The original western Canadian homesteaders came looking for a land of opportunity. Many found the early years full of challenge and hardship, but with prairie resolve and perseverance, countless families have seen their dreams carry on through successive generations.
The Kaeding family’s original homestead, now the home of Wagon Wheel Seed Corp., was claimed in 1917 near Churchbridge, Sask. Second generation farmer Roger Kaeding says his father Ewald left the family dairy farm near Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to establish the homestead. In 1918, his mother Alvina came up and they were married in Saskatchewan.
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“They started with a bare piece of ground and slowly improved it as the years went by. My dad came from a dairy farm and that’s the reason he left – he didn’t like milking cows. But when he came to Saskatchewan, he had to milk cows in order to survive,” says Roger.
“They started working with horses, then eventually progressed to working with a small Caterpillar tractor. During the ’30s there was no money to run that, so they had to park it and go back to horses.”
In the mid-1940s, the Kaedings purchased their first combine, a nine-foot Case. It was the first combine in the area, with a power take-off and an attached motor. They pulled it with a tractor and the motor operated the combine.
“It was an attraction – the neighbours saying, ‘it will never work,’ ‘how can you lay it down,’ ‘it will never dry,’ ” he says.
“We ran that for a number of years, then went to a self-propelled and that again was a Cockshutt. All these were open air, no protection from the weather whatsoever. The combine didn’t have any hydraulics, it was all manual lifting … and dusty.”
The new machines’ maneuverability almost doubled the speed of harvest, but the first ones weren’t able to work at night because they didn’t have lights.
“After two years, we did install our own lights, which gave us an extra hour or two in the evening, but it was nothing like we have today.”
Roger knew from an early age he was going to be a farmer. He graduated in 1947 from the School of Agriculture in Saskatoon, at the age of 17, and started a purebred polled Hereford show herd.
“While I was gradually taking over and my dad was gradually being relieved of his time and effort, we increased the herd significantly. At that time we were producing for two families, so that added to the income,” he says.
“We sold to bull sales, entered bulls at the ROP test station and exported bred heifers to Japan and Mexico. We also sold bull semen to Australia and followed it up with a visit to promote it.”
When Roger and Phyllis were married in 1961, his parents moved off the farm and Roger assumed farm management duties.
“In my first transfer, from my dad to me, I slowly took over as I progressed on the farm. I started when I was 17 years old. In lieu of wages – in those days there wasn’t much money to give around – after a certain period of time there was a land transfer made. But that took a number of years. Eventually I got to own the greater portion of the land base and my dad was phasing himself out.”
During that period, he was able to buy more land, including the rest of his dad’s land when he retired. It was a phase in, but a little different than the corporation he eventually formed in the next intergeneration transfer with son Warren.
“Warren knew he was going to farm from the time he was in high school, so that made it easy. We geared his education towards agriculture. He took a degree in agriculture and he also spent about 10 years working for a chemical company, gathering information, contacts, learning the agricultural end, away from the production end. While he was doing that, he was an active member of the farm operation. Even when he was in college, we were still ‘farming by telephone.’ He was still part of the operation while in university,” Roger says.
“By the time he was in university, knowing he was going to farm, I made an early estate decision and turned over some land to him, so he had some production of his own. And he had equity to use to purchase other land. That’s very important. I think any son that wants to start farming today needs an equity. He can’t just work for wages – he needs something that’s his own, that he can use for security for other investments in land or whatever else.”
Warren says he knew he wanted to farm by about Grade 8 or 9. He’d been through the 4-H beef club, from pee wee to Grade 12, and says that’s where the interest was cultured.
“In first year university, we had rented some land. Some of it was up for sale and another neighbour was selling his, so in my second year of university, I purchased it,” Warren says.
“I started to build a bit of a land base. In the early ’80s, we tried to plan long-term how I was going to work into the farm and Dad was going to ease out. So we actually had an estate planner come in and work with us. That was a good basis to some of the decision making we made.”
When he graduated in 1984, Warren started with Imperial Oil and was promptly let go after 16 months with a severance package. That was the start of his Registered Retirement Savings Plan.
“I promised not to touch it and haven’t. Then I got on the next day with a herbicide company.”
