This month, we are heading back 30 years to the May 1995 issue of the Rural Voice and, as you could perhaps guess from the cover, it had a strong focus on barns and the building boom of the 1990s. However, there was no record of whose barn or where it is, so I called up the construction businesses mentioned in the magazine. No luck. The hunt led me to social media without any leads, and then to Vanden Heuvel Structures and to Ken Janmaat, its recently retired former owner. Vanden Heuvel did many of the barns in the area over the last 50 years, but, alas, the barn didn’t look familiar to Ken.
Still, Ken was gracious enough to walk me through Vanden Heuvel’s current build of a 66- x 424-foot chicken barn for Murray Whyte near Seaforth, and to smile for our cover photo this month. He also took the Rural Voice back through his 50-year year career and the evolution of barns in this corner of Ontario.
Kase Vanden Heuvel had come to the area from the Netherlands in his mid-20s and after a decade working in the area, he started building barns because a few farmers had asked him to. By the early 1970s, a core crew – that included Ken – began working with him. Kase had built a hog barn for Ken’s dad and that is how the two had connected. Ken thought he wanted to be an accountant, but after a short work contract there when he was just 18, he got hooked into construction.
Still, Ken put his knack for numbers to good use there. He quickly moved into management, quoting and operations, as Kase was also a hog farmer and had a lot on the go. Ken went on to buy the business in 2000, before Kase passed away in 2007. Ken sold in 2022 to fellow long-time employees and brothers, Herman and Kevin Gerrits, but still likes to stay in contact.
These days, Vanden Heuvel has a loyal and local crew of about two dozen, which allows them the manpower during those few crucial stages when a barn will need 15 or more people to put on the roof. They average about 15-18 buildings a year and Ken estimates that the chicken barn we were touring would take about 2000 hours from Vanden Heuvel, with an additional 1000 for electrical, concrete and other contractors.
When Ken started there in the 1970s, there were a lot of two-and three-storey chicken barns being built. Ken remembers plenty of 42-foot wide two-storey barns that would be a “balloon” frame construction, instead of building up floor by floor. Over time, chicken barns moved towards single storeys for ease of cleaning and the more recent move to modular loading spelled the end of multiple storey broiler chicken barns. He is seeing a lot more farmers choosing tunnel ventilation over cross-ventilated barns, while the barns keep getting wider.
When interest rates skyrocketed in the 1980s, the Vanden Heuvel crew diversified and kept a wide portfolio: Hensall District Co-op, the Goderich salt mine and hundreds of local commercial businesses. During the hardest part of the 1980s, they were down to a crew of only half a dozen, but they kept going.
Their first large dairy barn projects came with a wave of Dutch and European immigrants that knew exactly what they wanted: large free stall barns with an eight-foot under-barn manure storage. Ken remembers doing the first barns for the Hosper, Steenbeek and VanderVeeken families.
They did hog barns too, building many of the Burgsma family’s barns. But as these barns moved more and more towards under-barn storage, Vanden Heuvels backed away from the concrete work and stuck with chicken and dairy barns primarily.
Next up, Ken sees a big boom in layer barns, because the move to enhanced housing for laying chickens will require significantly more space and more barns. As for Ontario’s new building code that came into effect last month, the Vanden Heuvel crew isn’t too concerned as they are mainly streamlining to make the rules easier, while increasing the structural load specifications. Considering the number of barns and buildings that collapsed under this winter’s snow load, Ken doesn’t think these increases are a bad thing at all.
Ken is grateful to have worked and grown with some of the most successful farmers in the area, and been a part of some exciting projects, including the REACH Huron arena in Clinton, Rosebank seeds and several others. He loves driving through Huron County, seeing farms and businesses thriving in the buildings they have constructed.
Kyle Rutledge, 12-year employee with Vanden Heuvel Structures putting some finishing touches on the Whyte chicken barn
We caught up with several businesses listed in the Leaders in the Building Industry supplement in the 1995 issue, most of which, like Heritage Builders, had largely transitioned from agricultural to residential construction. Glen Irwin, from B&M Construction near Dundalk, says they might do some agricultural buildings for their long-time customers, but that they now focus on building the farmers’ houses, not their barns. Being in the barn-building business meant keeping large crews, so they gave it up over time and 2016 was the last barn project that B&M Construction did. Still, the barns that these companies built stand the test of time in our rural areas.
