or my daughter’s fifth birthday, her friend Jake Ferguson arrived with a picture he had drawn himself. They’ve known each other since they were in daycare together at the age of two; they interact easily, like siblings, and she accepted the drawing with casual thanks and little fanfare. My wife and I were much more taken with it.

The picture was an assemblage of large rectangular shapes on outsize wheels, a big hunk of machinery coloured in a vaguely familiar scheme of bright green and yellow. We already knew Jake was an obsessive fan of big trucks and industrial equipment — his mother, Zoe, once told us he awaited the launch of a new season of Mighty Machines the way our daughter, Sloane, anticipates the latest Pixar release, and Zoe sometimes entertained her son by reading to him from farm equipment catalogues. Still, there was something uncommonly touching about his gift of a picture of the machine he loved the most: a John Deere combine harvester.

“I tried to tell him Sloane might want something else,” his mother told us as we grinned at the drawing. “Maybe she’d like it better if he drew flowers or her favourite animal or something like that.”

Jake’s brusque reply: “Who doesn’t love a combine?”

Zoe Ferguson grew up on a farm in southeastern Alberta, and her father and brother still work the land there. Jake had spent weekends and lazy summer days on the farm since he was an infant, riding alongside his grandfather in the big new combine every chance he got. He is intimately familiar with tractors and sprayers and irrigation pivots; the first time I ever heard the term “air seeding,” it was from Jake.

As I examined his combine drawing, rich with detail I never would have known to include, it struck me that, at five years old, Jake knew more about the actual work of modern farming than I did. I’m an obsessive food shopper, a stalker of farmers’ markets, and a relentless seeker of obscure ingredients. I make a mean Thai curry, and I can tell you exactly where in Calgary to find the sweetest Hutterite carrots and the freshest homemade tortillas. But I couldn’t tell you with any precision what a combine even does. I know an awful lot about food but almost nothing about where it comes from, who grows it, and how. I think this makes me a pretty typical urban Canadian.

Food is a perpetual hot topic — it is, after all, one of the few consumer products that become part of our bodies. But even as food security, safety, and health have risen on the public agenda, the conversation has focused entirely too much on the contradictory lines of what we want — more local, fewer chemicals, more options, greater convenience — and far too little on how to get it. We don’t talk about whose job it is to provide it, how they should be compensated, and, in particular, how to close what turns out to be a yawning gap between our needs as consumers, at one end of the supply chain, and theirs as farmers at the other. What follows, then, is a modest attempt to discover how food is actually produced in Canada, and how we might like it to be produced by the time Jake will be ready to drive a combine of his own.

aques Farm Ltd. operates from a 550-hectare spread of irrigated land alongside the Red Deer River in southeastern Alberta. The riverbank forms the farm’s southern limit; an irrigation ditch curves north across a thin patch of forested flood plain and a fallow field littered with old farm equipment, emptying into a wide pond. Jake Ferguson’s grandparents, Arthur and Heather Jaques (rhymes with “snakes”) occupy a handsome new ranch house that hugs the irrigation pond’s south bank.

A wide yard encircled by a windbreak of irrigated trees and populated by pickup trucks and tractors and four-wheel ATVs stretches out to one side of the house, hemmed in on the far side by two gleaming new Quonset huts, each more than fifty metres long. The primary farmland, planted with an annually rotated mix of grains, oilseeds (mostly canola), and pulses (Great Northern beans for the past few years), forms a wide semicircle around this central node. The fields are bisected by long, humped steel spans that look to the untrained eye like scaffolding laid on its side — these are irrigation pivots, great long sprinkler systems on wheels that rotate around the planted fields. The farm is bounded on the north by steep, bald hills that appear denuded from a distance but are in fact thick with sage and cactus, attesting to the need for the pivots. At the far end of one field, due north of the irrigation pond, sits another house, slightly older and more modest, where thirty-six-year-old Byron Jaques, Jake’s uncle and the fourth generation of Jaques men to farm the Alberta prairie, lives with his wife and two young daughters.

The nearest city is the dusty regional centre of Brooks, roughly 120 kilometres to the southwest. Many of the other dots on the map around here — Buffalo, for example, the place name on the Jaques family’s mail — constitute little more than a crossroads with a gas station or, in the case of Buffalo, a shuttered gas station. The land is dry and gently rolling, riven with deep gullies and half-hidden coulees. Down in the river valleys, deer, antelope, and rabbits are abundant, and signs warn of rattlesnakes on the road. It is starkly beautiful country and faintly primordial; Dinosaur Provincial Park, one of the richest fossil troves on the planet, lies just eighty kilometres upriver.

The farmland along the local range roads is strewn with humps of black steel pipe, which are encircled in heavy fencing painted a warning shade of orange; they resemble caged serpents in a vast arena. There are also gas wells and compressor stations and signs bearing Husky and Cenovus logos, all of it testifying to the rich hydrocarbon bounty beneath the soil. Jaques Farm ships all of its crops off-site for processing before any of them are sold, but the farm consumes its own fossil fuel, making it entirely self-sufficient for its natural gas needs.

I arrived just before dusk on a clear spring evening in the middle of planting, and Heather Jaques drove me out right away to observe the last of the day’s work. I found a John Deere 8120 tractor backed up against a trailer fitted with a big white steel bin. Attached to the rear was a seeding machine, an eight-pronged furrowing apparatus with a yellow plastic tub, or hopper, mounted atop each prong. These were filled to varying degrees with white pellets speckled in jellybean hues of blue or pink — treated Great Northern bean seeds. Sacks in the back of a nearby pickup truck read Danger Treated with Maxim Apron XL Streptomycin, a blend of bactericide, fungicide, and insecticide.

Every so often, two work-gloved hands appeared at the lip of the big steel bin overhead, holding aloft a red plastic pail. Byron Jaques was inside the bin, mixing the last of the seeds with a nitrogen-fixing inoculant called NitraStik-D (“This inoculant guarantees a minimum of 100 million viable cells of Rhizobium leguminosarum bv phaseoli per gram”) and hoisting them out. Arthur Jaques, in sturdy workboots and rust-coloured Carhartt overalls, took each new bucket in turn and dumped it into one of the eight hoppers on the seeding machine, taking care to measure the levels equally. Once Arthur had loaded the tubs, Byron climbed out of the bin and jumped into the tractor. I joined him in the cab as he made his last seeding pass of the spring over his bean field.

It was full dark now, and the field beyond the tractor’s headlights was a rumour. No matter: the action was all on a small GPS screen mounted to the right of the steering wheel. It showed a gridded field of grey, much of it filled with tidy squares of blue that represented the land already seeded. A small digital pictograph of a tractor at the bottom of the screen pointed directly at the last narrow grey band of unseeded field, tracking our progress.

Byron has an engineer-like disposition toward his work, focused and slightly anxious yet somehow offhand. When I asked how it all worked, he tapped the GPS, flipping over to a screen that traced the data stream guiding us. Multiple satellites spun within range in the stratosphere high above us, and they traded information with the tractor’s GPS through a receiver in the main farmyard. A radio antenna on the tractor’s roof received minute corrections to the vehicle’s trajectory, based on triangulations calculated between the various satellites. Both of Byron’s hands left the steering wheel as he fiddled with the GPS, which was doing the steering; it controlled a hydraulic valve down at axle level, precise to less than an inch, making sure the streak of blue on this pass up the field didn’t cover any of the same pixels the previous one had, nor leave the slightest of gaps.