MONT NEBO, Sask. – A bronze tree limb cast in Jim Jansen’s homemade foundry cools while he plants trees on his quarter section farm near Mont Nebo, Sask.
Jansen likes the long-term satisfaction he gets out of planting trees and pouring bronze sculptures.
“Not that I want to be known 10,000 years from now as the guy who did a certain thing, but the artwork that I make may very well still be here,” he said. Jansen trained as an engineering technologist and built his own foundry.
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“It’s kind of nice to make something that you know has the ability to last.… A forest will stay there forever too.
“We’re trying to do no harm. With these trees, we’re trying to add more oxygen to the air. We’re trying to improve things.”
Jansen walks through his pasture with a handful of young seedlings and a homemade tree digger.
He paces off four strides and pushes and twists the spade down and pulls up a plug of soft sandy soil. A white spruce seedling fills the new hole.
He packs the soil around the seedling with the heel of his steel-toed boot. He repeats the routine many times during the day.
“Fuel prices were getting higher and higher and reached what we thought was the cutoff for making sense, so we started putting the fields into trees instead of wasting fuel on them,” he said.
Now the fields are largely covered, he said.
For the past six years, Jansen has received trees from SaskPower’s Shand greenhouse. This year, he planted five acres with white spruce and Siberian larch.
Jansen, along with his wife and fellow artist, Debbie, moved their young family here in 1979.
The land was partially cleared of pine trees and contained weedy hay pastures.
Growing ryegrass helped get rid of the weeds, with alfalfa planted in the sandy soil to grow seed. That led to raising bees in 1980.
After 14 years of producing alfalfa seed, the price of bees started to decline while fuel prices edged higher.
By 1993, he had started the foundry, one of three bronze foundries operating in Saskatchewan.
One of his pieces, a large bronze blacksmith swinging his hammer, stands outside Saskatoon’s main public library.
His hockey goalie, entitled The Big Save, is on display in the Art Hauser Centre in Prince Albert, Sask.
He said people like him who want to live in the country and don’t farm have to find their own ways to support the rural lifestyle.
“If you are having to leave farming and you’re trying to pick something else to do, use your imagination because there’s lots of alternatives.
“Pick something that requires enough skill, determination and talent that you’re going to be the only one in your area doing it. Then you’ll get enough business to make a living,” he said.
Jansen believes farmers should be paid to do what’s best for their land.
“If I stuck enough chemicals in and enough fertilizer, I could grow canola here, but it would certainly not be what’s best for the land. It wouldn’t make me any money and just wouldn’t make any sense,” he said.
“This land does grow good evergreen trees and it doesn’t grow good crops. In the end, that’s what it should be growing so we thought we would put it back into evergreens and let somebody in the future log it.
“Hopefully selectively log it and just continue planting and it can be a productive piece of land instead of just a costly waste of resources,” Jansen said.
