Mackenzie Foy and Matthew McConaughey, backed by 500 acres of corn on the set of Interstellar. (Bonus trivia: these scenes were shot in southern Alberta.)

In Interstellar, Christopher Nolan’s dystopian tale of the near future, the settled parts of the world seem like a vast cornfield. The Earth is dying, and farmers are hard-pressed to keep up with the demand for food. Beyond the towns and cities, corn sprawls to the horizon, the tasseled ranks broken only by the automated harvesters. Just over the horizon, a dustbowl is expanding, and a spreading blight threatens crops.

There’s more to Interstellar than corn and dust storms, of course: there’s the search for a new home for humanity, the subsequent journeys to distant planets, and Anne Hathaway in a space suit. This being Nolan, there’s a lot of playing with time and space (for a similarly ambitious warping of the usual narrative approach, see Dunkirk.)

But the image that sticks with me most is the planet of corn. In some ways, Nolan’s vision is prescient. My own province, Ontario, is increasingly a landscape of urban sprawl separated by acres of row crops, especially corn and soybeans. Squeezed out is the acreage once devoted to hay and pasture – the agricultural grasslands that are still the core of my own farm.

If you look at this graph, you can see the changes in the past 20-odd years. Crops are generally up, while grasslands demonstrate a solid downward trend. Pasture losses are the most striking: “tame and seeded” pasture (generally newer, better managed fields) fell by 21 per cent in just five years. “Natural” pasture land – land that hasn’t been ploughed in decades, or more – declined by 20 per cent.

Graphing the trend: more corn and soy, (yellow and black lines) fewer acres of pasture and hay (green and blue lines.) The vertical axis, left, represents thousands of acres, so 2,500 is 2,500,000 acres. 

This change is the cumulative result of thousands of on-farm decisions, and I don’t want to knock fellow farmers for doing what they think is the best. When crop prices are good, it seems like a good idea to plough up pastures and grow higher-value crops. Once fences are torn out to make bigger fields, the cost of re-establishing perimeter fencing becomes a deterrent to shifting back into livestock. And after a generation or two with few or no cattle or sheep, the know-how and on-farm infrastructure for livestock is lost. There’s a cultural issue, too: livestock farming is a slow-and-steady business, one that builds over years, and generations of animals. It’s an approach that seems out of step in a business environment that values the quick payoff.

We need grain, and someone has to grow it. But the overall trend to less grass and more annual crops is a worrisome one. Well-managed hay and pasture stands have benefits that extend well beyond the farm, or any single farming year. They feed the soil, store carbon in the ground, limit erosion, help improve water quality, and maintain habitat for wildlife.

Crops, on the other hand, tend to make withdrawals from the soil bank over the long term. One of the remarkable figures I’ve seen this past year was a 1949 soil report on Essex County farms. Essex is in far southwest Ontario, and today it’s high-value cropland, a mix of horticultural and vegetable crops and the more common cash crops, including corn and soy. In the late ‘40s, when the area featured more livestock and forages, typical soil organic matter levels averaged more than six per cent. Now they’re almost half that.

It’s a startling decline. Each per cent of organic matter represents about 20,000 pounds per acre. Since organic matter is crucial to soil health and quality, that loss is a major weakening of the earth we rely on.

So on your next drive to the city, have a look at the landscape stretching along the highway. Perhaps most city dwellers don’t distinguish a corn field from cattle on pasture – for them it’s all farmland. But I expect the readers of this blog might appreciate the benefits (aesthetic and otherwise) of a more diverse rural landscape. If the trend to less perennial grass and more annual cropping continues, that view will become less diverse, more Interstellar.

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To the west: sunrise with, (at the top of the frame),  Canada Geese.

When lengthening nights force late-October’s morning chores to start before sunrise, one compensation is the way the job concludes in the new day’s buttery light. This morning, on my way back from the pasture, I saw the early sun’s ochre rays wash across my neighbour’s barn. Like Marcel Proust’s madeleines, the sunrise triggered a rush of memories.

If you’ve grown up around old barns, you’ll likely recall the way the rising and setting sun washes across the gnarly old wood like warm honey. Every knot, crack, and splinter is transformed by the ochre glow. A worn, workaday structure is suddenly, briefly, suffused with beauty. The day seems full of possibility.

Decades ago, as a young university student walking through an Ottawa department store, I glanced at a jumble of boxed Christmas cards on a table. One featured a painting of the classic Ontario bank barn at sunrise. It brought me up short, and I was instantly homesick. I bought the cards to send to my parents and grandparents.

To the east: in the few minutes it took to grab my camera, the light on the boards had changed from glowing gold to washed-out amber.

Now the barns of my youth are gone. So, too are many of the people those cards were sent to. But this morning, I saw the sun light up my neighbour’s barn, and it all came back to me: The childhood promise of a new day, and later, the newly independent kid in the big city, suddenly transfixed by the glow of sunlight on barn board.

I still shop for a card like that every Christmas. I never find one.

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Earlier this month, I was mucking out a stall and listening to a radio interview with American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, when I heard him say a striking thing. Mr. Coates writes a lot about racial issues, and the interviewer asked “what gives you the most hope for the future?”

“It’s a hard question for me to answer,” he said, framing a long and nuanced response that’s worth listening to in its entirety. “Writers and journalists are generally not in the business of giving hope.” If his reporting doesn’t make readers feel optimistic, “you should see your pastor. That’s not my job.”

Pretty blunt stuff, I thought, as I tossed another forkful into the manure spreader. When most radio guests would reach for an upbeat ending, Mr. Coates obviously doesn’t believe in sugar coating things. More power to him.

But I think writing, like farming, is a hopeful act. Even Mr. Coates must hope his stories promote better understanding and plant the seeds of change. In a like way, pasture-based farms are a commitment to the future. We work with perennial plants – species that grow year after year – not just to feed people and livestock, but to sustain a productive earth. In the process, we hope for financial rewards, but we also reap unexpected benefits.

Sometimes these are aesthetic payoffs, like the beauty of a sunrise, or a lush stand of grass that dips and bows in the wind. One of 2017’s eye-pleasing bonuses came from an effort to get rid of an invasive weed called smooth bedstraw (Gallium molugo.) To clear the weed from an infested area, I had a friend plough the ground last fall, and then I sowed an annual mixture of Italian ryegrass and crimson clover (Trifolium incarnatum) this spring.

The goal is to produce a lush crop of clover and ryegrass that will help smother the bedstraw, reduce the number of surviving weed seeds in the soil, and provide good grazing. Next year the area will be replanted with a perennial hay and pasture mixture, and my bedstraw problems will be – fingers crossed – sharply reduced.

These varieties of ryegrass and the clover are more common in Europe and parts of the U.S., where they’re hardy enough to survive the milder winters. In most regions of Canada, winter kills off the clover and ryegrass, but they’ve still become increasingly popular as annual crops among livestock farmers. The ryegrass is prized for its high sugar content when grazed or made into hay or silage. Crimson clover – a species that was completely new to me – is a soil-building legume that boosts fertility and improves soil texture.

At least, that’s the plan, and despite a wet spring and late start, it seems to be working. But here’s the real bonus: the crimson clover turned out to be gorgeous – so pretty, I could almost plant it as an ornamental. When you’ve been in and around farms for most of your 50-odd years, it’s oddly exciting to grow something so new and striking.

My enthusiasm might not be surprising to a rose gardener, but as someone who never did much flower gardening (that’s my wife’s job) I was quite taken with this showy new clover. Aesthetically, at least, it was the highlight of our forage season.

By nature, most farmers are primed to cope with unexpected misfortunes, because those are going to happen. But I’ll argue it’s equally important to be open to surprising moments of wonder and beauty, and to reap those rewards when they come.

If that’s farming in hope, I plead guilty as charged. The way I see it, hope really is part of my job.

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12 September, and that’s standing hay on the right. (It’s not supposed to be brown.)

As species go, Homo sapiens is pretty good at spotting immediate threats. Got a sabre-toothed tiger lurking outside your cave? Being sapiens helps you avoid the predator, and allows you to survive to meet another challenge.

These days, we worry less about predators, and more about how we’re stacking up on social media. But we still react to obvious and significant threats. Got a tornado bearing down on your home? Most people will take cover (perhaps after snapping a selfie.) Hurricane bound for your region? Time to board up the windows, and maybe bug out while there’s still time.

Threats that seem distant and incremental, on the other hand, draw a slower response. After all, climate change, or workplace automation could be a problem, but maybe not right here and right now. Or they’re problems someone else will solve, long before the climate or the robot at the office become the 21^st century version of the tiger outside the cave.

But what if those distant, slow-motion problems grow suddenly, and without warning – perhaps because we haven’t been paying attention, or haven’t perceived the threat.

For farmers in my area, the summer of 2017 was a good example. The growing season was wet, and almost consistently showery. It delayed the onset of planting, and when haymaking time came, it was conducted in fits and starts, if at all.

Hay is the make-or-break fodder on our farm, the basic winter feed for cattle and sheep. Harvesting high-quality hay is an annual summer obsession for stock farmers. Success depends on a mix of good timing (for us, that’s succulent grass and legumes mowed in late June or early July) and clement weather (three or four days of sun and wind to dry the hay.)

If hay is baled too damp, it spoils or heats in the barn, and could trigger a fire. If the grass is cut and then rained on, the goodness flows out of the forage like boiling water on tea leaves. If wet weather forces you to wait, you are still penalized. As the grass matures, the protein and feed value slowly drains away.

So farmers sweat it out during hay time, impatient for the harvest to begin, and fretful when it’s delayed. Around here, if your first cut of hay isn’t done by mid-to-late July, you’re probably harvesting sub-par stuff. As one grower once told me, feeding late-cut hay is like “buying a box of breakfast cereal, dumping the contents out, and then eating the box.”

This year, with near-constant showers and downpours that flooded fields, we waited, and stewed. It wasn’t until July 15 that we could start baling hay — a full month later than in 2016. The weather remained spotty in July. We missed a couple of good haymaking days for a family wedding, and an equipment breakdown. At the time, it seemed like no big deal. Surely a bout of sunny, dry weather was right around the corner?

But the sun shone only fitfully, and our situation became increasingly dire. By mid-August I only had about half the hay I need to get through the winter. Family discussions shifted to worst-case scenarios, including reducing the flock and herd, or buying hay.

Fortunately, the clouds cleared for the last week in August. Though the fields were wet and the weather cool, I was able to make enough hay to get through the winter. We’ll still have nutritional challenges – and spend much more on supplemental grain and protein this year – but we have enough “stuff” to keep the stock feeling full.

Wheel tracks in a wet field. This is not “regenerative agriculture.” 

The weather was unusual, but we live in an era where what was once odd is now nearly commonplace – not to mention regional trends towards wetter, stormier seasons. What surprised me most was the way the showers continued throughout the summer. In other years, the pattern would break, and we’d see “normal” haying weather, even if it came a few weeks late. In 2017, an extended period of warm, sunny weather didn’t hit until early September.

In other words, I failed to see the tiger creeping up to the mouth of the cave. At first the showery weather was an inconvenience or an annoyance, something to wait out. Then, as we ran out of summer days, the once-distant problem became a clear and obvious threat – one that grew so rapidly, in retrospect, we were shocked we didn’t see it coming.

What’s the lesson to be learned? I’m not sure. I’ve grown up playing this farming game by rules that were handed down by previous generations: there’s a time to plant, and a time to harvest. If you’re patient, the right weather will materialize.

But what if a changing climate has altered the game, and the techniques and standards I’ve learned no longer apply? While we’re scouting for signs of a tiger outside the cave, perhaps a different threat is on the way.

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Thanks to T.S. Eliot, I know April is the cruelest month. So why was I surprised when this past April capped an unusually mild, wet winter, with a cool, unusually wet spring?

The nadir came when a storm brought heavy, driving rain, then freezing rain, then ice pellets, and finally, snow on the weekend when March turned into April. While lambs and ewes huddled in the barn, the cows were exposed in their wintering yard – a sandy, gravelly area that’s usually dry underfoot.

Traditionally, winters in our area are cold enough that cattle winter in a sheltered area outside, on “country concrete” – frozen ground. But this year’s thaws and moisture regularly transformed our country concrete into the pockmarked slurry of a First World War battlefield. The mud got so thick – and our four-wheel-drive tractor was doing so much damage – that for about a week or so we left the tractor in the shed and hand-lugged square bales to the feeder.

But as the storm turned even dry areas into mush and some of the cows weeks away from calving, we had to find dryer ground. With the help of my son, Cam, we evicted the ewes and lambs from the dry corner in the barnyard and shut the flock into the barn. Slopping around in the muck in rubber boots, with wet snow sliding down the backs of our collars, we dragged the cattle feeder area onto dry ground near the shelter of the barn wall. We dropped a bale into the feeder, invited the cattle in, and hoped for the best.

After an hour of this we were sodden, cold, tired, and exhilarated to be out fighting the elements. “It’s days like this that make this job so much fun,” I said. Cam grinned. We both share the farmer’s perverse enjoyment of hard work in bad weather. Then we ducked into the shelter of the barn, and felt the warmth of the flock and its newborn lambs.

Welcome to spring!

Thanks to climate change, what constitutes “normal” weather has become a moving target. For those of us fortunate to have seen 50 years in the same area, what’s “normal” is necessarily backward-looking – rooted in the snowy winter sledding days of our youth, or hazy summer days with high-school friends at the beach.

Those memories are faulty, and not just because of the usual tricks our brain plays on us. Our recollections of “normal” summers and winters are drawn from a different climatic era, from a life lived within a different atmosphere. When I was born in 1964 the air above me had about 319.5 parts per million of carbon dioxide. This past April, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii tracked a new record high for carbon dioxide: 410.28 ppm.

It’s a strange thing to get your head around – that the sky above you now is not the same one you were born beneath, and it’s making the climate behave differently. With this pace of change, how many of my assumptions – like wintering cattle on country concrete – need to be rethought?

While we struggled with mud on the farm, lakes and rivers were swelling across much of eastern Canada. By late April and early May, homes and cottages along the Ottawa River, parts of east-central Ontario, Lake Ontario’s shore, and regions in Quebec and New Brunswick were hit by severe flooding. Areas including Renfrew and Haliburton counties received twice their normal precipitation in April and May. Many residents said they’d never seen the water so high.

“I don’t expect this is ever going to happen again,” one man told me, when I was working on a story about the flooding for Cottage Life Magazine. “This was the 100-year flood.”

I hope he’s right, and I hope I never see a winter and spring this mucky, too. But some high-powered science sponsored by the Muskoka Watershed Council suggests we both need a Plan B. Using sophisticated computer models, the Council projected the ways the region’s climate could differ by 2050. The bad news is this past winter looks almost like a trial run for the future. By 2050, on average, there will be more precipitation, with most of the additional rain and snow – 17 per cent more than today – falling from November through to April. More remarkably, winter lake and river outflows will be three times higher than they are today.

If that’s true, country concrete will be a less reliable commodity.  Struggling with a feeder in the mud won’t be an exhilarating challenge, but a regular slog. I’m hoping for a return to colder, crisper winters. But in the meantime, I need to work on Plan B.

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A ewe licks her lamb minutes after his birth. (I’ve just towelled off the lamb’s head to clear the amniotic fluid from his nostrils.) The ewe’s licking seems to play a major role in the maternal bond, helping ensure she claims the newborn as her own. 

One of the very first memories I have of farm life – along with having my finger bitten by a duck and feeding milk to kittens – is staring goggle-eyed at a wobbly newborn calf, and the vast pool of gelatinous, red placenta that had just slid from its mother.

I was three, I think, and both fascinated and repelled by the afterbirth. This inert, cast-off sack and the calf went together, in a mysterious way I could not fathom. The gooey organ seemed dead, yet it was intimately connected to this new life.

I think about that now during lambing season, when our business involves the safe delivery of creatures previously hidden in the liquid embrace of their mothers’ wombs. Living on a livestock farm is, literally and figuratively, a visceral experience – one involving both internal organs, and gut-level emotions. But it’s also revelatory, as the strains of labour and delivery reveal not only new calves and lambs, but the maternal abilities of their mothers, and our own skills as farmers and livestock obstetricians.

Despite our best efforts, there are times when the consequences are tragic: complicated labours, stillborn or dying animals, and tired, heartbroken shepherds. In other words, this one neglected and underpaid job encompasses the entire realm of experience, from birth to death, with much blood, sadness, and joy in between.

I pass lightly over these issues when writing for a non-farm audience, but I’ve been rethinking this approach after reading James Rebanks’ The Shepherd’s Life. Rebanks is a hill shepherd in England’s Lake District. He became a media sensation after he bought a new smart phone and started posting photos and comments on Twitter.

One of the remarkable things about Rebanks’ book is he takes great pains to portray the full range of farming life, from sunny-day highs to vet-call lows. And his childhood memories aren’t that different than mine:

“Blood was everywhere when I was a child. Sheep lambing, bloody hands, dehorned cattle…Cow Caesarians, men with armfuls of guts and blood, and then shoving it all back in and stitching it up,” he writes, perhaps a bit gleefully. “We accept blood as normal as long as it stops flowing, and the skin scabs over and it heals.”

Ditto for manure and mucus (or, as Rebanks puts it, “shit and snot.”) This is a job deeply immersed in the stuff of life. “You learn to accept that you will get spattered in shit at times, or slaver, or afterbirth, or snot. That you will smell of your animals,” Rebanks says. “You can always tell how alien someone is to our world by how terrified of the muck they look.”

So I was surprised, recently, to read an anecdote about Charles Darwin. A shrewd observer and subtle thinker, Darwin nevertheless seems to have started with a sort of Sunday School, All-Things-Bright-and-Beautiful view of creation – the kind that’s hard to maintain on a farm.

After discovering a parasitic wasp that laid its eggs within a caterpillar, Darwin’s faith was shaken. “There seems to me too much misery in the world,” he wrote. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”

There is misery in the world. But you don’t have to spend long on a farm to know the agenda of other creatures doesn’t fit neatly with your own goals. While Darwin was repelled by the parasite, I can’t help seeing a planet that is jam-packed full of life – even the lives we don’t favour. As far as we know – and this may change one day – we live on the only place in our universe that houses life. And it doesn’t just do so in a grudging way. This planet is full of living things, in every niche, and on every surface, and at every depth and height.

It all fits together, blood and mucus and manure and amniotic fluid, birth and death and sunshine and rain, to create this difficult, astounding, life-filled experience. Farmers are immersed in this experience, and that makes us an increasingly rare group, in a society that works hard to remove the viscera from daily life, and transfer it onto screens in the guise of violent “entertainment.”

True, there are days when I emerge from the barn feeling beaten down, tired, or dispirited. But on the whole I’m grateful to participate and observe a world that’s still visceral.

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Excavating a round bale, Feb. 16 2017

Now is the winter of – not our discontent exactly – but of our calculating. And concern.

We started the winter with about 230 round bales of hay, and now, with each passing day, another round bale disappears into the mouths of our sheep and cattle. While each day brings us closer to spring and the onset of grazing (typically around the 24^th of May, give or take a week),  we’re also slowly exhausting our winter hay supply. And we absolutely cannot, for reasons of animal welfare and farm finance, run out of hay before the pasture is ready.

The reason is simple. Without hay, ewes and cows go hungry at the same time as they’re feeding new lambs and calves. It would be a disaster. At the same time, laying in extra hay would be almost prohibitively expensive, if it was even possible.

So I keep a running inventory in my head. As I write, I’ve got about 88 bales. If all goes well, that’s enough to get me through to late May. I cross my fingers and hope for a “normal” spring.

Hay is very much a product of moisture. In a wet year, grass grows, and everyone has lots of it. (Although hay quality is often poor in rainy summers, but that’s another story.) In a drought, like the one that affected a large swath of Ontario in 2016, scant yields lead to tight supplies and high prices. In our case yields were down about 30 percent below normal.

While weather is the immediate cause of the shortage, there are other factors behind the trend. An astounding 17 per cent of Ontario’s agricultural grasslands disappeared in just five years, between 2006 and 2011. In part, this is because higher grain prices pushed farmers to shift their land to crops. At the same time, cattle numbers were trending down, as the industry struggled with low prices following the outbreak of Mad Cow Disease in Canada, earlier in the decade.

The remaining hay ground is also less productive. Across Canada, hay yields, measured in tons per acre, are 14 percent below the levels of the 1980s. With the increasing value of grain crops, “we’ve pushed our forages onto marginal lands that don’t have the capacity to produce those yields anymore,” Calgary-based researcher Brenna Grant told me.

So this year, the price for hay is soaring. “In 2015 in our area, hay was $45 a round bale. This year it’s $110,” central Ontario cattleman Ron Lipsett said at a meeting in Mount Forest, Ont. last week. It’s a seller’s market, and I’m hoping to squeak through the winter without becoming a buyer.

For urban readers, fretting over something as common as dried grass may seem odd. But hay is such an essential fodder for ruminants that I struggle to find an analogous food in the human diet, at least for modern westerners. In previous eras, going without hay would be akin to rationing bread, or porridge, or potatoes. But it’s more than that. For ruminants, hay is almost a complete meal. It provides proteins, sugars and carbohydrates, fibre, and some vitamins and minerals to boot. In other words, hay is a cow’s equivalent of meat and two veg, with a salad on the side. Partial substitutes are available: straw, or extra grain, or even “cull” vegetables considered unfit for human consumption. But those can be expensive stopgaps.

So I count the bales. And I can’t help remembering the old bus-trip song. Remember the one about bottles of beer on the wall? I’ve got new lyrics:

Eighty-eight bales of hay on the stack, 88 bales of hay.

Take one down, pass it around. Eighty-seven bales of hay…

You get the idea. I’m hoping spring comes soon. I need to get this tune out of my head.

Sorry about the fence.

Near the close of the year, The Globe and Mail’s television critic runs a regular “Ten Most Irritating Canadians” column. It’s mean-spirited, of course, but I have to confess I scan it every year. (Then I feel guilty. Some of the targets are just hapless TV personalities. On the other hand, the Penguins that star in advertisements for my bank really are tiresome – how do they rate such attentive bank service? Why is their home so nice? How do they afford holidays in Italy?)

Still, this got me thinking about my own year-end list. When you’re a farmer, you learn that everyone has an opinion on food production, rural life, and how things should be done outside city limits. Food costs too much, it tastes too bland, isn’t good for you, despoils the environment, etc. Mostly, I bite my tongue. Agriculture is a complex business. Responding to even one off-hand comment in a thorough way would probably derail a conversation.

So I usually let the opinions lie, even though they’re “teachable moments” – occasions for a thorough discussion that educates both participants, and helps us understand one another.

In honour of 2016, here’s one belated response to a travel story. It’s a review of The Pig at Combe, a “luxury boutique hotel” in a restored manor in England’s Devon countryside. With rooms starting at $243 Canadian a night, the hotel gets a glowing review, except for one unpardonable design fault:

“The mile-long drive leading up to the hotel is rather marred by downmarket electric fencing that keeps livestock…from straying onto the road. Wooden post and rail fencing would be far more fitting.”

My wife, Sue, read this and burst out laughing. But I spluttered in outrage: “Hey, are you calling my fencing downmarket? I paid good money for that fence…”

Now that I’ve settled down, here’s a more thoughtful response. The beauty of modern high-tensile fencing isn’t so much aesthetic as it is functional: it keeps animals off the road, at lower cost and more effectively than say, wooden post and rail. The secret lies in the psychology of an electric shock. Once you’ve got one (and this goes for farmers, too) you remember it, and stay away from the fence. Unlike post and rail, where animals scratch themselves, and push and work until there’s an enticing gap, well-maintained electric fences tend to garner respect. The benefit is enhanced safety from a fence that keeps animals in, and predators out.

As a bonus, temporary electric wire can be used to subdivide fields, giving grass time to rest in a managed rotational grazing system, and protecting environmentally sensitive areas. In this respect, the beauty is what happens inside the fence: a thicker, more diverse, healthier sward with richer soil, and more contented livestock. Properly managed, these fences can be a crucial part of the working landscape – infrastructure that helps feed people and livestock, stores carbon, provides clean water, and makes space for wildlife.

All in all, it’s really quite an upmarket solution to an age-old problem. Here’s wishing you a very happy 2017, full of opportunities for learning, growth, and your own teachable moments.

From a column for The Ontario Farmer. For those outside Ontario (or Canada), Boxing Day is the day after Christmas. My drive took me into the province’s “snow belt”, where cold winds coming off the Great Lakes generate hefty snowfalls and “whiteout” conditions. 

It’s tougher to keep track of dates as the years pile up, but I think it was 31 years ago, this Boxing Day, that I saw the Christmas star. Not the Christmas Star, mind you – not the one that drew Wise Men from the Orient. This was just a Christmas star, lit by electric light, mounted high on a silo on a farm south of Grand Valley.

It was a beacon, nonetheless. I was in my mom’s old Pontiac LeMans, spinning north in a snow squall so thick you could hardly see the yard lights in farms along the road. Other drivers were virtually non-existent. Once or twice, I saw a snow plough.

It was a stupid time to be on the road. But I was heading north to meet my girlfriend (now my wife, Sue) and a combination of love and youth had disabled the risk-management centre in my brain. Danged if a little snow was going to keep me from getting to Grey County. So after the dishes had been put away at a Christmas dinner at my aunt’s in Oakville, I excused myself, hopped in the car, found some leftover Christmas carols on the radio, and took off.

Visibility was bad. At one point what I thought was a flashing Christmas light display turned out to a snow plough parked on the shoulder of the road. In fact, it was tough to see most light displays, except for that star on the east side of the road. There, someone had climbed a silo, and hung a bright white star over the farm.

Oh beautiful Star of Bethlehem,                                                                                                                    Shining far through shadows dimmed

I was impressed, even though I could only spare a passing glance. It must have taken some effort to climb the silo to make this single, eloquent gesture. And then I drove on.

A year later, I repeated the drive on a cold, clear night. The star was back. I realized I had been looking for it, and the star had become a way station on my journey.

And so a modest tradition was born. As the years multiplied and Christmases passed, Sue and I drove past the star together. First, we were, as they used to say, “an item.” Then we were newlyweds. Then we were young parents with two little boys in car seats.

Twenty years ago we moved north to our own farm, meaning we didn’t drive that highway near Grand Valley so much. But every few years, when we were on that route, we continued to look for the star.

Star of wonder, star of night                                                                                                                                   Star with royal beauty bright

Now I fear the star has disappeared. I can’t remember when I last saw it – maybe ten or 15 years ago? Maybe it’s because we drive that route in the daylight, and so don’t notice the light. Or maybe I can’t remember the right location.

A lot can change in three decades. Did the owner sell the farm? Is he (or she) no longer able to climb the silo and replace bulbs? I wish I could thank the person who put that star up. That small, meaningful gesture has enriched our Christmas travels.

It has also inspired our own farmstead Christmas tradition. When my boys come home from university this Christmas, they’ll see the star over our own barn – one we’ve being lighting for almost 20 years. The fixture begins to glow on the first night of Advent, and shines down on the sheep and cattle inside the barn and yard until Epiphany. It’s a reminder of that first Christmas, of how wondrous things can emerge from unexpected places, and how good news travels even to be such lowly folks as shepherds.

But it’s also in appreciation of the unknown farmer who added light to my Christmas route in 1985. In this season of hope, here’s wishing we will all share in peace and goodwill. As we travel snowy country roads in 2017 and beyond, let’s appreciate the efforts others have made to light our way – and let’s reflect some of that light, ourselves.

Christmas morning sunrise, 2016

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My “helper,” assisting with fence maintenance.

I was brushing out a fence line a few days ago, hoping to make gains before the snow comes. But as the wind drove the snow down the back of my collar, my thoughts were in a much warmer place – with Allan Lemayian and his insurgent cattle in Nairobi, Kenya.

Mr. Lemayian is a pastoral Robin Hood, profiled in a recent New York Times story. As development paves over the grasslands his ancestors once relied on, the lanky Maasai man has brought his herd into the suburbs, snatching grass from cemeteries, roadsides, even the lawns of the well-off.

I found myself admiring Mr. Lemayian’s gumption, rooting for him as his herd dodged traffic and he endured the taunts of BMW drivers. “Take your animals back to Maasailand,” one shouts. “You look like your cows,” says another well-heeled motorist.

Mr. Lemayian’s guerilla grazing may seem like an exotic tale from a distant country, but his predicament is one we all share in. Archaeologists have long suspected East Africa’s extensive grassland savannahs are the cradle of humanity. Now, not just in Africa but around the globe, we’re ploughing under or carving up the landscape that nurtured and still feeds our species, with dire implications for the planet’s climate and the creatures that share the grasslands.

Maybe we’re all more like the impatient BMW drivers, oblivious to the changes we’re causing, contemptuous of the rural people who are among the most obvious victims, and unaware of the connections between our dinner plates and disappearing landscapes.

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