Some years ago, probably 15 years at least, Ontario Farmer, a weekly magazine, asked its readers to send in farm photos. “Send us your scenes from the farm along with a detailed description”, says the invitation. It was a brilliant idea.
Each week, at the top of page 2, the magazine runs three coloured photos that readers have submitted. The heading “Farm Seen” says it all.
It’s one of the most popular features of the magazine. They run a full page of pictures if they get too many. But only three are featured on the second page.
There are no prizes for the best picture. Nobody is singled out as being a great photographer. The caption underneath just gives the names, place and a small description of the event.
You see young kids playing on the farm, semi-retired farmers restoring old tractors, beautiful sights in the countryside, and graduation photos of students all decked out in their best standing on or beside a large new tractor.
Wedding pictures are a real hit. Many of the photos show the happy couple on or beside tractors. Yes, tractors! I have yet to see a wedding scene in a flower garden or beside the still waters of a stream or lake.
I am always amused by the many pictures I see of the newly joined couple, and their pals, flanked on a polished tractor, or on the steps of a combine or in a manure spreader. For goodness sake, what are the brides thinking?
One photo showed a couple standing in front of a parade of spiffy John Deere tractors led by a huge green combine. I counted eight double-wheeled tractors in the parade.
Another wedding photo showed two huge tractors — a John Deere and a Case/IH. The groom and his entourage are on and standing beside one tractor and the bride and her friends are on the other. Young women are standing on the tires. Imagine!
Not all wedding photos feature $200,000 tractors. Newly-weds are pictured on restored tractors, in manure spreaders, up a few rungs on a cement silo, under umbrellas in a grain field, up beside decorated large round bales of hay or straw, beside weathered barns, beside wire or rail fences and so on.
The magazine’s editor-in-chief commented in his column some years ago about all the wedding pictures with fancy tractors. He said farmers love their tractors and their large equipment. They will find any excuse to be in it. He wrote: “And yet the tractor is a fixture at many weddings. Maybe that’s just the way it has to be. For the young brides who become old marrieds with children in a few years will tell you, with various degrees of resignation, that they should have seen it all coming. They become widows to the cab come planting and harvest. It really is the competition for a young woman’s time,” he wrote.
Did that stop the wedding tractor pictures? Did it scare brides off the large horsepower beasts? Did the warning get them out of the manure spreaders? I thought young women would never send another picture in to the magazine that showed them even near a machine. Not so! I think it brought on more. Almost all the wedding photos are taken on the farm. Those red and green tractors are very popular with young farmers.
It’s wonderful free advertising for the tractor manufacturers and the dealers. I’m sure they love it. In a few years we might see the proud parents displaying their offspring in Farm Seen– on the tractors, maybe.
