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| OATS |
Trevor Lake noticed it for the first time while
walking through a ripening oats field on an otherwise-glorious July
morning—July 26th, 2025, to be precise. Somehow, the individual
plants looked more … well … tired than they should. He pulled one entire plant
up and examined the roots, then the leaves where he noticed reddish splotches
forming. He examined a few more plants, walked in toward the middle of the field
and discovered that the spots were fewer, but still general. It seemed as if
someone had gone through the field with a sprinkler of rust-coloured paint. The
worst areas were right along the creek bank.
Trevor knew what it was: Some
variety of fungal rust. But only after looking it up on line and realizing that
there were several dozens of oat diseases ranging from viral to bacterial to
fungal, Crown Rust being the most common. He’d grown mostly canola and wheat
until the passing of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic had shifted the demand toward
locally-grown and consumed food crops, and the price of canola plummeted.
Over coffee at the PetroCan on
the highway that runs through Shermen, Saskatchewan, Trevor announced what he
had seen, thinking to warn neighbours who’d made the same crop-switch for the
same reasons. “You’d better look at your
oats,” he said, “especially you, Sam. You’ve got Buckthorn growing along the
creek and it’s a primary host for the fungus’ sexual development.”
“What?”
“What?” was exactly what Trevor
had said when he first waded through Danika Thompson’s column in GRAINEWS.
He’d read it three times before concluding that his oat crop would probably be
lucky to return input costs, that he should have bought a resistant strain of
seed. “The fungus develops on the Buckthorn and migrates to live on oats … and
sometimes barley, I think.”
“What the hell is Buckthorn?”
“Well, it’s that shrubby plant with the little yellow flowers and … and, I think, black berries.”
Sam’s face wore a mask of
skepticism. It was, in fact, Sam’s default look whenever problems went in
search of solutions. “I’ll bet Monsanto or Bayer are behind this … again,” he
said. “You’re probably gonna tell me next that there’s a spray I can buy for five-thousand
dollars that’ll fix the problem!”
The Monsanto/Bayer “conspiracy”
to rob farmers of as much of the profits of their hard work as possible was a perennial
topic at coffee row, ever since Percy Schmeiser got shafted for planting seed
on which Monsanto held an exclusive patent. That was way back in the 1990s,
before the two companies joined forces to perfect the art of “ripping all the
profit out of agriculture and turning it over to rich corporate owners and shareholder
men in suits, laughing all the way to the bank”. At least that’s how Willie
Turner loved to put it to anyone prepared to listen. Willie didn’t farm; he and
Don Castle were local business interests who were well aware of the fact that
their good fortunes leaned heavily on the success or failure of local
agriculture.
∞∞
Everybody who lives in
or near one knows that rural towns have mysterious networks down which news and
opinions flash at the speed of light. The dilemma of the oat crops was
particularly vexing to John and Cecil Skowring who were in the middle of
building a mill to capitalize on farming changes by producing locally-grown,
locally-consumed rolled oats. The content of the PetroCan coffee row
conversation, plus the Skowring’s complaints about their misfortune, plus the
unbridled assertions on everything by Sam and his wife, Mabel, got pumped into
the network in minutes. Like a Corona Virus, peculiar versions of the Crown
Rust story spread through town and countryside. The Buckthorn/fungus
transmission version was far too complicated to transmit in casual
conversation. What wasn’t too complicated and got digested and regurgitated
were the following:
- ·
Bayer put spores into their RoundUp chemical so farmers would have to buy their remedy for
Crown Rust,
- ·
The Canola
people were spreading rust spores with crop-spraying planes to urge farmers
back to buying their seed,
- ·
The Robin Hood
Mill in Saskatoon was conspiring with the canola people and Bayer/Monsanto to
shut down the mill in Shermen before it even opened,
- ·
There actually
was no such thing as Crown Rust; just a story made up by Trevor for some
unknown reason.
The favourite
explanation was the one involving crop-spraying planes; a few farmers had used
them to spray RoundUp in spring; everyone had seen and heard the planes; there
were far too many to just be doing weed spraying. What’s more—some said—Buckthorn
isn’t a thing … nobody’s ever heard of Buckthorn and they’d know it if it
existed.
