On the Farm: Living in town helps create more of a work-life division for the Johansons than most producers experience
LAC DU BONNET, Man. — You can’t farm the land around here like you do the sprawling, grassy plains of most of Western Canada.
Here, where the prairies either run out or get started, depending upon which way you approach it, you need to farm what you farm and leave alone what isn’t meant for farming.
“It’s bits and pieces, here and there,” said Trevor Johanson, about the land scattered fields along the Winnipeg River on the edge of the Canadian Shield.
“It’s all over the place.”
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The family farms pieces of land on both sides of the Winnipeg River on Manitoba’s eastern edge, amongst rocks and trees. The land on the west side of the river often has open fields similar to much of the Prairies, but on the eastern side there isn’t much of a regular shape.
“We don’t have straight lines and straight roads and square fields,” said Jenneth, the full-time farmer in the family of five.
“We have more granite outcroppings and odd shaped fields.”
For the Johansons, that’s not a problem. They love the beautiful region and see the challenges as just an interesting part of their farming life. In fact, the family deliberately creates spaces around itself and its farming, including living on an acreage near the farm rather than on the family farmyard Jenneth lived on for some of her childhood.
The farmyard is only half a mile away from their house, but it’s enough to create more of a work-life division than most farmers experience.
“I actually prefer a bit of the disconnect,” said Jenneth, whose father, Cameron, started building this farm after his father moved the family farming operation from near Stead to Lac Du Bonet. He started out managing the family’s cow herd at the age of 14 and developed from there. The 1980s were hard in farming and the family moved off the farmyard to town, while Cameron built up the farmyard with grain storage and other farming structures.
“He never had a desire to move a house back onto that property,” said Jenneth.
Now the family runs a straight grain operation, growing mostly wheat, oats, fall rye, canola and soybeans.
There are lots of meetings in Jenneth’s life, and not just the usual farm business meetings. She is a director with both the Manitoba and prairie oat growers associations and an active participant in industry events.
Just like being in the unusual position of being the main farm operator while her husband works an off-farm job, her involvement in grain farming organizations makes her a relatively rare creature, but a happy one.
“I always questioned why things were the way they were,” she said of herself as a youth.
“I haven’t lost that characteristic.”
Trevor is similarly unflappable about being in the farm-spouse role more typically held by the wife in the family.
“I never had any intentions of being a farmer,” said Trevor, who grew up on a farm at Langruth, Man., and today works as a correctional officer.
“And yet, I ended up marrying a farmer.”
Trevor helps on the farm during the busy seasons, with his farm youth providing him with valuable experience, but he still works his regular off-farm job at those times and leaves the management to Jenneth.
Jenneth tries to keep farm meetings to the farmyard so the family has some space from the business of farming.
“The house is the family place and the farmyard is the business establishment,” said Jenneth.
Their three children — Wyndham, 11; William, 9; Rebekah, 5 — also have a separation to deal with. In order to get day-care spaces, they have to attend school in Pinawa, so they commute to and from school every day.
Jenneth and Trevor don’t know if any of their children will want to farm. They aren’t pushing it and they aren’t discouraging it. Jenneth is farming because the opportunity arose for her, so maybe that will happen with one of theirs if that’s what they want.
“When your heart is in something you end up coming out ahead,” said Jenneth.
That’s how farming feels to her. She’s doing something she wants to do.
“I absolutely love it,” said Jenneth.
“Every year has new challenges to overcome. Every year has different kinds of rewards. I had the opportunity. Lots don’t. And I had the drive and the ambition to try to make a go of it, even if there was a chance I could fail.”
