BIRCH HILLS, Sask. – Lee Ann Tessier stopped having favorites among “her girls” when she couldn’t remember all their names.
But her husband Vic still has a special one in their herd of 84 cows, 29 yearling heifers and two bulls.
“When you treat them like pets they get spoiled” and then they take liberties such as nosing you in the back when you’re not expecting it, said Lee Ann.
There is danger in working around 1,500 pounds of muscle and while they’ve been kicked a lot, Lee Ann reports no serious injuries on their farm. Partly that’s due to the
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safety consciousness they practise and have instilled in their children.
Still, some of the tamest cows in Saskatchewan must dwell on the Tessier farm set in a rolling wooded area of the province. Despite a stranger walking among them, the pens of calving cows and heifers are calm and quiet.
“We don’t keep any mean animals,” said Lee Ann. “I’m getting too old to jump fences.”
From their 427 acres the Tessiers run a commercial cow-calf operation, selling their animals as replacement heifers. Vic said they used to have Herefords but switched to Shorthorns.
A third of their farm is still in crop with malting barley, canola and wheat, and they grow 185 acres of forage.
In this area most of the people are related and many are third-generation farmers. Vic grew up here and bought the farm from a cousin. Lee Ann was not a farm girl but she adapted after moving to the farm in 1972.
It’s a close community, said Lee Ann. “All I have to do is pick that phone up and boom, they’re here. Yet they respect each other’s privacy.”
The Tessiers got into cows their second year.
“When we first came I thought we’d bought a rice farm. There was water everywhere.”
But 33,000 trees later the Tessiers planted themselves a new look. They renovated their 1938 house, adding a utility room and a front sunporch, yet most has remained as it was, including the varnished wood doors and trim. The entire farmyard is tidy: the driveway is plowed, straw bedding covers the ground in the pens, tools hang in their places in the 1985 shop and the old, but still working tractors are clean and not dripping oil. Vic loves to tinker with machinery but also made their cattle gates and changed the bathroom plumbing. His wife calls him Mr. Fix-it.
Organization involvement
Vic loves to browse at farm auctions but is content to stay on the farm looking after the cattle. Lee Ann sits on several organizations such as the milk control board, pesticide container association and the farm women’s network, so she gets away more often. They have no hired hand and buy custom services to spray, bale and clean pens.
Basically their farm is “a mom and pop operation,” said Lee Ann. “We don’t have automatic waterers and it’s very labor intensive. … I get envious when it’s 40 below and they (the neighbors) go to the States.”
Neither of the Tessiers’ two sons seems interested in the farm. It’s a common occurrence in the area where the youngest farmer is 30 and the next youngest is 40. But the Tessiers think young people might come back to farming with the controversial push to increase pork production.
“It’ll create employment plus a market for our feed grain,” said Vic.
Lee Ann adds: “You can’t stop progress. It’s no different than when tractors came out. … No one has a crystal ball. We really don’t know how it’ll work.”
Lee Ann views farmers as a laid-back group that reacts when something gets their attention. Vic notes young people are different in that “they’re not scared to speak their mind.”
But the Tessiers are not sitting still either. They look at the trends and, while not on the risky cutting edge, are ready to fill the consumer’s demand. They have seen more zero tillage plus a change to smaller cows to supply what the market wanted. They use satellite sales technology to help them price their animals, attend farm shows and do a lot of their own veterinary work.
“I think we’ve got a very good industry. We just don’t toot our horn,” said Lee Ann. But she thinks prairie agriculture could go further by processing more raw products.
“Why ship dirty grain out?”
The Tessiers run their farm as an equal partnership with both working the cows, Lee Ann on the books because her husband hates it and Vic on the machinery because his wife confesses she can’t drive a straight line with the tractor.
“I wish more women would be involved in SWAN (Saskatchewan Women’s Agricultural Network) because they are involved in the farm. It takes two to run a farm, whether they don’t give themselves credit or whatever.”
The couple has begun their estate plan which includes phasing out the cows in three years and retiring at 65. For now, they say the best part of the farm is the fresh life that comes with spring calving. This morning there are two new arrivals. And only 69 more to go.
