MONTMARTRE, Sask. – Patrick Lesiuk thinks better grain prices just might lure more young people back to the farm.
As one of the youngest farmers near this community about 90 kilometres east of Regina, he admits it is difficult to get started unless there is help from family members who are already farming.
But he said the rural lifestyle needs to be preserved.
“We need more of the little guys,” he said. “With corporate farms there could be these huge tracts of land with nobody even living there.”
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Lesiuk, 27, has been farming with his older brother since leaving high school.
“I’d be bored if I wasn’t farming,” he said. “I enjoy it. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”
The brothers farm 14 quarters, which include land owned by their mother and two sisters. They grow wheat, barley, flax and canola and also have a small commercial herd of about 20 cattle. Lesiuk intends to expand that herd on his own.
He has no immediate plans to diversify into other crops, largely because he doesn’t have the equipment to grow something like peas, and because “we know what works here.”
However, he predicts a change to zero tillage farming methods within five years.
“I’ve been watching and looking at how it works,” Lesiuk said. “It’s like anything new. It’s iffy at first but then you don’t regret it.
“Up to now going from the drill to the air seeder has been the biggest change here.”
He also predicts computers will play a larger role in farming in the future. The Lesiuks use one now for recording crops, their yields and what chemicals were used.
Lesiuk said he is optimistic about farming in the next century and thinks most farmers are, or they wouldn’t be thinking of diversifying into different crops or buying equipment.
“It’s been next-year country for 10 years,” he laughed.
