How many tractors will I need?
I live in a small province. Things are reduced in scale. In fact, until the arrival of the industrial potato period, a family farm would have been 50 acres, or a multiple (2x, 3x). Big enough to get the family fed without needing a trained guide to find the limits of your land.
Hence, when CBC carried the story of a family that wants to sell a larger farm, out in Manitoba, (53.8N, 101.4W), I had to get out the calculators. What does the number “10480 hectares” mean? Well, there are equations, and there is Google. I learned that this area would be equivalent to 25896 acres or over 40 square miles. Around here, we use an inexact measure known as the Lot (thank you, Mr. Holland, for your opus). My “lot” has an area of about 9000 hectares, woodland and bog confounded. So, this is a big farm!
And, like anything that gets into overkill, it requires too much effort to actually use properly. The family with the deed wants out, and they want a buyer. Preferably someone who will take the parcel all at once (the list price is $56.5 million; a realtor’s dream).
I try to imagine a world where one family believes/believed it needed that much fallow ground to exist. Did they awake in the spring, ready to plow until autumn? What about harvest time. Now, around here, we have one or two firms that aspire to such things, but the average farmer realizes that it takes a lot of tractor time to do justice to such a dream. And, thankfully, there are none ready to turn my world into one big, muddy field.
