The oft-repeated Canadian “farm crisis” soundbite finally gets an in-depth exploration with veteran journalist and author Ingeborg Boyens’ comprehensive overview of the problems facing the family farm. Another Season’s Promise explores the farm crisis not as a series of occasional individual losses caused by poor growing seasons, but rather as a perpetual structural phenomenon composed of many villains. Family farmers face down multinational agribusiness, pressure to grow genetically modified foods, the perils of factory farming, massive dependence on pesticides, and an increasingly distant federal government more interested in pleasing international trade bodies than supporting Canadian farmers.

The only ones not making money in the food chain, Boyens clearly shows, are the family farmers themselves, a phenomenon she demonstrates by introducing each chapter with the personal tribulations of one such family in Manitoba, who act as a microcosm for a threatened way of life. These vignettes also help make these complicated issues accessible to non-rural folk, even if freight rates and government subsidies are not everyone’s idea of a fun read.

Some of the book’s chapters read a bit like instalments in a radio series, with certain phrases or concepts repeated for the benefit of listeners who may have missed the previous week’s report. Boyens also tends to romanticize farm life, making sweeping claims that the problems befalling urban folk are nothing compared with mishaps on the farm. And by the end, one wishes Boyens had a better thesaurus, for the terms like “toil under a hot sun,” “lifeblood of the country” and “swaying wheat” are as omnipresent as the proverbial prairie gopher.

These weaknesses aside, Boyens has opened the door on an issue all too easily forgotten when shoppers stroll down well-stocked aisles of their local grocery store.