Addiction or convenience?

It’s been many years since Canada decided to replace capital punishment with some degree of imprisonment ranging from a few years to life. These sentences could be appealed and reduced for a variety of reasons. Several life sentences have been overturned after many years of imprisonment, after new evidence was discovered.
As drug use has skyrocketed in the last decade, Canada’s health authorities and police have tried to treat and reverse drug addiction and save the lives of thousands of addicts that came from many different economic situations and backgrounds. Although Canadians have footed this large bill for saving and turning life around for a percentage of some very unfortunate people and watched them return to society as extremely grateful and helpful citizens who worked helping others who had almost fell off the edge.
Our world has now realized that our addiction to all the great things that oil has given us since it was discovered in Canada little more than a century ago. I am from the age when our grandparents surely enjoyed the coming of a tractor on the farm, making it unnecessary to give our best hay and oats to the horses who did the heavy work on the farm. When the day’s work was done, Dad just turned off the key and the tractor didn’t need any attention, feeding, or cleaning out like the teams of horses did. When my parents got too old to cut loads and loads of wood each year to heat the home, they celebrated switching to an oil furnace.
Any farmer who unloaded a corn crib used to air-dry the cob corn, cleared when a propane fired grain drier replaced that back breaking work. That new gas engine powered vacuum pump that grandpa used to milk the cows sure made grandma happy because she didn’t have to milk her twenty cows by hand twice a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Grandpa always said that grandma always picked the easiest cows to milk and left grandpa the toughest, meanest twenty.
Mom was happy when polyester clothing came along because they dried quicker on the line than cotton, hemp, or wool, and they didn’t shrink or need ironing. Even though it was fifty dollars per ton, it was a lot less heavy work, spreading a couple ton of chemical fertilizer, much of which was made from and hauled by oil, than moving that manure a couple miles to the other farm.
When our mechanic had to repair the transmission of the tractor which used very smelly whale oil to lubricate the transmission and differential, it was not as smelly or hard to wash off the new oil from the petroleum industry.
The new grease gun and general-purpose grease made it both faster and better to reduce wear on the machinery than those old oil cups that sometimes plugged with sand or dirt. Even though gas was twenty cents a gallon, I enjoyed those fast cars of the sixties too, even though sometimes the fines got pretty heavy. Yes, the change to petroleum products was not only convenient, but kind of addictive too.
Now that the worlds climate experts have watched our clean air, clean water, and productive soil become not so clean and various pollutants begin to make our soil less regenerative, more dependent on more and more fertilizer, chemical sprays, still we notice an increasing number of weeds resistant to chemical weed control. Yes, I was one of those farmers that jumped for joy at the introduction of every new chemical spray.
The convenience of a tractor, combine, and many other tools that have made modern farming more productive per man hour will never go away. It will take years before we power our big equipment with electric or some other non-polluting fuel. On our farm some of those older machines are very trouble-free and easier to repair even if they are sixty years old. Many of the dairy, hog, and chicken barns have already been converted to electric powered everything. Recently, micro-plastics and chemicals related to plastics have been found in fields that were recipients of sludge that came from some cities.
Some US states have banned the spreading of sludge from those cities. Some fields have been condemned for being used for agriculture for the foreseeable future because plastics are extremely slow to break down.
It has been determined that some fibers from the washing of cloths that have polyester, or some other oil based fiber are being monitored very closely because this wash water all ends up in the sewer system and eventually in sludge that may end up in some fields. At one time hemp was the strongest fiber known to man. I have several shirts made of hemp and still wear them fifty years later with no hole or signs of wear. Hemp cloth became almost extinct when strong, oil based fiber became easier to work with and the oil industry was also more subsidized than the hemp growers. Fibers from cotton, hemp, and wool will all break down in soil. Before gas, and diesel-powered tractors became the norm on Canadian farms; huge wood fired steam engines were used to power threshing machines and till the soil. The smoke from those giants as well as the early steam powered train engines mostly contained carbon, black smoke, which returned to the soil with rain. Experiments being carried out at some agricultural universities with diesel powered equipment are looking at recovering both carbon and nitrous oxide and returning those nutrients to the soil. More experiments are also being carried out that can both reduce the use of chemical fertilizer and both herbicides and insecticides, while encouraging biological life in the soil at the same time.
The rate and amount of chemical fertilizer, weed, and insecticide became much more used for aesthetic purposes than was used in farmers fields. We have noticed several weed sprays that also contain bactericide restricted for domestic use. The bactericide also reduces the efficiency of the soil to regenerate itself and residues can be deadly to pets if they lick their paws after walking through the area that was sprayed. The presence of bactericide is not even listed on the container.
Yes our agri-business sector has made many suppliers of farm inputs very rich during the modern farming revolution, but Canada has lost a lot of farmers at the same time. Farmers made up 30 per cent of Canada’s population in 1920. Today scarcely one per cent of our population make farming their living.