Farmers often call in friends and family to help with the yearly crisis of the growing season.
Ian McPhadden goes one step further – he brings in help from around the world.
On a mid-September day of blue skies, hot sun and good combining conditions, the Milden, Sask., farmer was being helped by a Danish, German, Romanian and an Irish farmer and observed by an Australian farmer.
McPhadden has made many farmer friends over the years as he traveled the world. Two of them – the Irishman and the Dane – are here visiting and working this harvest. He also has two young farm exchange students – the German and the Romanian – working on the farm.
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Out in the yard the Dane, the German and the Romanian were running the McLeod Harvesting System, struggling to unplug a jammed cross-auger and trying to connect the McLeod’s cart to the header.
In the machine shop, the Irishman was reassembling a piece of equipment, good-naturedly cursing McPha-dden for putting a piece in backwards.
McPhadden was in the middle of it all, trying to keep harvest running smoothly while at the same time absorbing the advice and observations made by his international brigade.
“If you sit on your own little quarter section all your life, the box is pretty small,” he said, explaining his interest in international farm travel and bringing foreign students to his 5,000 acre grain farm.
Return visit
The Dane was a student on McPhadden’s farm 12 years ago and has come back for his holidays to help out.
The Irishman runs a former state farm in eastern Germany. He met McPhadden a couple of years ago and decided to see what Canadian farming is like.
The Australian, Dean Johns, is a Nuffield Farming Scholar, and so was McPhadden in 1990.
Nuffield scholarships pay for young farmers from a number of British Commonwealth countries to spend almost a year touring foreign farms to research topics of interest.
Johns is studying precision farming, something he is trying on his own farm. But on this day he is with McPhadden to see how the McLeod Harvesting System works.
The McLeod system, which is being demonstrated on McPhadden’s farm, is unconventional and many farmers don’t think it makes sense. McPhadden said he is keeping an open mind – an attribute he credits in part to his international travels and the foreigners who come to his farm.
“Nuffields come back (from their year of traveling) with a whole bunch of new ideas. There’s no guarantee they’ll work, but at least they come back with ideas.”
Foreign farmers often ask stumpers.
“They come and say, ‘why do you do (that farm operation) like that.’ If you can’t answer immediately, then you’d better think. ‘Because we’ve always done it that way’ is not a very wise answer.”
McPhadden said he’s only made a few changes to the farm based on his travels.
One example is a combine shed that isn’t fully enclosed. Even though most prairie farmers think machinery has to be completely protected from the elements, McPhadden said he’s learned from farmers elsewhere that sun is the main threat, so a totally enclosed building is unnecessary.
He said the real benefit gained from his international experience is a willingness to look at everything he does from a different angle, and the courage to try new things.
It’s an outlook that Johns said he is also developing on his travels.
McPhadden cautioned him to prepare for a depressing return to the normal life of farming after his year of mind expansion.
“The toughest part was coming home and having to sit on the tractor again for 10 or 12 hours a day after you get used to that adrenaline rush of learning new things every day.”
