spend more time with his family, and to escape the frustrations that go along with such work. Not only did he find himself learning things from talking to other farmers, attending trade shows and listening to speakers, but he began working his way up the organizational ladders. That was no longer possible after his father died in 1974, and after marrying Laura in 1977 and starting a family, his drywall career was put on hold and he became a year-round farmer.īy the mid-1980s, with times getting tough, Cawkwell decided to go to farm organization meetings to gain more knowledge that might pay off for his own farm. Over the next few years he gradually took on more land, renting and buying, and continued to do drywall work in Calgary in the off-season. He took up a trade as a drywaller, then in 1970 he took up an offer from a neighbor to rent some nearby farmland. He was literally looking for greener pastures, and ended up at Nut Mountain.Ĭawkwell grew up on a typical mixed farm, a half-section with crops, turkeys, chickens, cows and pigs. His grandfather, an English immigrant who had originally settled at Grayson in the southeast, fled that drought-stricken region in the 1930s. That wet climate is the reason Cawkwell is farming in the Nut Mountain area at all. “I have more problems fighting mud than drought,” he said. “Usually we get away with July,” Laura said with a slightly bitter laugh. It also meant that there was frost every month in 2000. When it had all been sorted out, it was determined there had been four or five degrees of frost, the first July frost since 1946. A second look confirmed the almost unbelievable – frost. Strangely, the roofs of the farm buildings across the yard were covered with something white. Walking into his kitchen at 6:30 on the morning of July 16, he poured himself a cup of coffee and glanced outside. Farming in this part of the Prairies presents unique challenges, a reality that was driven home one day this summer.
“I guess I’m not going to live to be 300 years old to see all the changes I’d like to see,” he said with a smile.įor all his political involvement, Cawkwell is first and foremost a farmer. But the changes haven’t gone far enough or fast enough for his natural impatience. Not only is he well known locally, growing grain on more than 10,000 acres with wife Laura and their four sons, but his name is familiar across the Prairies from his work in farm organizations and industry policy.Īt various times he’s been a president of the Western Barley Growers Association, a director of the Western Canadian Wheat Growers Association, a director of the Saskatchewan Canola Growers Association and a member of the western grain standards committee.Īn avid supporter of the open market, an outspoken critic of corporate concentration and a fervid opponent of government interference in business, Cawkwell talks with an intriguing mix of down-to-earth common sense, folksy humor, insightful analysis and intense, sometimes almost angry, politics.Ĭawkwell acknowledges there have been huge changes in agriculture and in the grain handling and transportation system over the last 10 or 15 years, much of it in line with his own idea of how things should work. It’s easy, he says, to get discouraged, and difficult to see a bright future for the next generation of farmers.Ĭawkwell is perhaps Nut Mountain’s most famous resident. Grain prices are low and production costs are high, there’s too much government regulation, big corporations have too much power, grain companies and railways are out to gouge farmers who spend too much time fighting with each other and governments don’t listen anyway. “But I’m definitely not as optimistic as I once was.” “I’ve always tried to be an optimist,” he says with a sigh. It’s not the fault of the countryside here in northeastern Saskatchewan, where rolling, wooded hills alternate with snow-covered grain fields to produce eye-pleasing views.īut when Ted Cawkwell looks beyond the scenery at the economic realities facing the people who farm that land, he can only take another drag on his cigarette and shake his head. – The view from Nut Mountain isn’t very pretty.
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