For the last 50 years or so, Alberta has been known for its high-quality beef. It’s one of our country’s signature exports. And, alarmingly, it’s in trouble. Several summers of drought have made life very challenging for cattle ranchers. Farmers spend hours every summer day hauling water to their pastures. They can’t grow their own hay, and the cost of buying it has become prohibitively expensive.
In Maclean’s, a third-generation Alberta cattle farmer named Bob Tolman describes the heartbreaking decision he and his wife recently made to retire early and sell off their cows, more than 100 years after his grandfather settled on the ranch. There just wasn’t enough rain over the last few years to sustain their farm. “Water is everything to a farmer,” Tolman says in his moving essay, “and without rain and snowpack melting into river basins, crops suffer and cattle have nothing to graze.”
Tolman never uses the word “climate change.” Nor is he in any way political. He’s just describing what he has experienced: a way of life that sustained his family for generations coming to an end. “We had always planned to retire on our own terms,” he writes, “but the possibility has been taken from us.”
—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief
