The Hands That Feed Us: On Tour - The Podcast

I've been promising people a podcast for half a year now. 250 of you have signed up since the beginning of the year based on that promise, and all I've delivered have been quick YouTube updates and sporadic newsletters.

I'm happy to say that is about to change, because we have just launched our zeroth episode. This is our 'test' episode, recorded way back in January. In our original plan, this would have been completed before the tour launched in March, and released a month later in April but ... I severely over-estimated the number of hours I can work in a day. Suffice to say, I am very happy to finally bring you this episode three months late, and I hope you'll be forgiving of our growing pains as I try to release weekly episodes going forward, on top of a weekly newsletter and as many as five tour stops, all while driving across the country.

The podcast is also ... just a podcast, not a video podcast. I discovered early in the tour that, while I can definitely set up a camera and press record, there is no way I can get footage that is worthy of a video podcast if I'm also trying to facilitate a discussion at the same time. So, it's audio-only, just like, well, any other podcast, and you can find it where you'd expect to find podcasts: Spotify, Apple, Amazon, iHeartRadio, and YouTube. Especially YouTube.

The podcast is a way to bring the in-depth, very localized, in-person discussions I've been having to listeners across the country. It's a way to discover that, while every community has its unique challenges, there are themes and challenges that are common to many rural communities. Almost every discussion I've hosted has been recorded, and we'll be turning the most interesting ones into podcast episodes.

This is an experiment. We are going to learn as we go, and I'm not 100% sure how the local discussions are going to translate into an online medium. In-person discussions meander, they get distracted, and not all the loose ends get tied up. It will be our challenge to focus and sharpen the discussions to make them easier to listen to as independent episodes.

We have some good ones coming up. Highlights for me were talking about rural revitalization in Daysland, Alberta, and a debate over the role of 'romance' in farming in Clearwater, Manitoba. And, up next week: A very packed house discussing the challenges of farm succession in Agassiz, B.C.

Romance is a strong theme in my film, and it has been a sometimes-divisive theme in many of the discussions. I was quite unsure how audiences would react to my thesis that farmers are more successful when the focus on romance over finance. I was kind of expecting serious lectures from people telling me that I don't know anything about economics, so I've been gratified that pretty much every audience has embraced the idea that romance is economically important in rural life, and they seem to know exactly what I mean.

Still, there is a definite minority that gets pissed off by the word. But not because they think I'm wrong about economics. The word hits a sore spot for farmers for whom the romance has worn off, and who want to tell me just how hard it is to keep farm going. They are right. Farming is really, really hard, and much is not very romantic. You do still have to get down to brass tacks, you can't just ignore finance, or you will go bankrupt. Being told you aren't romantic enough feels insulting to farmers who feel they are struggling on the verge of collapse.

I hear that critique, and I think there's a better way to look at romance, but you'll have to listen to the podcast to find out what it is. And, when you do, I hope you'll find a little bit of romance in each episode — just enough to keep you going until next week.