When many of us think about life on the farm, we still come up with the idyllic mixed-farm image from the storybooks – an idea that’s becoming further removed from the reality.
Certainly at one point mixed farms were the norm for farms, but the face of farming has changed substantially since the first pioneers began working this land.
But in speaking with those in the know in the rural areas around St. Albert, one thing that still persists is the sense of camaraderie that comes from working the land and knowing all your neighbours.
“They supported each other a whole bunch. They worked together on threshing machines and those kinds of things, because not everybody had them,” Sturgeon County Mayor Tom Flynn said. “They had to team up.”
He has heard the stories of his great-grandparents settling in the late 1800s, and watched the changes taking place over his own lifetime as well, and said the changes have been very significant.
One of the biggest changes he has seen is in the specialization of farms, and the bigger, more technologically advanced equipment used to produce the food and bring it to market.
“You don’t see anybody out with double-disc drills any more, they’re all the big air seeders and putting in a crop isn’t a major production,” Flynn said. “And they don’t summer-fallow land any more, they minimum-till it so they’re not spending as many hours getting that crop in that way.”
This kind of change is something third-generation farmer Dave Kluthe has seen first-hand. His grandfather settled in the area of the Egg Lake School and had a typical mixed farm, but that’s no longer the case. Along with his two brothers, Kluthe now farms roughly 3,800 acres of grain after getting out of the cattle business in the wake of the BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease) crisis in the early 2000s.
He sold the cattle, and all the equipment, to upgrade his grain-seeding gear to the point where he can do in one afternoon what it would have taken his grandfather weeks to do.
“There’s tractors that drive themselves now, which we all have, so there are no more misses and you’re not wasting chemical,” he said. “It’s made life so much easier. If my grandfather was still alive and I could show him what we’re doing today, he would just shake his head.”
John Bocock and his brother Bill, who both work the same land their grandfather bought in 1921near the corner of highways 2 and 37, have seen similar changes with respect to cattle.
John said his grandfather got into dairy farming immediately, beginning by manually filling the five-gallon pails then eventually increasing to the eight-gallon pails and then ultimately switching over to filling the large tanks.
In 1947, he said, his father was one of the first farms in Western Canada to switch to an open-housing concept, where rather than tying up the cows in their pen where they were brought food and milked, the cows were free to roam and came to get food from the trough and went to the parlour themselves for milking.
While they haven’t been actively raising their own herds for the last few years, John said the technology is changing at an astounding pace.
“Ten per cent of the dairy farms now have robots milking their cows,” he said. “It saves a lot of labour, and the cow decides when she’s going to get milked.”
Each cow has a microchip, and computers determine if it’s getting the right amount to eat and being milked enough. The computer will even store historical data on the cow, so that if it knows a cow doesn’t produce milk on one or two of its nipples, it will only milk the nipples known to produce.
There are even robots that reduce feed waste by going up the fence line and pushing errant feed back into the cows’ reach.
Bill noted while there have been a lot of changes with the technology, there have also been significant changes in the physical landscape – there is less diversity in wild birds, there has been a disturbing loss of wetland habitat as farmers drain them to increase their farmable acres, and the weather has been getting hotter and drier. The most significant change, however, has to do with what farmers are choosing to grow.
“Now farmers concentrate on one or two crops,” he said. “It used to be all mixed farms with crop rotation,” but the advent of fertilizers has made crop rotation unnecessary.
As for what’s going to happen in the future, with respect to farming and to Sturgeon County in general, it’s difficult to say, but most farmers would agree the trend will continue toward larger, most automated farms.
For the Bococks and Kluthe, they all see they will be the last of their respective lines to be farming. Their children have moved into the city and work professional jobs, with little interest in the family legacy.
Kluthe said the fact his children don’t want to carry on the farm is a mixed blessing.
“In some ways it’s kind of nice, because I get to just retire; I don’t have to farm like my father did until he was dead so we could carry on,” he said. “But in other ways it’s sad to see it come to an end, this thing my grandfather started.”
He predicted an increased trend toward larger corporate farms, and also toward more communal farms like those operated by the Hutterites, simply because it’s more difficult to hire qualified help as the technology advances – you’re not just looking for someone to hoist some bales of hay, you need someone who can operate a half-million-dollar piece of equipment.
Flynn said while the county has strong agricultural roots, encroachment of the urban footprint and increased industrial development are not only inevitable, but in many ways they’re desirable as they give residents an opportunity to stay on the land and work in the area.
“Not everybody’s going to be a farmer, but they may want to live on an acreage and help your brother when it’s harvest time or something but you’re not going to make your living that way,” he said.
