This spring my children are swinging by the farm with more suggestions than usual about what I should do with the land and buildings. My wife just shrugs and says, “You’re pushing 70 and wheezing and nature abhors a vacuum. If they want to do something with the place maybe you should hear them out.”
I’ve heard them out and it scares me. They have plans for shitake and oyster mushroom logs in the woods, greenhouse greens, heritage chickens in the orchard, ramped up sheep production and Airbnb farm vacations.
One of them wants me to take the topsoil off my garden and put in a woodworking shop for making spoons. My first impulse is to shoo them all out the door and leave me alone but the part of my brain I like the best says one of these ideas might keep me engaged and useful for another decade. So I’m hearing them out.
This summer the Blyth Festival in Southern Ontario is mounting The Team on the Hill, a play I wrote about a farm family wrestling with the future of their little farm during the summer of 1978. I picked that particular year because soybeans had just come out as a major crop in our neighbourhood and they ended up changing everything I knew about farming. Kids my age were coming back from agricultural college and trying to persuade their fathers to try this brand new miracle crop of Maple Arrow beans that would grow in a colder climate, sit on the field for all of 10 weeks and sell for eight dollars a bushel, which was four times the price of a bushel of wheat. The fathers were very skeptical about a plant that was supposed to fix nitrogen out of the air. One of them said testily, “If you can pull nitrogen out of the air why am I paying ten dollars a bag for it at the Co-op?”
But the kids must have made a good case for soybeans because the acreage planted went from zero to 20 per cent of the township in about five seasons. The young guys then sold the cattle, ripped out the fencerows and took out scary lines of credit to finance the massive machines needed to switch over to a corn soy rotation. The old guys watched in fear and wonderment as their farms were transformed, not quite sure if this was all going to work out.
For quite a few years it didn’t. Interest rates spiked in 1979 and by 1981 thousands of farm families across the country had sold out. The average farm size doubled and then doubled again. When I moved north 30 miles to buy this farm that same summer of 1978 there were thirteen farm families on my concession road. Today there is only one and it crops more than five thousand acres.
Old Jake the patriarch of that family would come around in mid-July every year to square bale my little field with his Massey 165 and an International baler, just like it was 1965, while his sons whizzed by on the highway in Death Star-sized sprayers, off to fight the soybean aphid. Jake might do some recreational plowing for the boys in the fall but he never got used to the big machines. “They scare the crap out of me!” he declared. He was far more comfortable running his lawn mower or rototilling the potato patch than steering a combine.
It was Jake who pointed out to me then that the kids are here to replace us and that you just have to step back and start taking longer naps on the porch. I think of him today as I watch my own kids argue with each other at the supper table over which strain of mushroom is most likely to sweep the organic market. They’re even fighting over who gets my old truck.
“Never mind the truck,” my wife scolded them. “I promised your father that he would be buried in it.”
Why anyone would want this particular farm escapes me. We have forty acres of glacial till mixed with license plates and sheep skulls and the last family to make a living on it expired in the 1920s. But if the kids can think of a way to keep it useful and turn it into a place where my grandchildren can grow tall in the sun I will do my level best to cooperate.