Canola to the Fence Line

Somewhere north of Sexsmith there is a quarter section with a pumpjack in one corner and canola planted right up to the edge of the gravel pad. In July the yellow nearly touches the chain-link. Nobody slows down to look at it, because nobody here thinks it's strange. That fence line is about as good a summary of the Peace economy as you'll find. Two industries with very different temperaments share a property line, and mostly they get along.

Start underground, because the oil and gas does. The Montney formation runs beneath a large share of this region and keeps going west into British Columbia. For a generation it has decided whether the rigs are busy, whether the camps are full, and whether there's a waitlist at the truck dealerships on 100th Avenue. The work arrives in surges. Crews come up Highway 43, rent whatever they can, eat at whatever's open at five in the morning, and leave when the price set in some trading room far from here says so. People who've been around a while don't call it a boom anymore. They call it "busy," and they say it carefully.

Agriculture is older and slower, and it is just as much at the mercy of forces it can't control. The difference is that its forces mostly show up in the sky. The Peace grows canola, wheat, barley, peas and forage, plus a respectable amount of grass seed. The bees come with all that bloom, which is why honey matters east of here around Falher. The June days are absurdly long, and the crops know it. The season is also short. Anyone who has watched swaths sit under early snow in October knows that harvest here is a race. Some years you lose it.

Everyone loves to say the region needs to diversify. Chamber lunches say it. Election signs say it. My view is that the oil patch and the farm don't diversify each other nearly as much as people assume. Both sell into markets priced somewhere else. Both depend on the same rail lines and highways and the same supply of people willing to work long hours in bad weather. For decades, plenty of farm kids worked rigs in the winter and came home for seeding. That's a sound household strategy. It's a thin hedge for a regional economy.

The two have also propped each other up in quieter ways. Surface lease payments have carried more than one family farm through a hail year. Farmers also put up with what comes with those leases. There's dust on the range roads, heavy traffic in spring breakup, and sites that sit idle long after anyone remembers who drilled them. Forestry deserves its own column. It is the third leg of all this, and it gets talked about less than it should.

The result is a place that's hard to describe to outsiders and easy to understand from a truck window. It is prosperous, then nervous, then prosperous again. It is practical about money because it has had to be. It is suspicious of anyone who promises the next ten years will look like the last two.

In late September you can pull over on a range road after dark and see both economies at once. The combines move in slow lines across the fields, lights bobbing and racing the frost. Farther off, a flare burns steady on the horizon, minding its own business.