Grainswest - Fall 2022

Fall 2022 grainswest.com 23 C arbon credits, competition with China and AgriStability may have been the hot topics at a roundtable discussion between Peace Country farmers and hrystia Freeland back in January 2020, but it was the childcare concerns raised by Fairview area agronomist Josefine Bartlett that seemed to leave the biggest impression on the deputy prime minister. So much so that when Freeland returned to Alberta in November 2021 to announce a landmark $3.8 billion childcare agreement between the province and Ottawa, her speech referenced Josefine’s remarks about the need for greater commitment to early childhood education and childcare in rural areas. “They called me and asked if they could quote me, and I said that was fine. But I missed the whole thing. I couldn’t find it,” she said with a laugh about her moment in the political spotlight. Understandably, she doesn’t have much time to Google political press conferences, what with raising one- and-a-half-year-old Tor and four-year-old Henrik and running agronomy trials full time for Bayer. While her husband Brady Bartlett pitches in with the kids when he’s able, when it’s time to break out the heavy machinery on the family farm 19 kilometres west of Fairview, it’s just not feasible to have the boys underfoot for obvious safety reasons. “I tend to be a sprayer operator and that’s not very easy to have kids around between the equipment and whatever else,” said Brady, who works the 4,200-acre mixed grain operation alongside his brother Blaine and their parents. Which brings us to what compelled Josefine to broach the subject of rural childcare at that meeting with Freeland. Months earlier, in the summer of 2019, Josefine began a new position with Bayer after taking a maternity leave; though she and Brady had sought day care arrangements early in her pregnancy, they were put on a waiting list for the sole service in Fairview and ultimately were unable to secure a spot. As a result, the Bartletts were forced to make the 60-kilometre drive to Grimshaw, the next nearest town with day care availability. “It was really stressful. It was also expensive,” said Josefine, alluding to the cost of fuel needed to make the daily 120-kilometre round trip. Brady added that the economic impact on the family also manifested in reduced productivity on the farm at the worst possible time: harvest. “We had to be on the road by seven to drop them off at eight, and then we didn’t get back to the farm until nine,” he said. “Then I’d have to leave the farm again by four. It was a pretty short workday.” “Whenever you are stressed, you lose productivity,” said Josefine, whose work sees her travel all over Peace Country. “Your mind goes elsewhere, just trying to figure out, ‘How are we going to do this?’ Every day was different depending on where each of us was. “I’m taking that time out of my day to do that. It’s a lot of pressure on women to have to ask their employer for it. It may be acceptable, or it may not be acceptable. I started a brand-new job and right away I had asked for a bunch of time during the busiest season of the year to go and grab my kid because we don’t have childcare.” This wasn’t the first time the Bartlett farm took such a hit on productivity. Brady’s brother Blaine and his wife Kristie, a public health nurse, were in a similar bind a year earlier. While on the waiting list for daycare in Fairview, Kristie shepherded six-year-old Everly and four-year-old Ethan to an unregistered day home in Spirit River, about a 40-minute drive one way. The couple have a third child, Morgan, who is just shy of two years. “When it’s an unregistered day home, if there’s a vacation or anything like that, you have to find alternative childcare, and that is also stressful,” said Kristie. “It was quite a stressful period of time.” “I started a brand-new job and right away I had asked for a bunch of time during the busiest season of the year to go and grab my kid because we don’t have childcare.” — Josefine Bartlett