Easy Lift Doors: Andy Stinnissen is the owner of Easy Lift Doors; the address and the toll-free number haven’t changed from his spot in the May 1995 issue. After working for 14 years in the civil and mechanical engineering departments, Andy left Ontario Hydro at Bruce Nuclear to purchase the company 36 years ago. It was a small business with a few employees that he expanded to 25-35 employees over the years. The company installs and services overhead doors and much more within a 100-km radius from their St. Mary’s base. Now 71 years old, Andy still likes working, though he says he has gotten better at delegating. Agriculture is still about 40 per cent of the business for Easy Lift Doors, and Andy is proud to support farms in the area. He has been both a keen reader and a proud supporter of the Rural Voice for over three decades!
Slumskie Bros. Contracting: Tom Slumskie was another contractor listed in the 1995 issue. Now with 45 years of experience, he says he stays active so that he won’t get rusty. Growing up on a century farm near Dobbinton, Tom says that he and his brother Richard’s goal was to work for five years and then get full-time into farming. But they stayed in construction, doing grain bins, steel buildings, bunk silos and more, and they have been a part of the transition of Grey and Bruce County’s cattle country to cash crops over the last decades.
Among other structures, they erected Westeel grain bins. When they started, farmers weren’t even growing soybeans up in Bruce County, Tom reflects. They started putting up bins for Maxwells in the early 1980s, then Sharedon Farms, Five Star Seeds, Young’s elevators and Craig Trelford in the last 20 years. While the Slumskie Bros didn’t want to compete to put up larger commercial grain storages with big crews and big hydraulics, they nonetheless started these farms with their first Westeel bins. The Slumkie Bros still do quite a lot of business, especially with Amish farmers in the area. “Their word is good, and they are good stewards of the land,” says Tom.
Tom still gets lots of calls about used bins and what they are worth. “I guess I picked up some know-how over the years,” he says. “I also picked up some tendonitis,” he laughs, as well as a De Dell Seeds non-GMO corn dealership.
Over the years, all their kids took a swing at working in construction with Slumskie Bros, says Tom. They never had an injury on site, and they still have all their fingers, though they had their fair share of scares like the rest of the industry. “Not everyone in the construction business gets to grow old,” says Tom. He is grateful for the community and that he’s been around to see his customers and his family grow.
Calhoun Super Structures: Another company listed in the 1995 issue was just a small, young business at the time. Now a household name, Calhoun celebrated its 30-year anniversary in 2022.
Farmers needed cost-effective storage that was easy to build and the Calhoun’s started by buying enough pipe and fabric for three buildings, reflects Leonard Calhoun. “We put one up and didn’t know what we were going to do with the rest of the pipe,” he laughs. But soon many people realized they had stumbled onto something that would work for local farmers. What began as a 30-by-70-foot building, quickly moved towards a 40-by-100-foot structure. Leonard and his two sons, Sean and Jeremy, admitted that they didn’t sleep that well when the wind blew, worried how the structures would hold up.
Now they don’t worry about them anymore. With an in-house engineering team, Calhoun’s buildings have proven their reliability and longevity as they pushed the buildings larger than Leonard ever thought possible. They now routinely build structures up to 250 feet wide and for many agricultural and other uses. They have two manufacturing facilities in Goderich and Markdale, with their head office still in Tara, employing 70 people from the Grey-Bruce-Huron communities, and internationally.
Britespan: 1995 marked the year that local dairy farmers Ben and Jenny Hogervorst became distributors for Cover All Building Systems from Saskatchewan. When the company went into receivership in 2010, the Hogervorsts teamed up with Robert Stute of Wingham, the owner of Maitland Welding & Machining, to establish Britespan Building Systems. Proudly manufactured in Canada and deeply rooted in the Wingham community, Britespan buildings are now being constructed across North America and beyond. Farmers appreciate the natural light, ventilation, and durability these buildings offer. Over the years, Britespan has also grown significantly, providing valuable job opportunities in the area.
The Bollingers: Keith Roulston had written a lovely piece, “Baking up a success” about Paul and Marianne Bollinger, a Swiss couple that moved to the Dungannon area and started selling European bread at local farmers markets. We caught up with Marianne, who says that after that article, Paul got in a serious accident and broke both his legs, so Marianne had to scale down breadmaking, though she continued on the Goderich farmers market for 10 years in total. She still bakes bread, but not for sale.
