Visitors to the Royal Manitoba Winter Fair in Brandon at the end of March were entertained by an aggressively hungry ewe.
They also saw newborn chicks flopping and flipping a few minutes after cracking their eggs.
Horses clopped down the alleys, hefty-muscled and throwing off anxious-for-the-ring energy.
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There was straw, boots, company-branded gear, ropes, helmets, and that unique smell of animals, mini-doughnuts, manure and leather that comes with farm-focused fairs. It’s particularly potent when trapped inside the walls of the Keystone Centre.
All in all, the agricultural world was on fine display.
This event doesn’t have the hardcore commercial feel of Manitoba Ag Days, which happens in the exact same space and features gigantic machines, aggressive sales folk, the strutting of important industry people and an olfactory profile along the lines of rubber, new paint and fresh grease.
The Royal Manitoba Winter Fair isn’t for industry insiders and business. It’s for families and fun.
It is also a more holistic representation of the world that exists outside Winnipeg’s perimeter highway and beyond the sprawling of Western Canada’s other urban centres.
How many Canadians still experience this world? We know that very few people still live and work within agriculture. Small town Canada is shrinking, except for the trickle of ex-urban people who turn villages into suburbs.
It’s a unique world. So many things are ever so slightly different from city realities. The jeans worn by country and city people are famously divergent, but many elements of how people interact, chat, queue-up and react to inadvertent physical collisions are just a little bit different, from a city person’s perspective.
I enjoy noticing this when I go to a farm show, because I’m a city person, but I spend much of my life in the country, on farms, talking with farmers and getting worked-up by agricultural issues.
This year, I took my 14 year old with me to Brandon. Every year, I try to get my three kids to come with me to see the fair, to breathe in those smells, see those animals, walk along manure-enhanced hallways. It’s my belief that this will in some way expand their blinkered urban minds.
I wish more of my neighbours and friends had their kids here. It was such a great event. But how many people outside agriculture actually get to see it?
