PEERS, Sask. – The flocks of Canada and snow geese aren’t the only cheery creatures on the Kindrachuks’ hilltop farm this spring.
The family, in the normally tense few weeks before seeding, is looking forward to this year.
They think they’ll make a bit of money if they get an average crop.
John’s seed cleaning business is doing well and he’s getting ready to expand it.
The family has decided to take their farm in a new direction that will, they hope, give John more time to be with his four daughters and give the whole family a better life.
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“The big thing is quality of life. Profit is second,” said John, who with his wife Diana has decided to convert their farm from all-grain to all-livestock.
“That’s what life is about,” said Diana, who with her husband fills their spacious one storey home with a mood of optimism.
Many of their neighbors, seeing projected low crop prices and high input costs, feel depressed this spring, but the Kindrachuks are excited by the transformation they’re about to undertake.
This spring John will seed about 1,500 acres.
He’s putting in one quarter section of oats, 500 acres of canola, 300 acres of barley, 400 acres of wheat and 150 acres of peas.
But he’s also underseeding one quarter section with alfalfa, and sowing areas of the home quarter with grass.
From the 1,500 acres they farm now, the Kindrachuks want to drop down to one section only.
They think they can make as much money from cattle and sheep on four grassed quarters as they can with grains on two and a half sections.
Family benefits
Fully converting to grass will take a few years, but John and Diana are keen to bring the family’s boundaries down to the point where John and the children are always close to each other.
Their oldest daughter is now 11 years old.
Raising livestock won’t be any less time consuming, and John is expanding his seed cleaning business this year.
Diana says cleaning grain in a building 50 metres from the house is a lot better than being on a tractor a mile away.
“It’s busy, but he’s there,” said Diana.
“If the girls have a question, they can run out to ask him. They can take him supper if he can’t come in.”
One year old Kirsty likes it when her father is around.
While he talks about the family’s plan for the farm, Kirsty scrambles across the kitchen table on her hands and knees, drops down onto her Dad’s lap, and insists on trying to fit her small pink sunglasses on his face.
They don’t fit very well, but John accepts his role as a life-size dressup Ken doll with good humor.
Kirsty giggles at how ridiculous her dad looks, then scrambles back across the table to her mom.
John, who has been momentarily distracted by the dressup show, returns to his plans for the seed cleaning business.
Soon, once the concrete Saskatchewan Wheat Pool elevator at North Battleford is completed, the pool elevator here will be permanently closed.
John has already bought the elevator’s seed cleaning equipment, which he’ll add to his operation. It’ll double his capacity from 100 to 200 bushels per hour.
With a bigger on-farm seeding business and low-investment livestock rather than high-investment crops, the Kindrachuks think they’ve found a way to remove some of the risks that can destroy farm families.
Getting heavily into livestock has its own risks, the Kindrachuks know.
This family farm has never raised animals, so they know they’ll have to pick up the tricks of the trade as they go.
John knows the basics, though.
His father always had a cattle herd and John grew up around it.
Diana said they’re making this big change because they want to stay here, on the land, where they have spent their lives.
They don’t want to move to the city for jobs, but they also don’t want to spend their lives separated from each other, on the kind of huge farm many feel is the only option for the young farmer.
John grew up just down the road.
He can see his father’s land from his yard.
In the other direction, a kilometre down, lies the town of Speers, which is getting smaller by the year.
Diana comes from a farm near Hafford, a town 13 kilometres away. She still spends a lot of time there.
Twice a week she travels there to work out of a relative’s home as a hairdresser.
John and Diana were married in 1987.
First they lived across the road from their present home in a 700-square-foot house.
They stayed there until 1993, when a farm couple whose children had grown up and left decided to move out of the house they’re in now.
Diana and John happily moved onto the site, which has a tall shelterbelt of fir trees, lines of hedges, a paved loop road and a view of all the countryside around it.
The farmhouse sits atop a ridge, thought by some local people to be a hill, from which the family can watch sunsets and the wildlife that rambles across nearby fields.
They like the land not just because it provides them with a way to support a family, but also because it puts them in an environment they have to share only with the nature they love.
Tranquil setting
Right now hundreds of ducks and geese are on the field just north of the house. Some enjoy the clean water of a deep slough, while others waddle about where the swaths lay last fall, enjoying the leftovers of last year’s pea crop.
Over by the seed cleaning shed is a group of sheep and a llama, avoiding the hot spring sun by lying in the shade.
They provide a good training ground for the children, who are responsible for the animals.
“They’re learning what it’s like to wake up and actually do some chores,” said John.
The future is uncertain for the Kindrachuks. They don’t know how well their plans to convert their grain farm to a smaller, grassed operation will go.
But as they head into this first year of transition, they aren’t letting the worries bog them down.
“Things weren’t working,” said Diana. “You could see they weren’t working.
“And when something isn’t working, you want to do something about it,” John said. “We’re taking an action and hoping it’s the right one.”