Trevor was horrified by the
rumours and theories, especially after the whole thing was being attributed to
him as the perpetrator of fake news, or possibly as a co-conspirator with
who-knows-how- many people and companies that stood to benefit. How Trevor
would benefit wasn’t included in this narrative; it was enough that he was
making up a story about Buckthorn and fungi and other bullshit to cover his
tracks. (“Most likely, Bayer is cutting him a fat check,” was a nuance that
would be added later.)
Sam never checked his oat fields. Possibly
because he felt more comfortable with the conspiracy theories than with the
thought that come harvest time, his crop would be two-thirds or less of what he’d
anticipated, and his swather and combine pickup would turn a rusty red as he
harvested. He vaguely remembered stories of wheat rust in the 1950s; surely
crop rust wasn’t a thing anymore.
In desperation, Trevor tracked
down freelance writer Danika Thompson, thinking to bring her to Shermen if
she’d be willing to verify his news as being factual, not fake. “Why don’t you
just have them read my column, you know, the one you referred to?” She had too
much going on to come out now, she said.
Trevor thought about that, but given the community climate, he guessed that the reporter would be construed as another attempt by him to cover his ass. He was right; he realized it when he got replies to emails he sent to Don, Willie and Sam.
There's no arguing with conspiracy theory; anything you say to the contrary tends simply
to prove that you’re either in on the plot … or else have been taken in by it.
Trevor wanted to scream, “Why the hell are you all so damned dumb?” But what would be the point? It wasn’t their lack of smarts that bound them to see conspiracy behind their problems; Sam was known to be a successful farmer and Don and Willie passable businessmen.
He
went on line and printed all the references to Crown Rust … it made him feel
better to know that he was right … according to the experts. He also read
somewhere that conspiracy theories arise when there’s a
power, wealth or education imbalance. That it’s natural to assume that there are
elites with the power, wealth or education that allow them to move things and
events … while common folk have too little of any of the three to allow them to
move anything of importance, and so they feel like they’re always being done to
instead of doing. They resent their powerlessness.
He’d also read that conspiracy
theories generally arise only for momentous things, like presidential
assassinations, pandemics, unusual fires and such. That big things call
for big explanations. This puzzled Trevor because his bringing up this
Crown Rust thing was surely a tempest in a teapot. He should have been thanked
for his research. He could only assume that the Monsanto/Schmeiser debacle was the
big event, and he’d only been guilty of reopening that festering resentment.
The messenger often takes the
first bullet.
What startled him most was the
research that showed how impossible a massive conspiracy can be. To successfully
scatter rust spores across the province would take both the cooperation and the
absolute secrecy of a great many people. If among all those cooperating
conspirators even one person should experience a twinge of conscience and “blow
the whistle,” the conspiracy would have to collapse. Even in a family’s
conspiracy to give Uncle Ike a surprise birthday party, the likelihood of total
solidarity around the plan almost never happens. The article Trevor read and
reread ended with, “There are no really big conspiracies, even though there are
plenty of little ones.”
Harvest came early and by August
20th, Trevor had his oats in the bin and had washed the rust off his
equipment. He went out with his tractor and a few cables and began pulling up
all the Buckthorn shrubs along the creek and burning them. He was minding the
bonfire when he noticed Sam’s pickup dusting across the oat stubble. Sam pulled
up, exchanged a perfunctory greeting with Trevor and after a minute of both
staring into the fire, said, “You never told us which variety of oats is
resistant to this rust stuff.”
Trevor pulled out his notebook
and pen and wrote a couple of names, tore off the sheet and handed it to Sam.
“These aren’t guaranteed to be perfect, but tests have shown them to suffer the
least from Crown Rust.
In the end, the only defenses
against conspiracy-theories-run-amok … are facts. Facts experienced first hand
or, at least, facts endorsed by a trusted friend. Trevor decided that if he had the whole thing
to do again, he’d invite Sam over, ask him if he knew what was happening with
his oats and have him come up with the answers.
But then, Sam had been known
more than once to declare that behind the internet and the “mainstream media,”
there existed a massive plot to keep the public ignorant and confused, to
“bamboozle us with lies and bullshit.” At a conversation like this once, Trevor had
imagined a field of thousands of reporters, social media billionaires, fat-cat
politicians and corporate elites charging at an unsuspecting public with
syringes full of lies ‘n bullshit, all having agreed in advance that this
inoculation would be in everyone’s best interests.
He sighed and forked another Buckthorn shrub onto the fire, watched it flare, heard it sizzle.
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