Rob Fensom of Salmon Arm, B.C., elaborates on his reasons for loving the farming life and business.
Why farm? I am not sure if this is a question or a statement.
Most people would say why bother, there’s no money in it. The same people, well fed, some overweight, are all thinking it won’t matter if I farm or not because there will still be plenty of food in the store.
To farm or not to farm, it makes no difference to anyone else, but it sure does to me, so why do I farm?
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I was born and raised on farms. My father was a herdsman and milked and managed dairy herds. I grew up helping him on weekends and spent many hours with the livestock, wandering around the fields and woods enjoying the farm life.
In my last year of grade school, when I was 16, my father quit farm work, bought a house on the edge of town and took up as a digger operator in the construction industry.
After a few short months I learned to hate living away from the farm. There was simply nothing for a country boy to do in town. I would ride my bicycle out into the country or walk in the hills that our house backed onto, but it just wasn’t the same.
I found a job that winter working weekends on a large dairy farm three miles away, and from that point on I lived for weekends.
The work was hard and much of the feeding was done on the open hillsides, often in stormy weather, but I loved it.
My mother hoped the hardship of the work would put me off farming and I would consider more normal occupations, because I think she had never been overly fond of the farm life.
Her hopes were dashed when, upon leaving school, I found a job with room and board on a farm some 20 miles away and started day courses at the local agricultural college.
I completed three years of college and three more on two different farms to gain experience and still I loved to farm.
While at college I had met blokes who had worked in Australia and New Zealand and heard stories of a better life and cheap land. A dream began to form of having my own farm and to work for myself instead of for other people on their farms.
Few chances came until one day a job in Manitoba was advertised in the Farmer’s Weekly.
After a successful interview and much finger crossing, I left England for Canada, complete with a new wife who also dreamed of a farm.
It took nine more years before we were farming our own place, and I logged in British Columbia for most of them.
We hung onto our dream and started living it in 1989. With all the trials and tribulations, lots of off farm work and many long days, it’s still a great life.
Outdoors in the elements, life is more real. It has meaning. Working with nature and improving the soil – no price can be put on that, at least not one the market is willing to pay.
Satisfaction is a great feeling, one I have been enriched with, though it rarely fills the wallet.
I like knowing I have done the right thing, enjoyed doing it and improved the food sustainability for my country. This was once a noble act and appreciated goal, a patriotic duty, if you will.
Today, all they want to know is, ‘can you produce it cheaper than the imported foods?’ If not, they buy from Brazil, China or Mexico, with not a care in the world for their local farmers and stewards of the land.
Farmers and ranchers, who make and keep the countryside looking the way it does, allow the buyers and consumers of their produce to go for a drive or a walk on the weekend and enjoy the scenery and fresh air, free of charge.
Just think, it was so cheap, and it wasn’t even imported.
