By the time August arrives every year, the City of Weyburn has become a small urban centre floating in a sea of rich, golden grain. The city is home to Canada's highest volume, and largest privately-owned, inland grain handling centre. Despite considerable diversification in oil exploration, with over 600 wells in the area, the city continues to faithfully serve as a major supply and service centre for a wide variety of grain and livestock producers, over a century after it was first incorporated as a village in 1902.

Weyburn is still the consummate prairie town that it was originally created to be. The 50-foot steel wheat sculptures that line Highway 39 at the edge of the Souris River are tangible representations of its main reason for existence, then and now. Wheat is, and has been, the mainstay of the region's economy.

This intense reliance on the surrounding area's agricultural production for the city's basic economic health, as well as a robust celebration of its traditional farming heritage, are the reason for the exciting activities to be held this weekend.

Beginning on Friday and running into Sunday, the weekend will see a half dozen different sectors of the community get together to offer the Wheat Festival, Weyburn Horticultural Show, Weyburn Chamber of Commerce Street Fair, Heritage Days at Heritage Village, and the fourth annual Lions Club Rodeo. Thanks to a marvelous show of co-operation and good will among local organizations, businesses, and individuals, the number and variety of activities arranged for this festival on the second weekend of August just keep growing and growing since it first began a few years ago.

Among all the food demonstrations, craft shows, musical entertainment, pancake breakfasts, and hay rides through the downtown, bronc riding, and fireworks at dusk, people of all ages and backgrounds will find many things of interest. Everyone will leave with their memories refreshed of life in a western farming community; even the larger city-dwellers who really visit only for the fresh taste of homemade bread and Saskatoon pie.

The Wheat Festival is a good example of a new, interactive kind of community event that is just as much fun for locals as they are for tourists. In many ways, Weyburn will be a community entertaining itself for a few days before the busy harvest days begin, just as the earlier prairie residents did before television and the Internet intruded with their canned and universal diversions.

In this particular case, the festival also serves another useful purpose: it reminds the public about the origin of much of their food. Where does the wheat in that loaf of bread or dish of pasta come from? It comes from the wheat fields around Weyburn.

It also humanizes the farmers; turns them into real people trying to hang on to the life they know. Who is that man worrying out loud about the survival of the family farm or the international grain market or genetically-modified wheat? That's the farmer who drove the hay wagon at the Weyburn Wheat Festival. -J.H.