JUSTICE, Man. — Leigh was in her garden when the reality of her situation became overwhelming.
“I had a little crisis,” said Leigh, who is a schoolteacher now but in 2000 was a stay-at-home mom whose youngest child had just begun a full day of school.
“When Mike hit Grade 1, I had quite the emotional meltdown. I just didn’t know what to do with myself.”
Leigh and Dan Mazier have a 1,000 acre crop farm northeast of Brandon. They share cropping equipment with Dan’s brother, David, who lives down the road and also owns 1,000 acres.
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Farming can be a busy life, but not busy enough for them, especially with their restricted acreage. That’s why Leigh had her crisis. Both Dan and Leigh need to be busy to be happy, even if they have sometimes over-stretched themselves and been forced to pull back a bit.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen in the growing season,” said Dan, who has just become Keystone Agricultural Producers president and knows it can be a demanding role. He realizes it will affect Leigh too, with him being called away frequently.
“It’s that whole other side of the relationship. When you take on the presidency, your whole family’s buying into it.”
Taking on extra work today makes sense. Both of their children have moved away and they like to keep busy. Leigh teaches kindergarten to Grade 7 at the Deerboine Colony about 40 minutes away and teaches English as a second language in Brandon.
Dan is taking over at KAP after being vice-president for four years, following six years as a school trustee and previous local KAP work.
The couple wasn’t planning to follow the farming life. Leigh is the daughter of a railroad worker and her family is dominated by railway work. Dan got an agriculture diploma in 1985, then went to work at Brandon’s Simplot (now Koch) fertilizer plant for 17 years.
The two met in high school and married in 1985, settling in Brandon. Leigh first was a pool supervisor for the city, then became the local Red Cross branch manager.
Even then the two kept themselves busy. Dan went from being on student council in high school to class president of his ag diploma class to shop steward at Simplot.
Leigh got busy with Red Cross management, including dealing with an influx of northern people displaced by the massive fires of 1989 two months after she got the job.
“That’s called learning your job very fast,” she joked.
Dan was helping his father on the farm, where Dan had grown up, and by the late 1990s was thinking of getting more involved. He and Leigh had already built a house there.
Leigh had left her job after her second maternity leave. After having her daughter Hannah, work was still possible. But things got crazy after Mike arrived.
“I’d have to be on the road for a nine o’clock meeting in Winnipeg and my day care wouldn’t take them yet and when Dan got home after a midnight shift he certainly didn’t want to be taking care of two little ones,” said Leigh.
“It just wasn’t working, so we made the big decision for me to be a stay-at-home mom.”
But once both kids were in school and didn’t need her in the day, she felt directionless, making her think a lot about life.
“Dan said to me: ‘You always wanted to go to school to get a degree. Why don’t you go to school?”
In six years she got her teaching de-gree from Brandon University and had a third career.
Dan and his brother David have worked together co-operatively for many years now, sorting through the complications of intertwined farms. They’re stuck with small land bases, so they have shared equipment and work together to make everything efficient.
Both men are in their 50s but have already begun succession planning with Meyers Norris Penny, where Dan once worked part-time. The two brothers try to make sure each of them feels their interactions are fair.
“If people think they’re being shafted, they aren’t going to want to work together,” said Dan.
“If you want to work together, you’ll find a way.”
Being president of KAP will be de-manding, but Dan admits having a long admiration for the kinds of men he used to see leading the farm community.
In the mid-1990s, his neighbour Murray dragged him to a KAP meeting in Virden and he saw people like farm leader Owen McAuley informing farmers about complicated legislative and regulatory matters that would affect their farms.
“I was just in awe of what they knew. I didn’t know why they were doing it, but there was someone there telling us the story.”
So both Leigh and Dan are OK with being busy, even if Leigh is just getting used to the extra expectations of being the KAP president’s spouse.
Dan says he’s trying to make sure he can balance family, farm and KAP, which is why he’s hoping for an open spring free of flooding.
