STONEWALL, Man. – When they were living in downtown Winnipeg, neither George nor Shelley Matheson expected to end up on this pleasant mixed farm.
“He wasn’t a farmer when I met him, so that was unfair. But what could I do? I was in love,” jokes Shelley about George’s decision to buy his father’s farmland in 1982.
“I didn’t know I was going to become one either,” said George.
But Shelley, who grew up in nearby Stonewall as the daughter of a bank manager, was easily talked into it.
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“She loves it more than I do,” said George.
“I think it’s the house I’m attached to,” she said.
After 25 years here, it’s a place they wouldn’t leave. They make a living off only 630 acres, on which they grow crops and produce pigs and chickens.
While they may have left the city behind, the city has caught up to them. They are only a 10 minute drive from Winnipeg’s perimeter, and the area is filling up with commuters.
It’s the kind of situation that would give nightmares to many livestock producers these days, but the Mathesons have turned a liability into an asset. They manage their farm in a way that has almost eliminated frictions with neighbours over livestock odours, and they use proximity to the urban consumer as their competitive edge.
“Knowing that the end user of my products likes it means a lot to me,” said George.
The family has about 45 sows producing about 800 market hogs per year. Instead of an enclosed, water-based system, the Mathesons’ pigs spend their time out in the open or huddled in straw.
In 25 years of hog production George has faced only one complaint from a neighbour, and that was settled amicably.
The straw-based system means that the farm’s pigs make little of the stench typical of farms with lagoons.
The chickens are also raised in the sunlight. George had been researching alternative livestock systems on the internet two years ago when he came across American Joel Salatin’s Pasture Poultry Profits approach and decided he’d try it.
“I was looking for a different way to do agriculture,” he said.
The Salatin system puts the chickens into small, movable, unfloored coops. Every day the coops are shifted a few metres to fresh grass. The chickens quickly get used to trotting along for the daily move. The grass is supplemented with feed grains grown on the farm.
At about nine weeks the poultry are ready to be eaten. The chicken operation takes up about two acres of pastureland over a summer and produces about 1,000 chickens.
Both the pork and the chickens are sold to city consumers who come out to the farm. George has the animals processed locally and has freezers on the farm for the meat.
Shelley looks after the marketing, which she enjoys.
“It’s mostly word of mouth,” she said. Urban people like knowing where their food comes from, and they like to be able to see a real farm.
“People bring their kids and their dogs and run around,” Shelley said with a laugh.
The couple has four children. The eldest, Graeme, 19, is in the second year of a culinary arts course at Winnipeg’s Red River College. Madeline is in Grade 12 in Stonewall. Austin is in Grade 8 and Hannah in Grade 4.
Shelley still works one day per week in a dental office and the couple often attends farmers’ markets and special urban agricultural events. On this day the couple was getting ready to attend a Winnipeg meeting about the “100 mile diet,” which has become a popular idea in the city. This is the idea of trying to obtain all the food one eats from within 100 miles of where one lives.
Now, in their restored and expanded 111-year-old-home, the family is happy and relaxed with its lifestyle. But Shelley can still remember when the seven-day-a-week farm schedule was a shock to her.
“It was a huge adjustment. It was unbelievable,” said Shelley.
“I grew up in a family where you went camping every weekend, especially the long weekend in May, and you can’t be that flexible here. You can’t just leave the farm for a few days when you have livestock.”
George said he’s happy to be able to make a living producing livestock on the edge of Winnipeg, and happy he hasn’t had to fight with the commuters for ever-more-expensive land.
“I’ve tried to become more efficient rather than expanding,” said Matheson.
He knows it’s a small farm, but it’s profitable, and he may expand a little bit.
“I’ve always said I’m going to find that last 10 acres so that I can say that I farm a whole section,” he said with a chuckle.
