Laird, Sask. – In 2002, Kalissa Regier was eking out a living playing piano, singing in a band and working as a waitress in and around Victoria.
In 2003, she moved back to the family farm at Laird and started a new life as an organic hemp grower.
By 2007, she was flying around the world, attending conferences in
Africa, Mexico, the West Indies and Chile, as the youth vice-president
of the National Farmers Union.
Regier says she’s as surprised as anybody about the dramatic changes in her life.
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“A lot of times this past year I’ve had to pinch myself,” she said with a laugh while having a cup of coffee at her kitchen table.
While she had always helped out around the farm while growing up, she never saw herself becoming a farmer, let alone a spokesperson for farmers at international events.
“In my mind I was going to be an urbanite – a nice job in the city, a fancy house, that kind of thing,” she recalled. “But I guess people change.”
After high school, Regier studied horticulture for two years at the University of Saskatchewan, with thoughts of becoming a landscape architect, or maybe setting up a small vegetable business.
Things didn’t work out so she moved west to study music at Selkirk College in the Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia, majoring in vocal performance. After two years of study, she found her way to Victoria, scraping out a hand-to-mouth existence off her musical and waitressing skills.
“At one point music was a career goal, but it didn’t pan out,” she said. “It’s a tough industry to get into and make a decent living.”
Having said that, she still enjoys performing, playing and singing jazz standards at events in the area.
During her years in B.C., the farm was never far from Regier’s mind, and she often found herself talking with friends about issues involving the environment, food production and corporate control of the food industry.
She wasn’t interested in politics or farm issues growing up, but that was about to change.
“All of a sudden it dawned on me that I had this unique opportunity, that most people don’t, to come back here and try to do something about it,” she said. “That was my biggest instigator in coming back.”
She wanted to do something different, and after looking at the options and penciling out costs and revenues, decided to plant organic hemp as her first crop, on land rented from a neighbour across the road.
She now plants 150 to 200 acres of hemp each year, rotating it among two or three plots on the 1,400 acre family farm, called Hestia Farm Corp., after the Greek goddess of the hearth and home, run by her father Ted and mother Elaine.
The variety of hemp she plants, called Crag, grows to a height of 2.5 metres and produces a large seed that processors prefer.
Yields have varied widely, but anything around 800 to 1,100 pounds an acre is considered pretty good. The price of organic hemp is around 85 cents a pound, well above the non-organic price of around 40 cents.
The top four or five feet is cut off during harvest; the remainder is fibre, a versatile product that can be used to produce a variety of products, from rope to animal bedding.
Unfortunately, there are no local processors and the fibre is baled and stored on the farm.
Regier said she intends to continue producing hemp, which prices out better than most other crops.
“I’m surprised more farmers don’t grow it,” she said.
For some, it may be the risk associated with growing something unfamiliar, while others may be put off by the fact a licence from Health Canada is required to grow it.
“It seemed like a lot of hassle the first year, but you get used to it,” she said. “It’s just a few forms to fill out.”
Ironically, it was Regier’s musical abilities, not her farming skills, that led to her current position with the NFU.
At the 2006 national NFU convention in Saskatoon, Regier, whose parents had been members for several years, was invited to perform some of her jazz standards at the banquet.
Afterward, she was cornered by a number of members and, much to her surprise, asked if she was interested in becoming youth vice-president.
“I said, ‘I’m not sure what that entails, but sure’,” she recalls with a laugh. “I didn’t know what the NFU was a few years earlier. I had no idea what I was getting into.”
Her role as youth vice-president is to ensure the organization includes the perspective of young and beginning farmers as it addresses farm and rural issues.
She enjoys dealing with international issues, but she has also been focused on trying to create a strong network of young farmers across Canada who can bring forward new ideas and new ways of doing things.
“We’re a very fortunate generation,” she said.
“Our parents worked hard for us to be in this position, with so many options and alternatives. We have the luxury of being able to look at things differently, and we have to take advantage of that.”
She doesn’t know yet whether her long-term future will be as a farmer, but for now she’s committed to the farm and the NFU.
“Being involved in the NFU has brought me closer to the farm,” she said.
“It’s made me realize the importance of what I’m doing.”
