The title of this post is also the title of an editorial in the City Journal, an English language newspaper in Kerala, India. Those of us in the agriculture business will agree with the title, and can likely relate to some of the content.
But the information about the farmer suicide rate in India is thankfully foreign to us. Though we may complain about certain elements of our agricultural lives, information here puts things in perspective.

In our farm garden, frequent discovery of an earthworm was cause for happiness. It meant the soil was healthy and the worms were doing their job of aeration and fertilization. Worms were pink and squirmy and fun to watch, besides.
Even as tots, my sisters and I would treat earthworms with care, reburying them if they were accidentally dug up while gardening, so they could continue on their subterranean way.
Unless we were digging them up for use as bait, of course, which happened once in awhile during the summer. That in no way diminished our respect for earthworms. Enhanced it, if anything.
I guess that’s where my fascination from worms stems from. I delight in finding earthworms in my yard and I have a bin full of red wigglers in the basement that eat the kitchen garbage.
They’re an industrious bunch, regularly eating entire over-ripe bananas and potato peelings. It’s kind of scary, really. A red wiggler is said to be able to eat its own weight in food every day, and though I’ve never tested the theory, I believe it.
Dan Rollingson of Coaldale, Alta., respects worms too. He runs Earthly Matters, a business that markets worm castings and potting soil. Castings is the polite term for worm poop, a material that enhances soil structure and microbial activity. Unlike most excrement, this stuff doesn’t smell.
I visited Earthly Matters earlier this week to interview Rollingson for a story that will soon appear in the Producer. It’s a different type of farming, but one I thought farmers might be interested in because of worms’ relationship to soil health. And what do his worms eat? Well, grain, of course!

Rollingson has about 100,000 worms that are busily producing product in his garage. They’re also busy breeding new worms so he can expand his business.
It would likely warm his heart to know that worms may hold the key to human survival in space. Not that Rollingson revealed any plans to go into space, though in truth, I didn’t ask him.
Worms, on the other hand, have been to space. And survived. A colony of them lived six months on the space station back in 2006 and their relatives continue to thrive now that they’re back here on Earth.
Researchers at Simon Fraser University continue to study them and in a November news release they said worms are good indicators of how humans could manage in space.
SFU biologist Bob Johnsen said the space worms, a microscopic species called C. elegans, went through a dozen generations while on board the station and were exposed to various environmental toxins and in-flight radiation.
“C. elegans is an excellent model system to study the genetic effects of radiation in deep space,” Johnsen said in an SFU news release. His research is based on developing countermeasures that will prolong manned space flights.
Worms: wriggly, hungry, resilient and intrepid. It’s good to know my early admiration for worms was not misplaced.

Though it was clear and sunny in Lethbridge last Friday, I drove into a snowstorm while travelling west to meet Joe Guy Brewer, a rangy Australian cowboy on a mission.
The same fast-moving snowstorm had affected him about an hour earlier but it was much more unpleasant. He was on horseback, starting day 22 of a 700-kilometre ride down Alberta’s scenic Cowboy Trail.

Brewer is a horse trainer. He’s also a singer, author and apparent jack-of-all-trades. He’s in Canada with his wife and three children on a work visa that he hopes to extend and while here, he is training horses and meeting people.
Brewer says he has wanted to ride the Cowboy Trail ever since driving it earlier this year. So he found a horse that needed training and started his trip at the northern end near Mayerthorpe.
November in southern Alberta is quixotic, weather-wise. The month began mildly, then turned to -22 for a time, then switched to 100 km/h Chinook winds, and followed up with a storm full of wind-driven wet snow.
It didn’t seem to faze the cowboy. He is used to long rides as described on his website at www.joeguylongrider.com. Brewer completed his ride at Cardston, the end of the Cowboy Trail, on Nov. 27, narrowly avoiding a grass fire that affected hundreds of acres to the north of that town.
The horse he was riding is trained now, a triumph considering that the black and white mare was destined for the meat market about one month ago after three different horse trainers failed to turn her into a working ranch horse that wouldn’t buck its rider.
“I save lives, is what I do,” Brewer says. “I save horses from getting their heads cut off and I save their owners from breaking their necks.”
This particular horse belongs to Dodie Greenwald of Fox Valley, Sask. She encountered Brewer when he was doing a horse-training clinic in southern Saskatchewan. Now she plans to use the horse for ranch work. Greenwald, like Brewer, is a country singer (listen to some of her work at www.dodiegreenwald.com) but she said horses rather than music brought her to the trainer.
Brewer understood Greenwald’s frustration with the horse, which had a nasty habit of throwing its head and striking at people with its flying hoofs.
“Her horse had bucked her off one too many times, she said, and when you start flying through the air, you start thinking about how you’re going to land and if you’re going to land and if you’re going to know that you landed,” says Brewer.
He’s an interesting character, the sum of numerous experiences he has recounted in an autobiography, Just Another Dream.
I interviewed Brewer as he sipped tea at O’Bies General Mercantile in Lundbreck, Alta. You can find it in an upcoming edition of the Producer.