REABURN, Man. – Nothing seems to sever the roots that attach the Keens to their farm.
It isn’t like the four children haven’t seen anything else of the world, but three of them still live on the farm.
“I guess it doesn’t seem too bad,” said Martin, who had spent a busy morning weaning 40 calves.
Oldest daughter Sarah, 27, spent years at the University of Manitoba getting an agriculture degree.
She married Patrick, a Caisse Populaire agricultural loans manager, and they live on the farm today with their seven-week-old baby, Rayden.
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Jamie, 23, spent a few months on an Australian farm, seeing how agriculture is done in a warmer clime, and then returned to this farm northwest of Winnipeg to learn the business from his father.
Marci, 19, spends her summers at the farm, and attends the University of Manitoba full time during the school year, working on an agriculture diploma.
Only 25-year-old Kelli isn’t living on the farm for at least part of the year, and that’s because she’s working on a physiotherapy master’s degree in Winnipeg and working a job. But her boyfriend is a farmer, so she hasn’t gotten away from the business.
“We’re all pretty tied to the land, eh Dad?” Sarah said with a smile on a recent afternoon, sitting at their kitchen table cradling Rayden in her arms.
Mother Sandra says they have never tried to dissuade their children from leaving the farm if they find something better.
“They’ve all done something different, like Jamie going to Australia, so they don’t have to feel tied to the farm,” said Sandra, though she is pleased that the farm still draws them home.
Jamie said he can handle the northern winters, even last year’s brutal cold when his mother and father went south for their first winter vacation, and can’t think of anything else he’d want to do off the farm.
“I guess I’m committed now,” Jamie said with a grin.
“I decided I’d like to learn this like my dad did, through the ground and with your own hands. I’m pretty practical.”
The Keens raise 1,100 beef cattle and grow crops on their 4,800 acre farm, which Martin’s father established in 1942.
The operation started primarily as a dairy farm, and the family kept up the dairy business until 1996, when they sold their dairy cows and quota and invested the money in cropland and beef cattle.
Switch to beef
Martin said he got out of dairy because his children were young and the business’s staffing demands made beef and crop production seem easier to handle.
It also seemed like a better long-term investment.
“I’d rather have the land than the paper for the quota because some day the paper for the quota may not be worth anything,” he said.
The family grows canola, corn, wheat, oats and barley as well as hay. The corn is silaged for the cattle.
They keep about 385 cows – 300 Angus and 85 Limousin-cross. They keep their own calves for backgrounding and generally buy two batches of about 300 calves for backgrounding in the fall and in February-March.
They don’t like feeding the animals to slaughter weight because of a lack of large packers in the region, but sometimes do when calf prices are too low.
They can also sell their calves and bring in fewer animals if calf prices are high.
“Two years ago I couldn’t afford to feed them $5 barley, so we sold them, but this year barley’s about $2.50,” Martin said.
Sarah said one of the most enjoyable features on their farm in recent years has been the string of young Quebec farmers who have come to the Keen place to see what it’s like to farm in the wide open west.
“He couldn’t believe that there’s nobody out here, how you can see for miles and not see many neighbours,” she said about one of the farmers.
Martin said the young Quebeckers started coming to the farm because the father of one, a Swiss man, had worked on the Keen farm in 1984.
“They get an opportunity to run the big equipment and see how the season goes here,” Martin said.
“It’s a lot different than back home for them.”
Martin is a hard-working farmer who has trouble forgetting about all the demands of the farm, whether it’s with the cattle, the crops or the hired hands they occasionally need.
But Sandra said the trip to Nashville, Texas and Florida last year let Martin relax.
“He actually, really did forget about things back home. I couldn’t believe it,” Sandra said.
