SPENCERVILLE, Ont. – Geri Kamenz still remembers with a chuckle the reaction of his family to the news almost two decades ago that he was going to become a farmer.
“They thought I was crazy,” he said. “I had another career. I knew nothing of farming.”
He was 25, had been an air force pilot and was making a good living as a commercial bush pilot. He had been city born and raised. Other than a long-ago family history of farming in eastern Germany, the closest he’d come to the farm was as a boy, helping out neighbours when his family spent time at their eastern Ontario cottage.
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But he and his wife, Heather, took the plunge and 18 years later, it looks like it was the right decision.
They operate an award-winning 1,000-acre farm less than an hour’s drive south of Ottawa. He is vice-president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (an organization that once fired him as a senior manager) and has good enough Liberal party connections that his Buckstop Farms was the backdrop for prime minister Jean Chrétien’s 2002 announcement of a $5.2 billion funding commitment to new agriculture programs.
“We have built a good life and a good business,” Kamenz mused in September, between the end of hay harvest and the beginning of soybean and corn. “I can’t imagine right now doing anything but farming.”
It is a mixed operation built after years of experimentation with almost all kinds of farming to find the most profitable mix.
On 800 acres he grows pedigreed genetically modified soybean seed for Monsanto, corn that is sold in part to a nearby sweetener plant, some specialty beans and small grains. On 200 acres he grows hay for his 50-head cow-calf operation.
Not far from the modern farmhouse is a 3,000-head hog barn used to raise pigs on contract for Premium Pork. Kemenz receives 17-kilogram gilts and raises them to breeding age and weight, when they are shipped across Canada and North America as purebred breeding stock.
“It is a good mix right now,” he said. “I think this might be our most profitable year so far.”
He arrived at the mix by trial and error, reading what he could find about different farm models and listening to other farmers who knew more than him.
His style has been to buy a farm, invest in it, try different production mixes and then sell it when another farm in the area is available for sale.
Geri, Heather and daughters Erika and Zo‘ have lived on the present site for six years, but he is not sentimental about the place.
“It’s always for sale if someone drives in and offers the right price,” he said. “We’re always running it as a business. There will always be another opportunity to buy.”
Along the way, he tried and then abandoned a variety of crops, bought and sold quota (earning a good capital gain) to try dairy farming, and grew wheat.
“We got out of wheat because the economics just aren’t there.”
He also has become active in the farm environmental movement, winning a 1996 Ontario soil and water conservation award and chairing both the environment and science committee for the Canadian Federation of Agriculture and the agriculture environment advisory committee for the federal agriculture department and its minister.
Kamenz figures his own farm experience gives him some credibility to talk about two of the most controversial farm environmental issues of the day – hog barns and genetically modified crops. Both are part of his operation.
Despite his best and largely successful efforts to use manure containment and air circulation systems to control smell, he has been the subject of petitions to local council protesting expansion and building plans for the hog operation.
When the prime minister’s aides called in June 2002 to see if the Kamenz farm could be used for the agricultural policy framework announcement, “the first thing they asked is if it smelled. I said it didn’t.”
And it didn’t. Kamenz thinks hog farmers have an obligation to do what is required to be good neighbours and environmental stewards, “but we’ll never get away from the fact that pig manure smells.”
He operates a strict bio-safety regime in his pig barns and keeps his herd antibiotic-free.
Kamenz said his stance on GMOs is that they are well regulated by the federal government and offer farmers some cost and economic advantages. He will use GM varieties as long as they provide an economic advantage and there is a market.
“The customer is always right,” he said. “The reality is that there is no substantial resistance in North America to GM products. And the economic analysis is that farmers can see some benefits.”
Kamenz defends his involvement in the Liberal party as an investment in access to government and the political system.
He is committed to the farm lobby. In the 1980s, soon after entering the business, he became involved locally in the Ontario Federation of Agriculture and eventually was hired as a senior Toronto-based manager.
A political and personality conflict with then-OFA president Roger George led to his firing. Instead of quitting the organization, he went home to the farm, got back involved in the politics of OFA and has now become the organization’s vice-president.
“We can’t allow internal politics to get in the way of the strength of the farm lobby.”
