MINNEDOSA, Man. – Thirteen farms, three research stations and two exams, all in four days. To make it through this summer tour, you’d have to have the stamina of . . . an aggie.
More than 80 agriculture diploma students from the University of Manitoba travelled through the interlake, southern, central and western regions of the province recently to check out agriculture in action.
It’s a marathon that the school of agriculture has been running for several decades, said director Don Flaten. It isn’t cheap. The trip costs around $12,000 to put on, plus a lot of staff and volunteer time, but he said it’s worth it.
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“Our students are very practical thinkers. What they see, they’ll remember and appreciate probably a lot more than what they hear in a lecture.”
Mary Ida Herbert was on the tour more than 10 years ago, and said she can still name most of the farms she saw.
The tour “stands out better than soils class does,” she told this year’s crop of students, who stopped at the dairy farm she runs near Minnedosa with husband and fellow diploma graduate Mark Donohoe.
Herbert and Donohoe told the students how they started their farm a few years after they graduated, faced various financial challenges, but also found the rewards of successfully running their own operation.
Student Sheldon Toews of Niverville took a week off from his summer job at a fertilizer and chemical company in Innisfail, Alta., to come on the tour. He liked seeing first-hand a pregnant mare’s urine operation near Lundar.
“A lot of the bad publicity that they’ve gotten from the animal rights groups, to go there and see it, you sort of know that (the activists) don’t have it right,” he said.
Judy Fraser of Treherne, another student, said she knows about potato and grain farming from experience. But the visit to an organic strawberry farm near Teulon showed her something different. Owners Betty Kehler and Bob Pizey rely on a fertilizer mix of two parts turkey manure to one part cow manure and a flock of 100 geese provide pest control.
