The field sits just south of Fairfax, a dot of a village in southwestern Manitoba, northwest of Boissevain. It is a little over 300 acres — a half section — of canola, and on October 9 it will come off the land the way it has for roughly eighteen years: with a community gathered around it, a lunch served first, and the proceeds headed somewhere far from the Prairies.
The event is the BMW Foodgrains Harvest, run by the Boissevain-Morton-Whitewater Foodgrains committee. The initials are a local shorthand for the three municipalities the committee draws from, and the name has been attached to a growing project that has quietly become one of the region's more unusual traditions. The land belongs to the Del Fraser farm. The crop belongs, in effect, to the Canadian Foodgrains Bank.
To understand why a group of farmers would hand over a half-section of canola — a crop worth real money in any given year — it helps to go back to the early 1980s. Prairie grain farmers, watching famine unfold in parts of the world, lobbied the federal government for help moving their excess grain overseas. Volunteers bagged wheat to ship abroad, and Ottawa contributed three times the value of every donated bushel. In 1983, five Christian relief and development associations came together to form the Canadian Foodgrains Bank to keep that work going. The organization has since grown to a partnership of fifteen churches and church-based agencies.
What began as a way to move grain became something more durable: the growing project. The idea is simple. A community of farmers comes together — some donate land, some donate seed or fertilizer, some show up with combines and trucks and grain carts at harvest — and the crop is sold, with the proceeds going to the Foodgrains Bank. The model has spread widely. Nationally, growing and community projects raised about $8.2 million for the Foodgrains Bank in a recent year.
The BMW project is one of the established ones. From there, the federal government matches the funds four to one — a multiplier that turns a good harvest into something considerably larger. The money supports emergency food assistance and longer-term work, including programs that teach farmers in less developed countries how to get more from their own land. The symmetry is not lost on anyone involved: farmers helping farmers.
Harvest day itself has a rhythm that regulars know well. The committee asks for combines, trucks, and carts. But the machines do not start until the people have eaten. A community lunch is served at the Del Fraser farm, and the harvest follows.
That openness is part of what makes the event unusual. There are no tickets and no capacity limit. Anyone can drive out to a working farm near Fairfax, eat lunch, and watch a half-section of canola come off in an afternoon. For people who have never stood at the edge of a field while a line of combines works its way across, it is a rare look at something most Canadians only ever see from a highway. Don Neufeld, who coordinates a similar Foodgrains harvest near Kola in southwestern Manitoba, has put the appeal plainly: when the harvest comes, it is tremendous — the one time urban people actually get to see what happens in agriculture. He has described the harvest day and community lunch as being, for him, just like Christmas.
There is a harder edge to the tradition too. The Foodgrains Bank exists because hunger is not a seasonal problem. The scale of that work is built, in part, out of afternoons like this one — a donated field, a borrowed combine, a lunch in a farmyard.
The BMW project has also carried its share of local memory. Bradley (Buck) Neufeld, a farmer by trade and an enthusiastic member of the Boissevain Morton Whitewater growing project, died in May of one recent year, and his family's connection to the effort has continued. That is the other thing about a project that has run for eighteen years on the same land: it accumulates people. The Fraser farm has supplied the ground; the committee supplies the organization; the surrounding countryside supplies the equipment and the hands. What gets harvested is canola. What gets built is a habit.
This year's crop is canola again, on the same half-section on the Del Fraser farm, just south of Fairfax. The lunch comes first, then the combines. Admission is free, and the field is open to anyone willing to make the drive northwest of Boissevain. The organizers' ask is the same as it has been for nearly two decades: come out, eat something, and watch a community take a field of canola and turn it into food for people it will never meet.