By Way of Introduction - Part One
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 02:09PM Man, I never would have thought it would have taken us over six months to update the website. Turns out that this city boy from Vancouver really didn't know what he was getting in to when he signed up to farm with his in-laws. Life since July has been the most exciting, challenging, scary, emotional, rewarding and downright fun period of my life... and I have done some pretty crazy and/or stupid things.
I suppose I should probably start with who "I" and "we" actually are. My name is Chris and I am the son-in-law-student-farmer to Godfrey and Bev, the real farming minds behind what we do. You see these guys have been farming since Noah got off the Ark or sometime thereabouts. They have been dairy farmers, grain farmers, beef farmers and everything else in between. They started out in England and emigrated to Alberta back in '94. That's where I came on to the scene.
I met their smokin hot daughter Leonie, who would soon become my smokin hot wife, at school in Calgary in '98. We got married a scant year later and it was my new in-laws who began to expose me to what farm life entailed. I have to admit that my involvement with their farm over the next 10 years was fairly minimal. I used to hate getting dirty. Or wet. Or sweaty. Or anything else that involved going outside. I was one of those guys that loved techo-gadgets, books, ideas and clean things. Don't get me wrong though, I would help out here and there when they needed it but I always tried to swing it so that I was doing cooking or driving a truck or some other activity in a controlled environment. The long and short of it is I was very much a part of the system, just another cog in the consumer culture machine.
Then things began to change. Mom and Dad (yeah I call my in-laws Mom and Dad) took a beating in '04 with the BSE fiasco. They are very much farmers of principle and they had been trying to prove to those Alberta feedlot guys that you could feed beef cattle grass and still get good gains without having to stuff them full of food that they really shouldn't eat. Of course that means they were sitting on quite the sizable herd when the floor fell out on beef prices. They managed to keep going for another few years but by the spring of '08 they had run out of steam. They sold the farm and for the first time in their lives walked away from farming with no idea what to do with themselves.
In the meantime Leonie and I had added three children to the ranks of our family and by '08 I had been working in television for a few years. Things appeared to be normal but as we watched Mom and Dad leave farming and mourned the family's loss of the farming lifestyle we began to question the values of the culture we found ourselves mired in. What were we striving for? A bigger house? More cars? A cottage? A massive tv? Who were we trying to impress? We didn't even know our neighbors to be honest. Why would we care about what people thought of us if we didn't care enough about people to be in relationship with them? Something about that seemed backwards and over the next year we came to realize that the entire system seemed broken and we wanted out. Desperately.
I'll carry on with the rest of the story next time as this post has gone on far too long but this should give you a pretty good idea as to who we are and why on earth we are trying to farm in a day and age when agriculture is almost a guaranteed loosing bet. We may be nuts but it turns out being nuts is a lot of fun so why not?
our story
Reader Comments (4)
Well my husband and I are truly grateful you made the move! We absolutely love your beef. So much so, in fact, my husband usually starts asking me on Thursday if I'm going to the market on Saturday...and it's all because of you guys. Keep up the great work.
Saw the interesting wolfville farmer's market video on youtube and enjoyed it
Looking forward to the next part of the story you started here
Keep up the good work
PS: Fix loosing -> losing before I kill myself
Holy swear word, your bone marrow is some of the finest from a non calf source. I loved it. Moar moar moar. Nomnomnom.
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