GrainsWest Winter 2020

Winter 2020 grainswest.com 21 lood dripped from Liz Roberts’s hand. She needed help but her cell phone showed no service. She stepped away from the fence stretcher that had gashed her hand. Driving to get medical help, she stopped several times to phone for assistance without success. From her family’s farm south of Cereal, Roberts arrived 30 minutes later in Oyen, a town of 1,000 hardy souls perched just south of Highway 9 in southeast Alberta, relieved to have remained conscious long enough to find a doctor and stitches for her wound. Drawing on one’s own strength isn’t new for people living in Alberta’s Special Areas 2, 3 and 4. With a farm and ranch population of 4,184 in the 2016 census, this is about half the population of Banff spread over five million acres, or about one person per 1,000 acres. Even counting the roughly 4,000 townspeople of Oyen, Consort and Hanna, the Special Areas might be dubbed Alberta’s Empty Quarter for its sparsity of inhabitants. Though not quite as arid and unpopulated as the legendary Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula, dealing with isolation is a way of life here, as is battling drought. In the Special Areas, cattle and occasionally pronghorn dot large pastures and songbirds flit between grain fields. Wind- swept prairie and deep coulees wrap an unbroken horizon, the area’s history tucked away in homesteads and towns. The BY CAROL PATTERSON • PHOTO BY ZOLTAN VARADI B Growing grain in Alberta’s Empty Quarter requires resilience and resourcefulness region’s western edge dips into the Canadian Badlands, its dinosaur fossils hinting of a long-ago age when moisture was abundant. The Roberts family and their neighbours have come to terms with the difficult soil and climate conditions of this region, but many past inhabitants were chased away by the dust clouds of the 1920s and ’30s. Almost a century later, the residents of the Special Areas are role models for tackling drought and volatile climate conditions. SPECIAL RULES FOR SPECIAL AREAS Lured by cheap land, people with big dreams flocked to southeast Alberta between the early 1900s and 1920s. Homesteaders hoped to break the land, but it often broke them. Population in the area surged past 20,000, peaking in 1916 at about 24,500 but fell as newcomers discovered the land was poorly suited to the farming practices of the day. Worsening the situation, persistent drought conditions started in 1917. Many walked away from homes, mortgages and unpaid taxes, leaving towns and municipalities staggering under debt. A provincial commission struck to tackle the problem produced the Special Areas Act . Passed in 1938, it gave administrative powers to the newly formed Special Areas