Doug Chorney is immersed in the day-to-day drudgery of dealing with myriad farmer problems. From hog industry crises to flooding disasters to crop insurance wrangling to the Lake Winnipeg issue, the president of Keystone Agricultural Producers grapples with the problems besetting agriculture in Manitoba.
Yet he always seems bright and cheery, and even with the worst problems, he seems to be finding solutions.
“I have alter egos,” he joked.
“People often think I’m very optimistic, but the people closest to me say that I’m conservative and worry a lot and plan too far ahead.”
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Chorney’s immediate reaction to problems seems to be a quick search for pragmatic solutions, which might be due to his aborted career as an engineer and the many years he spent off the farm.
Chorney left the farm and got a degree in agricultural engineering, hoping to spend his career designing farming and other machinery.
He got sidetracked, however, and spent years in the aerospace industry, jetting around North American visiting aerospace manufacturers and literally having a high-flying life.
Many people may have thought Chorney had an ideal career, but then his daughter, Erin, was born and a lot of lingering concerns came to the fore. He didn’t like being away from home all the time on business trips.
He didn’t want to see his wife, Michelle, and new daughter only sporadically, whenever he got back to Winnipeg.
And he realized the corporate life wasn’t ideal for him.
“You have all those dynamics in an office environment, the hierarchies and senior management telling you how to do things,” said Chorney.
“After I’d been away for a while, I realized it wasn’t so bad back at the farm.”
So he quit his aerospace career and went back to the family farm. He was able to jointly raise his daughter, something he appreciates now that she is an adult.
And being on the farm allows him to indulge his conservative, risk-averse nature.
“When one light bulb burns out in our house, I say, ‘OK, we need to get a case of them,’ ” said Chorney.
He tends to plan his farm production and marketing well in advance and has lots of spare parts sitting in his shed, waiting for future breakdowns.
“Maybe that makes me a little more comfortable about the future,” said Chorney.
“I think forward planning helps you to be a little more optimistic.”
That’s one reason his day-to-day duties dealing with serious farmer problems don’t get him down or make him seem pessimistic. When he sees problems, he starts thinking of ways to re-engineer a system or situation to work better.
Dealing with problems is a way to make the future better.
“As a farmer, we face a fair bit of adversity, but if you approach every day as if you were going to fail, you’re going to fail,” said Chorney.
He is optimistic about farming’s future and hopes the string of farm problems people like him have to deal with don’t discourage young people from choosing farming as a career.
“If we’re going to keep young people engaged and enthused about our industry, we can’t be too negative,” said Chorney.
After all, even if life on the farm can be challenging, it can be a lot less fulfilling off the farm, as he found out from his engineering career.
