SOURIS, Man. – Don Lovatt is remembered as a man who helped his neighbors whenever the chance arose.
Several of those neighbors returned the kindness last week, arriving at the Lovatt farm in combines, trucks and tractors to harvest fields of canola, wheat and oats.
Lovatt died in late July only weeks after being diagnosed with cancer. He died knowing his friends and neighbors would harvest the crops he planted this spring.
“I knew as soon as Don was sick, it would be looked after,” said his wife Gladys, as a steady flow of grain trucks rumbled past her farm home en route to grain bins.
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“This is the way the community is. If anybody has a problem, they usually pull together.”
In the fields, combines lapped up the swaths on Sept. 13. With 10 combines on the go, it took only an afternoon to finish the harvest.
Ken McKay, a 74-year-old farmer, downplayed his part in the harvesting bee. Seated in the cab of a New Holland combine, he listened to country music and kept his eyes trained on the canola swath in front of him.
“What’s a day?” he asked, shrugging off the time he was giving to the harvest bee. “One day in life doesn’t amount to much.”
But a day can mean a lot in farming, especially at harvest time. Farmers in this region recently endured weeks of sporadic rains, moisture that caused sprouting in crops and dropped the grades of cereal grains.
For McKay, that was all the more reason to help harvest the Lovatt crops.
“Somebody’s got to take the crop off,” he said. “You can’t just let it sit here.”
The harvest at the Lovatt farm began last month with volunteers swathing and combining the barley.
Likable person
Steering a grain truck across an oat field last week, Tom Ewen struggled to find words to describe how it felt to be part of such a selfless effort. He remembered Don Lovatt as an easy-going man who was quick to lend a hand to his neighbors.
“He wouldn’t hesitate about helping a neighbor,” said Ewen as he pulled alongside a combine to catch a hopper load of grain. “I liked the guy. He was a nice fella.”
Those sentiments were shared by others taking part in the harvest bee. Colin McKay, a family friend, described Lovatt as “… a hell of a nice guy. Easy to talk to, easy to get along with. You don’t find too many like him.
“The way people are working here today, it shows what they thought of Don.”
Lovatt was 58 years old when he died. He had spoken of retiring from farming in a couple of years and maybe renting the land out.
Gladys said she is still undecided about what to do with the farm. Their two children are grown and living in Brandon, less than 40 kilometres away.
Their son, Robert, held back tears last week while describing what the harvest meant to his father: “It meant everything. It was a particularly good year this year. He would have really loved to see it.”
Gladys said it will be hard to repay the kindness shown by the community.
“There’s just no way you can ever repay someone for an act like this. I’m just thankful I have such good neighbors and friends.”