When the K2 Wind project came to the neighbourhood, they sold the farm and moved to a property in Wawanosh. Paul went on to join the municipal council. At the new property, the couple started planting trees in earnest - about 10,000 trees over the past 13 years, Marianne estimates. The Conservation Authority planted many of them, but she remembers a spring that she and Paul planted 2,500 just by themselves. Paul grows trees from seed and continues to plant a few hundred each year; they hosted the local Woodlot Association several years back and love to host their grandchildren and now, great-grandchildren. She laughs at how these past 30 years passed so quickly.
Ken Furlong: The recipient of the prestigious Tommy Cooper award in 1995 was Ken Furlong. President of the Grey Federation of Agriculture at the time, Ken had also written an excellent column for the Federation’s newsletter that month. Just by reading, you could tell Ken had a good head and a fiery spirit, and when the Rural Voice caught up with him, it was clear that hadn’t changed. I have a suspicion we will hear more from Ken about his time advocating for farmers in the 1980s for the next issue. “Push came to shove,” he says, “and we shoved really hard.”
Ken had been a part of the 4th class of the Advanced Agricultural Leadership Program (AALP) and had been at the table to solve the issues between cream and fluid milk in the dairy quota system. He was honoured to receive the Tommy Cooper award. Tommy Cooper had been a highly influential Ag Rep for Grey County from 1920-1959 and the award is still presented to this day.
Gisele Ireland: Thirty years ago, the columnists were quite different than today. Gisele Ireland was writing a monthly humour column for the Rural Voice, about her life on the farm near Teeswater.
She had moved to the Teeswater area with her family in 1963, originally from Germany, as Gisele Manjin. She first met her husband Brian, a fourth generation farmer, when he came over to her family’s farm to teach them how to “murder” and process their chickens. They married when she was 19 and he was 20, and she appreciated his family and the community that taught her how to fit in and adjust to a new country. She and Brian went through the hard times of the 1980s and on to raising pigs, then beef cows, before they tried selling tractors. And they started Teeswater Agro Parts and it did well.
“Why didn’t we just start with this first?” Gisele had asked Brian, who by now was nicknamed Super Wrench, because he kept leaving wrenches in his coveralls, that Gisele would find the hard way in the washing machine.
She had read that the Rural Voice was looking for a gardening columnist and while she had no experience in that department, she asked the editor if she would consider a humour column. The rest was history; Gisele wrote for 25 years before she moved on to running a main street restaurant and store, First Cause Flowers, in town.
She reworked her columns into two books, Hog Wild and Bumps in your Coveralls. She put new material into a book called Brace Yourself, and also wrote a child’s book about her son and his dog, Charlie Munsey and Lonesome. She had actually started with a more serious book, The Farmer Takes a Wife, published in 1983, about mental health and what impacts current high interest rates were having on farm families. It was based on surveys with 680 participants, published with the University of Guelph funded by Health Canada.
We caught up with Gisele for this story through a phone call. While she had been an avid reader and prolific quilter, making quilts for all 12 of her grandchildren, she was disabled by a stroke four years ago, at the age of 76, which left her blind and with difficulties on one side. While she can’t write like she used to, she still has the keen sense of humour that helped Rural Voice readers along over the years. She says she got positive feedback from the community, saying they got a chuckle out of her columns because they were such relatable experiences on the farm and between spouses.
“Everything eventually comes to an end, nothing is forever,” says Gisele, “and I’m sure God has something else in store for me.” On May 1, Gisele will be celebrating 60 years with Brian, who she calls Super Wrench to this day.
Dave Gordon: Before Scott, we had Kevin Hachler’s marketing column and before that, and for a long time, it was Dave Gordon, a corn merchandiser for London Agricultural Commodities (LAC) who worked there from 1985 until he retired a few years back. Dave has since moved to Victoria, B.C .to be closer to his children and grandchildren. He is enjoying retirement and stepping away from the hustle and bustle of marketing; he says he even got off his blood pressure medication a few years back!
Dave began writing for the Rural Voice in the late 1980s after Keith Roulston reached out to him, and he followed the ups and downs of markets each month until 2012. He remembers writing the columns by hand, often the night before deadline and then having someone at work type up his column and fax it into the office for publication. He says the markets gave him plenty to write about over the years, though - like today - the markets would often change before his column got into readers’ mailboxes. ◊