COALDALE, Alta. – The relentless prairie wind was never Henry Bergen’s enemy.
It was his greatest inspiration.
After a lifetime promoting conservation and developing zero and minimum cultivation tools, the Coaldale inventor was presented last year with the province’s highest honour, the Alberta Order of Excellence.
Bergen expressed surprise that he was recognized along with bankers and philanthropists, but he was assured his work in conservation and better farming techniques were equal to theirs.
“We had a small part in saving the family farm,” he said from his sales shop GEN Manufacturing in Coal-dale.
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“If we had gone through this whole dry period for the last 15 years, it would have been worse than the Thirties. Zero till really helped people survive.”
Born into a German Mennonite family in Ukraine in 1935, his father died in 1938 when the Stalinist government began persecuting them. His mother was left with five young children and they eventually escaped to Germany in 1943.
“The Germans actually saved us from starvation,” he said.
Life was hard for refugees and at times Bergen begged in the streets along with other displaced people. They depended on ration cards and his mother worked for a farmer who provided them with food.
With help from the Mennonite Central Committee, the family came to Canada in 1948 with nothing but a wooden box filled with the few possessions they could carry.
An uncle in Coaldale helped them in those early years, and the family also worked hoeing sugar beet fields, a backbreaking job using short handled hoes to weed and thin the rows from sun up to sun down.
Bergen started working for Agriculture Canada when he was 17 and stayed until 1968, tending crops and working on machinery. He became more than support staff, working closely with university educated researchers to develop better equipment and solve agronomic problems for prairie farmers.
“When I get my teeth into something, I’m stupid enough to stay with it,” he said with a smile.
He studied mechanical engineering and metallurgy at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and graduated in 1959. He eventually earned certificates in automotive mechanics, welding and as a machinist.
Working with Agriculture Canada researcher and mentor Doug Smith, Bergen helped develop a planting tool called the Smith-Bergen Plot Master to evenly plant experimental crops to ensure consistent test results.
It was an adjustable, self-propelled seeder cobbled together from spare parts and a discarded motor.
When Bergen left to start his own business in 1968, he was listed as the co-author on at least seven technical papers. The early years in his business were a struggle. His office and plant was a dilapidated chicken hatchery full of garbage and manure. He had a young family to support and the future was unsure.
“I didn’t have a business plan and I didn’t have any money,” he said.
The turnaround came when he started working with local farmer Ike Lanier, who was interested in preventing soil erosion and preserving moisture.
“He had tried zero till, but he didn’t have the right tools in order to go into the stubble fields in one pass,” Bergen said.
In those days, people prepared well tilled black seedbeds that were vulnerable to erosion. New machinery and ideas were needed to stop soil drift. Convincing people to seed into stubble took time but it eventually became part of an agronomic cultural shift on the North American plains.
“People would have to reseed in this area, especially in the beet fields,” he said.
“The beets would be cut off by the sand blowing and they would have to retill and reseed. That didn’t make sense.”
He started working on attachments for seed drills to drop seed and fertilizer without lifting the soil and leaving it vulnerable to the wind.
Like other inventors at the time, Bergen knew he could not stop the wind but could change the way the land was worked.
He also received help from members of the local Hutterian Brethren colonies, who farmed large tracts of land and needed to conserve labour, soil and moisture. Today, his company works with 100 colonies.
Work has been done on instrumentation to schedule crop irrigation, and modifications have allowed producers to receive maximum benefit from their equipment at a minimum expense.
New ideas continue, with the latest being carbon sequestration. Zero tillage prevents deep cultivation and disturbance of the ground, root systems and organic material. Once soil is exposed, carbon is released into the atmosphere.
“Carbon sequestration is tremendously important not only for the greenhouse effect but the social benefits,” Bergen said.
Oil companies are experimenting with pumping carbon back into the soil, but Bergen believes farmers deserve more credit for the work they are doing.
A few years ago his interests turned to philanthropy and he now funds private charitable works in Belize.
He continues to work at GEN Manufacturing with his wife, Mary Ann, and his son David, who is the company sales manager. Another son, Douglas, is a property developer and daughter Jacqueline works for a steel company in Edmonton.
His work has been recognized with awards from the Public Service of Canada, the Alberta Society of Engineering Technologists and the Canadian and American societies of agricultural engineers.
He received the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005, became a member of the Order of Canada in 2006 and received an honourary doctorate from the University of Lethbridge in 2008.
“It amazes me, being a person coming from that beginning with nothing and how can you not be thankful and count your blessings?” he said.
