Dear Kerri-Leah and Clinton,

I don't want our farmers to die. I don't want our small towns to die. And I don't want my sense of being a Canadian to die.

I am an urban person at the moment and like most urban people I drive to small towns every summer to escape my nine-to-five city dweller life.

But, I have lived in small towns, on a farm and even in a warehouse in Minnedosa, so I know the two-week version of life in the country is an illusion. In fact, I keep a small photo of that imaginary life at my desk to dream upon when the job routine grinds me down. The photo is a stone house in Minnedosa where I see myself growing roses and writing deep thoughts.

Maybe I should replace that photo with a picture of an empty barrell to remind me what the country is really like, especially for a farmer. Maybe I should take a photo of you and your husband on a February morning at six a.m. walking to the barn. Because, you are right Kerri-Leah, most of us don't have a clue what country life is really like. We understand mad cow disease as something on the news. We have a disease here too, it's called perimeter-vision.

If we drive just outside of the city we see the bedroom communities where living in the country looks like nirvana. Trampolines, swimming pools, huge houses and SUVs. This is not the country. This is city people with city wages pretending to live in the country.

But, Kerri-Leah, you don't need me to tell you what living in the country means, you're the one who should be telling me. And you have in a way that might have inspired a few Saturday morning breakfast debates. At least it did in my house, as working-class, wage earners, our first reaction to the 0.72 cents per pound you get for your cattle, was to call and try to arrange to buy some beef. Since I pay from $2.00 per pound for hamburger to up to $7.00 a pound for steak, I think it is time we talked.

In fact, maybe it is time we all talked. I know, I know, there are regulatory bodies and health inspectors and government red tape on an endless roll before I , the city person, can go to you, the producer, and pay you what you deserve for your product.

Kerri-Leah, you talk about us not understanding agriculture and again you are so right. We don't, our kids don't. I plant a garden that would be an over-ambitious flowerbed on your farm, but even from that small plot I get a lot of food. To me a garden is food. You may thing because gardening is the number one Canadian hobby that many of us are closer to the earth, closer to you. But, gardening as a hobby, buying a few hundred dollars worth of flowers and shrubs for the front yard is not really comparable to being hungry if your seeds blow away.

I know it isn't that extreme yet, but when will it be? When all our farms are deserted except for the lucky corporate landowners, the conglomerates of agriculture that swallow the small farms whole? No small farms, no families, no small towns.

Kerri-Leah and Clinton, you have a big job ahead of you. I believe your letter was written in frustration and anger which means your letter is real. With a daily routine of Tim Horton's coffee, Paris Hilton updates and snarled traffic, it's easy to forget what's real and what really matters.

I don't have the kind of money you or other cattle farmers need to stay on the farm. But I have a pen and a circle of friends with pens. We need to all start writing, start talking, start looking past the perimeter and deciding what we want to find when we take next year's two week vacation.

Kerri-Leah, your pen is pretty powerful too. I think our newspapers and magazines need to hear more from you. Wake us up. Tell us how to help. Tell a mom with an 11-year-old boy in downtown Winnipeg what being a farm mom is like. Write Kerri-Leah, write.

- Eva Weidman

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