MAYERTHORPE, Alta. – The Hagmans were given the choice of relocating from their home in Vancouver to Toronto, New York or Brussels.
So they picked Mayerthorpe.
“I told them I had the urgent desire to chop wood,” said Earl Hagman about how he informed his company he was quitting. Earl, a marketing manager for a computerized typesetting company, and Deb, a fellow marketer, walked away from the big city pleasures in 1979 and bought a farm near the northern Alberta community where Earl had grown up.
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“The day I finished high school I ran out of here in a hurry,” he said.
The couple returned to a tiny cabin, no running water, an outhouse and the wholesome prairie environment.
“The idea was to live frugal and save for a nice house,” said Deb in the family’s spacious, light-filled farmhouse. “It took a little longer than we thought it would.”
Sixteen years, in fact.
For years Deb and Earl lived cheaply, but things changed when the stork popped by.
“The day I had my daughter was the day we got running water and moved into a mobile home,” said Deb about her 12-year-old daughter.
The little cabin lies in the shade of the Hagman house now, but it’s not just a rustic relic slowly collapsing back into the soil. Groups of hunters from Alberta and across North America regularly arrive at the Hagman place for a few days of hunting.
The 800 wild boars on the farm provide lots of meat animals but also targets for bow hunters. Hunters live out of the cabin and hunt specially selected boars – big, mean looking ones – on wild land set aside for them.
The wild boars live in a swampy area across from the Hagman house and can be seen most days snuffling through straw piles, splooshing through ponds and trotting in large groups on upland areas, enrapt by their private porcine reveries.
Began in cattle
Livestock isn’t new to the Hagmans. When they moved to the farm they bought a herd of 40 cows and have been cattle producers ever since. They now have about 300 cows.
But wild boars, which they’ve raised for six years, are a livestock that has neatly tied in all of Deb and Earl’s marketing skills. It makes their time in Vancouver seem like a sensible lead-in to being a successful 1990s farm family.
Unlike the beef industry, which is huge, well established and has an existing complex network the producer can rely on, the wild boar industry is relatively small and producers have to do most of the marketing themselves, said Earl.
Most producers can grow a wild boar, but they aren’t as good at getting it slaughtered, processed, sold and transported. For the Hagmans, who both have international marketing experience, getting the boar meat from the Canadian prairies to Japanese consumers isn’t a frightening prospect – they just send Deb.
“I love it,” she said about her travels to sell Japanese supermarkets on prairie boar products. Before they added wild boars to the farm, Deb worked on economic development for local communities, but now she’s able to work on the economic development of her own farm.
Deb is excited about her new marketing initiatives. Already they have brochures, product labels and a web site to promote their wild boar meat. They also have processors in other parts of Alberta and in Quebec producing boar products for them, including meat pies and pate. The Hagmans organize slaughter, processing and marketing for a number of wild boar producers, with the main sales effort coming out of the Hagman home in Mayerthorpe.
“She’s going to be our full-time wild boar salesman,” said Earl.
The hunt camp also provides one of their boys with a lucrative trade in boar skinning. Hunters pay him about $25 per hide, which helps his pocketbook but doesn’t necessarily get more family chores done.
“He doesn’t want to do anything for us any more,” joked Earl. “Not for a dollar, anyway.”
The Hagmans say one of the highlights of their year is the wild boar barbecue for their neighbors. They supply the meat and hospitality as a way of saying thanks to their neighbors, who have to put up with boar fans knocking on their doors looking for the Hagman place and dealing with the occasional pig rooting around in their yard after a breakout.
The modest homes of Mayerthorpe may not be much like the gleaming towers of New York and Toronto, and the grunting pigs don’t have the urbane charm of Brussels cafe society, but Earl said neither he nor Deb regret building their lives on the prairie.
“We made the right choice,” he said. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”