That job allowed Warren to work out of his home, allowing him to be more involved in the farm. One of Warren’s summer jobs while at university included growing winter wheat on an experimental basis, which he started doing on the farm. As one of the first growers in the area, the Kaedings ended up growing seed for the crop. Eventually, the cow herd was dispersed and they built their own seed plant.
But Warren knew he couldn’t work and farm forever. He says the decision to give up the off-farm job in 1996 was easy to make.
“I said I needed 10 years and I got my initial investment paid off in 10 years. By that time our seed business had grown to the point where Dad wasn’t able to handle it on his own. I was trying to juggle two things, had two kids by then and it was a pretty easy decision to make. Ten years was up – time to go full time.”
But there were more decisions to make.
“Warren had land and I had land,” Roger says.
“It was a real headache trying to figure out who was spending what on what and what income was coming from where. There were two sets of books. We figured that was no way to run a partnership so we decided to go to a corporation.”
That happened when Warren came back to farm full time.
“We turned the land over to a corporation between the two families. It was an easier way to continue with the estate planning.”
Warren says incorporation brought a fixed set of guidelines about how the farm was to be operated. Warren’s title became chief executive officer and they outlined responsibilities.
“That would have been the point when the reins were handed over. Up to that point, I got to make cropping decisions. Then I eventually made the agronomic decisions and when we first incorporated I was able to make farm decisions based on equipment and land,” Warren says.
“We had pretty well doubled our farm size from what Dad and I first started with in the mid-’80s. We were about 1,500 acres in the mid-’80s. By the mid-’90s, when we first incorporated, we were up to around 3,000 acres – half owned and half rented. Now we’re cropping 6,000 acres. We own 16 quarters and rent 30. Two-thirds is pedigreed seed and one-third is cash crops like canola and sunflowers.”
Warren says spending time away from the farm was the best thing he could have done.
“I was able to build some equity fairly quickly. Dad had gifted a couple of quarters of land early, to give me collateral to borrow money from the bank. That was as much as we wanted, because that farm was his RRSP. Plus, I got management experience from somewhere else,” he says.
“You can get stuck in a rut in what’s been done historically on a farm, without looking outside that management area. There’s so many different things you can learn and the biggest thing for me was marketing.”
Another advantage was understanding what it’s like to be an employee.
“When Warren started and we got more intensive into the grain and seed business, we needed full-time help,” Roger says.
“We’ve progressed from one to two full-time and some days there’s six more around, depending what’s happening. That’s the time when I wanted to get out of the management part. I was more confident in handling a smaller labour force.
“I never worked for anyone else and maybe that’s why I find it difficult to work with labour. I’ve got my own standard – when I worked, I worked. When the employees come now, they’ve got to have time off, coffee breaks, an hour at noon. My operation was to get at a job and get it done. So I think the fact that he worked out gave him a better insight in how to handle labour. That’s one of the advantages – that he was an employee.”
Roger says it’s probably a good idea for any boy who’s going to take over the farm to work off the farm for two to five years.
“Ten years is a long time, as you’ve got a very productive period of your life that you’re giving to somebody else. But it gives you a better insight into the operation and it gives you contacts which you would never have just living on the farm. That’s invaluable to our seed operation today.”
Warren considers his wife Carla an integral part of the farm’s success.
“My spouse has been an important part of the operation, behind the scenes for the past 10 years. Her background is a CGA (Certified General Account). She’s got an accounting degree and worked for accountants when we first came home,” he says.
“She’s just retired from her job in Yorkton and she’s taken over the financial management of the operation. We found that we really need to have someone full time, designated to monitor that side of the business.”
Warren says along with the financial side, Carla plans to get more involved in marketing, hedging and other aspects of the operation.
“The state we’re at now is determining where we’re at with our business. The retail side is pretty scary now, with receivables high. Making the right decision as to what to grow and how to market it. Do we wholesale more, focus on retail more, those kinds of things. We might want to expand the plant, do more value adding. We’re exploring marketing a few things over the internet, like birdseed items and things like that,” he says.
“We’re in that state of flux right now. Do we keep expanding our land base or focus more on the value-added/processing/retail side of the business?”
