MOOSE JAW, Sask. – They’ve come a long way in five years.
From starting out to outstanding, Kelvin and Shelley Meadows have discovered that determination and dreams can pay off in recognition.
This week, Saskatchewan’s 1998 outstanding young farmers are in Toronto with daughter Kirstin, 9, and son Shae, 7. A family holiday will follow the national outstanding young farmers competition at the Royal Winter Fair.
“We’re both a little apprehensive about the interview (with the judges),” Shelley Meadows said before leaving. “But we’re going to go and have a great time. Shae’s been counting down since day 62.”
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The Meadows are seed growers who farm near Buffalo Pound Lake north of Moose Jaw. They are the third generation of Shelley’s family to work the land.
“We always knew we wanted to farm. It was tough to decide how to do it,” said Shelley, who speaks for the couple on a warm October afternoon. Kelvin is taking advantage of the weather to do some field work.
They were involved with the family seed cleaning plant, Northfork Seeds, for about five years before plunging in full time. They lived at the homestead about 16 kilometres away from where they are now while Kelvin worked at AgPro Grain and Shelley worked at Scotiabank.
Her work at the bank helped as they ventured into farming when her father and brother bowed out. There was equipment and land to purchase.
“I knew what was required, the numbers they needed,” she said.
Today, they own and rent about 2,000 acres, which are continuously cropped to durum, prairie spring wheat, extra strong wheat, barley, canola, canaryseed, chickpeas, silage peas, grass seed, lentils, yellow peas and soybeans.
An experiment last summer included white-flowered canola. Shelley said the breeders are hoping the white flower will repel more heat, making the plant less susceptible to heat blast.
“It yielded similar to the yellow canola,” she said. “It had very high oil content. That may have its own bonus.”
As seed growers, the Meadows do a lot of what Kelvin calls not-for-profit research.
“We co-ordinate with a lot of the chemical companies, with a lot of the seed companies, doing plot production tests on different forms of treatment or different varieties of grain that haven’t been registered yet or they’re trying to push through for registration,” he explained when they were honored in June with their regional award. “We don’t get reimbursed for it, but it gives us a chance to see the technology up close first-hand ourselves and it also allows us to pass that on to our customers and our neighbors.”
In 1992, the Meadows and Northfork Seeds were part of a western Canadian group of seed growers and processors that formed Performance Seeds. They remain active on the board of this organization, which works to obtain rights to new varieties.
Northfork Seeds, which employs five people from October through May, processes about 250,000 bushels of oilseeds, cereals, legumes, grass and spices each year. Most of the product comes from within a 100-kilometre radius.
“We export about five million pounds a year of canaryseed to Europe, the United States, Mexico and Japan,” Shelley said.
They clean it, bag it and load it on containers for Vancouver exporters.
“We sell to an exporter so we don’t take the marketing risk ourselves,” she said. “We just aren’t prepared for that.”
Yet, they prefer to market some other crops themselves.
“You put so much work into it, and then to turn around and hand it over to the wheat board … it just doesn’t work for us,” she said. “Every morning Kelvin’s checking DTN for prices. It’s your decision. You’re not always going to get the highest price. We know that.”
While many would consider their cleaning plant a diversification measure, Shelley said they were varied even before they took over the plant.
At one time they raised 300 pheasants for the wildlife federation for use as breeding stock or release in the wild. They’ve had pigs, chickens and geese and today have about 25 cattle. They take the screenings from their plant, have them pelletized and feed them to the cattle.
Their diversification efforts are one of the things they hope the judges of the outstanding young farmer program will notice.
Besides interviews with the nominees, the judges use a point system to look at the progress of their agricultural career, soil, water and energy conservation practices, crop and livestock production history, financial and management practices, and contributions to community, province and nation.
“It will be a great experience and interesting to learn about all these different things,” Shelley said, referring to the diverse backgrounds of other nominees.
