Heart and soil Portage-area sisters offer city dwellers an opportunity to roll up their sleeves, lend a hand and gain an eye-opening appreciation for rural folks and the work they do By: Melissa Martin, photography by Mikaela MacKenzie Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, Sep. 28, 2018

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/09/2018 (2317 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The rooster wakes me up in the morning, crowing its dawn song from the next property over, its voice wafting across pasture and garden and through the big bay window that peers into my room.

This is a pastoral music, hinted by so many idyllic pictures; it reminds me of the opening montage of old Saturday-morning cartoons.

I lie in bed for long minutes, listening to this morning service, this feathered preacher singing praise to the day. I scrunch my eyes shut, try to slip back to sleep again. No way, the rooster protests; sunlight means time to wake.

The farm is still damp in the morning, after a night of cool rain. My boots kick up spray that glazes the grasses.

It seems I am the last one to rouse. In the corral, the horses are giving an expectant whinny, calling for breakfast. The chickens, too, are up with the sun, milling about the yard of their hut. They are all there, save for the one that took to its stubby wings and, quite literally, flew the coop; it is happily scratching at the root of a nearby cottonwood.

These chickens, that rooster song, this crisp September weather — all of it is exactly what I imagined when I booked a stay at Farm Away, a new rural retreat about 10 kilometres west of Portage la Prairie. For a moment, the scene seems a little too perfect, a little too close to a city person’s vision of what farm mornings could be.

I did not come here in search of perfection. In August, shortly before the retreat opened, I emailed co-owner Tracy Wood about doing a story. I didn’t want to simply do a profile on the place, I told her. I wanted to immerse myself in it, to explore it as a bridge between urban and rural space.

Right away, Wood was on board. “Your point about the disconnection between our urban and rural population is one of our big ‘whys’ when putting the Farm Away idea together,” she replied. Just a few weeks later, I turned down the dirt road that leads to the retreat, passing copses of trees and vast spreads of pasture.

In the driveway, Tracy greeted me with a bright smile. Only days before, she’d opened Farm Away with her sister, Taralea Simpson. They grew up on the family cattle farm, just a few kilometres away. Tracy runs that farm now. Taralea, in addition to her work as an agronomist, has a cow-and-grain farm nearby.

For years, Tracy had dreamed of opening something like Farm Away and she filled notebooks with ideas. At first, she thought she could run one out of her house. But it’s a full-scale working farm and not, perhaps, quite as idyllic as one would want for a bed-and-breakfast. Plus, then you’d have people traipsing through your home.

Still, this much was certain: the sisters didn’t want to open a glorified petting zoo. They are farmers, born and raised from a long line of the same. So any retreat they built, they thought, should reflect the truth of their farming life, too.

“I always wanted to have that agriculture portion,” Tracy says. “For me it’s always so frustrating when people believe everything they read or see. We do it every day, so why not come ask the people who are doing it?”

A stroke of luck landed them the perfect spot. Last summer, Tracy noticed a For Sale sign in a nearby driveway. Over the winter, she mentioned it to Taralea, who happened to know the owners, who’d lived there for nearly 40 years. So she gave them a call — was the property still for sale?

It was, and the sisters were invited to visit. When they saw it, they shared the same thought.

This would be perfect.

It is a picturesque property, 95 acres of garden and pasture, veined with grassy trails that reach south towards the Assiniboine River. There is a pond, a gazebo, a secret walled garden.

A remarkably well-kept cabin, built long ago; Tracy’s 95-year-old grandmother remembers it being there when she was a girl.

It also had all the trappings of a small farm: the chicken coop, the pretty red barn and the surrounding pasture. There was space for a healthy market garden, a shed to keep farm equipment, a greenhouse.

That would be the joy of it, they thought. It could be anything visitors wanted to make of it. A wedding venue or setting for a photo-shoot. Some visitors would come just to relax. Others might want to hold group events there; a local scrapbooking club has expressed interest.

Or, there was the other option if folks wanted to stay and learn more about farm life. They could help with the sheep, the horses, the chickens. They could tour Tracy and Taralea’s farmsteads and lend a hand with the chores.

“We want people to feel the freedom to be as involved or uninvolved,” Tracy says. “There will be people who come here just for the B&B, but there will be people who bring families out so they can learn, like where milk comes from.”

We set out for a tour of the grounds. A stout tabby struts ahead as we walk, peppering us with insistent meows. The cat is nameless; it came with the barn, Tracy says, and thus seems to consider itself the rightful tour guide.

