I was looking out my window recently, as the farmer who rents the rest of our 150-acre parcel was planting corn with a huge tractor pulling a monster corn planter. As we approach the 50th anniversary of our purchase of this house this summer, I couldn’t help reflecting on how much things have changed.
Summer 1975 was quite a time for our family. Our son was born that June and because he cried a lot, and we had a small house in town with two bedrooms and his two sisters already occupying the second bedroom, space was limited. We had to find something bigger. Being a country boy, I wanted a house in the country. We found this place and bought it mid-summer.
I had recently helped to start the Blyth Festival Theatre and it was in its first season. Before we left town, Angie Gei, the only woman in the company at the time, delivered a gift from the actors to my wife and our son. As if that wasn’t enough, we also began The Rural Voice that June.
Anyway, back to farming comparisons. We bought a four-acre property subdivided from the original 150-acre farm. The rest of the farm was owned by the farmer across the road who also owned the 100-acre farm to our east. The boundary line between these two farms had mostly been erased except for a couple of big maple trees.
The farmer planted the usual crops for that time: white beans, corn (for silage for his beef cattle) and wheat. He still worked the farm traditionally, plowing in the fall, cultivating until the soil was fine in the spring. As we were downhill, we received a layer of rich top soil on a couple of rainy springs.
The farmer built a log cabin where the Blyth Creek flowed through the property and added trout in a pond he dug. He became fascinated with raising trout and eventually bought a farm near Teeswater with a spring-fed pond where he could expand. He moved there.
Meanwhile he rented the parcel to a large cash-cropper that farmed in the area. This brought the changes I witnessed out the window. Not only did the equipment get bigger — our neighbour had planted corn with a four-row corn planter — but the renter introduced soil conservation methods, so we don’t have topsoil floating down the hill to our property. He grows soybeans, corn and (sometimes) wheat. He also fertilizes the corn with biosolids.
Our neighbours have also changed. We’ve lost the last two dairy farms nearby as the owners got older. We now have a large chicken barn in one direction, and a large hog barn in another. Mostly, it’s cash crops with a few beef farms.
In last month’s issue of The Rural Voice I saw that the average price for farmland in our area was $33,000 an acre— that is more than we bought our house and whole property for so many years ago. Of course, we’ve been improving our house many times over during our stay so its value is higher.
We’ve survived many changes over the years. There was the high interest rate crisis in the 1980s that mildly affected us because we had a mortgage at the time. Our neighbours with cattle were hit by the BSE crisis in 2003. With Anne Chislett, I turned these rural issues into plays for the Blyth Festival: Another Season’s Promise and Another Season’s Harvest.
There was the panic when Canadian Agra, based in Blyth at that time, began buying farmland for European investors.
One thing I’ve noticed over that 50 years is that far fewer sons and daughters of farmers want to be farmers. Many of the young farmers who took over the family farm 50 years ago are still farming.
Producing food is one of the greatest jobs we can do, so I hope young farmers will continue, and we’ll see what the next 50 years brings. ◊