LANIGAN, Sask. – Dale Termuende’s loafers slipped on the wet grass as he pushed through the overgrown caragana and honeysuckle hedge. Rainwater from the bushes splashed off his trench coat sleeve as he swept away the branches to reveal his heritage.
A one-room house. A few small windows. A home for a pioneer family of six.
Making tight circles on the floor of the house, Termuende seemed to stumble over a box of thoughts as he began to recount a family history that has helped shape prairie agriculture.
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Termuende has traveled 2,655 kilometres from his home in Chicago, Ill., in an annual pilgrimage to a farm at Lanigan, Sask.
Now in his late sixties, the American lawyer feels strong ties to this northern farmstead. His great grand-uncle brought his family from the Chicago area in 1907 after emigrating as a larger family group from Germany in 1880.
The farm grew quickly from a 160-acre homestead, eventually covering 1,920 acres. The large round barn, designed to be wind resistant in the barren prairie, has been a landmark in the district 160 km east of Saskatoon for eight decades.
John Termuende’s daughter and three sons came into control of the operation and the four set about to create the most modern farm on the Prairies.
“They were always the first,” said Termuende. “The first to use commercial fertilizer, the first to use egg incubators, the first to sell fertilized eggs, the first to have a water softener, the first to own a combine, the first to import British polled cattle to the region. My aunt was the first person I knew that owned a microwave oven. They always wanted to be on the cutting edge of technology.”
The family kept a commercial flock of more than 1,000 chickens in the 1920s.
“Everybody kept chickens. Nobody kept 1,000 on a mixed farm,” he said.
From raising the first commercially grown crested wheat grass and selling it into the United States to experimenting with cattle herd development and feeding, the Termuendes blazed trails.
Canadian polled Hereford lineages credit the Termuende Four Square herd bulls, Leonard, Modern and Jager for some of the original blood that still flows in prairie herds.
“When the British had the devastating brucellosis epidemic some of the later generations of the original cattle brought over beginning in 1923 were sent back to England to help reconstruct the breed over there,” said Termuende.
The four siblings never married and in 1974, when they chose to retire, they decided to donate the land and buildings to the University of Saskatchewan’s agriculture department. A trust fund was established to provide agriculture scholarships to local high school graduates and to provide for research at the farm site.
“My dad knew them,” said Les McGrath, a farmer from nearby Leroy, Sask. “He said they were always doing something new, always trying something else. Always making it possible for somebody else to do something they had tried. It seems fitting that this place is a research farm.”
Their nephew adds: “They always had a great respect for research. They had little education themselves but were great readers and learned all they could about everything they did. They found the work done at the university was of help to them and saw the benefit to agriculture as a whole.”
The early 1990s saw research budgets cut and with them, the Termuende farm. For the first time in 85 years there would be no cattle in the pens, no grain in the bins, no voices to cut through an early morning fog during chores and nobody trying something new.
The farm remained in mothballs until last spring when the Western Beef Development Centre, with the participation of the university, the federal and provincial governments and cattle industry, reopened it for the purpose the family had intended in 1974 – research.
“My uncle Reiny, before he died, told me that ‘you never get anywhere by following the ruts’ and I know he’s looking down on the place now and he’s smiling,” said Termuende, standing in the doorway to the future -Êthe doorway of the first Termuende farmhouse.
