VEGREVILLE, Alta. – Grant Durie doesn’t answer the doorbell at his farm home; instead he comes out of his workshop to greet a visitor.
“I don’t make my living in the house,” he says with a smile.
Like most farmers this fall, he was eager to get out to the fields but the crop still had too much moisture to cut. However, after two years of drought in this central Alberta area, he’ll take wet weather over dry.
This year he was looking at harvesting 3,000 acres of wheat, barley and canola. Usually he’d have peas, too, but he wanted a break this year.
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A major part of that break came 10 months ago when he sold his herd of 220 Black Angus cattle. BSE was not the only reason; he and his wife Debbie had been talking it over for a couple of years.
Someone had to be on the farm all the time to look after the animals and the family had to commit four weeks a year to attend shows.
“We were doing very well with cattle but a good businessman can separate head from heart and leave when the leaving is good.”
Durie said in the three months after the dispersal sale he spent more time with his family than he’d done in the previous three years. Now he can follow his daughters’ interests in soccer or swimming, while his wife continues to work part time as a nurse.
Grant recites a saying on a plaque his wife has: “A house is made with walls and beams; a home is built with love and dreams.”
Durie is the third generation of his family on this farm. He and Debbie met at the University of Alberta and were headed to Hawaii where Grant had a job with the pineapple company Dole. Then his father got sick and Grant had to decide whether to return home or let go of the family farm. The Duries bought the farm – it’s his parents’ pension, Grant said – and his father Jim still helps out 11 years later.
Grant has not just been a farmer. He has also worked as a loans officer for the provincial crop insurance agency, as a financial consultant for Alberta Agriculture and as an instructor with Lakeland College.
“I thrive on challenge and I’ve had to rein myself in.”
He also was president and still is a director of the Vegreville Agricultural Society and works with the United Farmers of Alberta. Debbie helps out at their daughters’ school.
“As a volunteer you don’t do it for the recognition but so your kids have a fair to go to and they have a community.”
The Duries have won recognition. In 1993 they won the Northlands Farmfair family of the year, followed in 1999 by the Veg-reville Chamber of Comm-erce farm family of the year. In 2003 they were one of the nominees for Alberta’s outstanding young farmer.
Durie said it will be up to his daughters whether they want to go farming, but added that anyone who gets started in agriculture today either has to inherit the farm or marry it.
He said Alberta Agriculture once followed a farmer around for a year and found he worked almost double an average urban resident’s work week. Farmers eventually burn out, he added, and questioned why people would work a full-time job off the farm to keep a multimillion dollar operation going.
When asked how he stays optimistic as a farmer, he replied that it’s no different than any other industry.
“There’s days you enjoy yourself and other days you have to say, ‘I like my job, I like my job.’ “
Durie is not slowing down. He is studying to get his real estate appraisal certification and then he may work for a bank.
“Ten years from now, who knows what life will deal us and whether we’ll be on the farm? You do what’s best for the family, not out of tradition or guilt.”