Land base expansion will be a combination of buying and renting.
“We’re going to have opportunities to buy land. We’ve got neighbours who are asking about us renting to own.”
He’s also looking at leasing equipment.
“We’re tying up a gob of money in equipment that’s only being used maybe five weeks of the year. Now that Carla’s here, we’re going to look a lot more into leasing combines, tractors, mid-sized equipment. That’s something we’ve never done before, especially with our equipment,” he says.
“We’ve always felt we needed to own the majority of equipment. But in the last while, we’ve had to rent a second combine or tractor, and we’re thinking it’s maybe not a bad idea. And we’re thinking that way with the land, as well.
Our biggest concern is when we rent land, we want to have it for a long term, with the pedigree seed business. Especially now when we’re thinking of getting into more forage seed production, you need to have that land available for a long period of time to get your return out of it.”
While three years is a minimum, the Kaedings like to have five-, 10- or even 20-year agreements. They’ve got two or three landlords who probably won’t be selling their land. Warren says they’re going to use it as part of their estate planning. That works well for both the owners and the Kaedings.
With two young sons, Warren and Carla are already looking into how to incorporate the next generation of Kaedings into the farm.
“We’ve got two boys, 14 and 11. They both have their own special interests in the farm. The older boy is very mechanically inclined and he’s been one of our chief equipment operators. The other one is just starting to get into it now, asking what he’s going to be doing at harvest time,” Warren says.
“Both have expressed interest that the farm is where they’d like to be. The older boy has already told me he’s going into ag engineering. He’s been asking a lot of questions about management things on the farm, why we do things and how we made those decisions. So I’m not going to dissuade them.
“I want them to explore all their options and do the same thing I did – get into the outside world, get away from this operation to see how somebody else manages things and get some experience. Now that Carla is here full time, we have to sit down and try to plan this a little better. If he’s interested, 15 years away from here, how we’re going to have that transition work. We definitely have to start planning now.”
While agriculture has its problems, Warren says he’s committed to the industry.
“Using a controversial subject like GMO products right now – once we get that door open, it’s going to provide all sorts of opportunities with special niche market commodities. We’re going to get away from relying on the wheat board to do a lot of our marketing and move away from bulk commodity production,” he says.
“We finally have a really good crop of pinto beans coming right now. I see beans being part of our operation. We’ve been doing all right marketing our own sunflowers. Forage grass and turf grass seed – we’re doing very well in that area of production. Looking for something with a little higher return, a little higher risk and therefore higher management, but getting away from those bulk commodity things, because everybody can do that. If we want to try and get that better return, we’re going to have to get into things that take a lot more work.”
And he expects the future to provide many opportunities. “I can’t even get my head around where we’re headed. Look at the changes I’ve seen in my short time I’ve been on the farm. Mechanically, my dad has probably seen the biggest change in anybody’s lifetime. He remembers working with horses to now sitting in a 425 hp tractor with air conditioning and a CD player.
“The crops we’re growing now, my dad would never have thought of growing corn for grain, or sunflowers, soybeans or chickpeas. That’s where I see the next revolution coming from. The next 20 years? … that’s what I can’t wait for. That’s what gets me going in the morning and that’s why we’ve played with nutraceuticals, pumpkins, now we’re into trees, beans and all kinds of stuff.”
While optimistic, Roger is also reflective.
“It’s got to be a more complicated operation than when we started. The options that we have today to help ourselves – high-wheeled sprayers, high capacity machinery – adds to the income but also the stress. I think that’s a big part of the operation is the stress right now. You’re not allowed to make many – or any – mistakes today, because your mistakes are too costly. The consequences are greater now than what they were years back,” he says.
“You’ve got to be very attentive to detail today. The marketing is as much of an education as seeding the crop. We have so many options, especially in the seed business, where we’re worldwide instead of community sales.”
For continued success, Warren says the biggest necessity is a written plan.
“Having a goal in mind – where you want to be – then trying to do a road map of how you’re going to get there. Dad said he knew where he wanted to be, he just hadn’t really documented anything and wasn’t sure how he was going to get there. Now, growing up through business, we really see the value of having a plan, yet having it flexible enough to be able to change.”
