Now this is farming:
Well, actually, that's more like the kind of farming I grew up around. My father-in-law, who was a dairy farmer, used horse teams for much of his fieldwork until around the mid-1950s. Back then, he not only kept dairy cattle, but a few hogs and chickens. Mixed farms were fairly typical in this area until sometime around the 1960s. Up here, most dairy farms shipped whole milk and generally milked Holsteins, Ayrshires, Brown Swiss or Guernseys. However, a lesser number of farms shipped cream under contract to dairies. Those farms usually milked Jerseys, and would separate the milk and ship the cream, but feed the skimmed milk to hogs and calves. I believe that cream shipping was phased out some time around 1990. That was one of those nail-in-the-coffin events for the smaller mixed farms up this way. There are still some smaller farms around though -- most raise livestock such as sheep or beef and often do something on the side. In my area, a lot of farms have maple sugar bushes, so some farmers do sugaring in winter. Others have apple orchards -- we're not far from where the Macintosh apple originated. One of my neighbours grows garlic on a commercial scale and that's actually fairly common around here. There's also a fairly new hothouse tomato operation just down the road from my place. I think they have about 4-5 acres under glass so far and are just in the process of building some more units. Up here, a lot of people are using the kinds of greenhouses that are seen in Holland. The big center for that kind of thing is down around Leamington, but it's starting to catch on up my way too. One other farm which I forgot to mention are the mushroom farms. There's one huge operation not far from here. They great thing about the mushroom farm is that it buys up everyone's spoiled hay -- hay that got rained on too much while being baled. Anyhow, kind of interesting to see some of the new kinds of operations that have started to spring up in the area. |