The horses consider me with bottomless dark eyes and a flare of the nostrils. We toss bales of alfafa to three sheep, led by a curious fellow named Charlie who had recently been a local girl’s 4H project.

Then we hop in the truck for the short drive to Tracy’s farm, where she and her husband, Cam, and their two teen sons keep a barnyard full of animals. Their cows are out for summer pasture; they’ll come home soon for winter.

Over dinner, she explains how to medicate sick cows (with a little dart); how to birth stubborn lambs; how to navigate the endless stresses of the farm. (”What’s said in the barn, stays in the barn,” she says with a laugh.)

There is a farm chore I’m welcome to participate in, Tracy tells me. There is a corn silage pile on the field by their house and they need to get a tarp over it tonight. It’s a big job, she explains, but won’t take long.

“Hopefully we can get through it without anybody swearing,” she says.

“We might,” Cam replies. “It’s not windy.”

As we walk to the pile, I pause and beg forgiveness for an ignorant question. What is a silage pile?

Tracy explains it’s what happens they take all the feed corn they grew in the summer and chop it all up. The whole plant is in there — leaves, cobs and stalks. All of it piled up and left to ferment under a plastic tarp.

As months pass, the fermentation transforms the pile into a rich, high-calorie mulch. In the middle of winter, the cows get “big bellyfuls of warm feed on a cold morning.” Each silage pile will feed their herd for more than two months.

“And it smells delicious,” Tracy says, though by her description that seems slightly doubtful. “It is the best smell.”

Suddenly, Tracy leans over and thrusts her hands wrist-deep into the silage. A puff of steam belches from the indent her hands leave behind. She raised a handful to her nose and, breathing deep, let it fall.

“If you just stick your hand right in there, you can feel the heat coming out,” she says.

For a moment, I hesitate, frozen by the most stereotypically urban relucatance: I don’t know if I want to touch the thing. Then I look at Tracy’s face, bright with excitement and shining from a spritz of rain. I tug up my sleeve.

My hands sink into the moist pile. I squeeze its warm bulk, sift it through my fingers, rub it in my palms.

It smells good, just like Tracy promised, though it is hard to pinpoint exactly what the aroma is. It smells like popcorn and cut grass and something distantly remembered. It smells like the long farewell of a cold September.

When’s the last time I filled my hands with the stuff of real growing work? Or rather, when was the first?

•••

In truth, the seeds of this story were planted on a different farm, about 15 kilometres west of this one.

Over the winter, I’d written a story about the women’s hockey team from Baker Hutterite Community. In the months since then, the people I met became cherished friends, and their colony the locus of several happy summer visits.

On one of those visits, my friend Tirzah Maendel enlisted me to help pick corn from Baker’s green fields. She patiently showed me how to tell which ears were ripe, how to twist just right to snap them free of the stalk.

We worked like this for a few minutes, filling our arms with corn, getting lost in the towering plants.

“I have a confession,” I said, as I twisted another cob. “I thought that corn grew from the top of the stalk.”

It was a classic city-girl moment; she teased me about that sometimes in the weeks that followed. Even as soon as I’d said it, I was keenly aware of how silly it sounded: how could I not know that corn grew out the sides of the stalk?

While I am no genius, I like to consider myself a fairly well-informed person. I know a little about a lot of things: linguistics, history, politics. I can chat for long hours about the causes of complex social issues.

How could I not know something so basic, so completely mundane as how corn actually grows?

The more I thought about it, the more I thought I understood the problem. I’d seen corn on the stalk, of course, and I’ve eaten plenty. I’ve driven past cornfields countless times on long road trips across the great platter of the prairie.

But with a pane of glass between me and the corn, it became less of a plant, and more of a scene. An undifferentiated painting, esthetically pleasing, something to be enjoyed as a backdrop to the journey.

I saw acres of corn more clearly than a single stalk. Missed the trees for the forest.

So it’s not that I was entirely ignorant about corn; it’s that I’d just never really thought about it. I’d only ever received it as it was presented to me; a verdant field, a can of yellow kernels, a stack of cobs clad in their white-gold silks.

That is the disconnection, the way some of us urban people lost touch with the basic business of surviving, and growing and getting our hands in the dirt. We began to accept the world as it was given to us — no root, no source.

Milk without a cow. Corn without a stalk. Life, stripped of the context of how it unfurled.

In the city, you have the option of thinking about that context as much or as little as you want. You don’t ever have to find out how wheat becomes flour unless you really want to, but out here on the farm there is no way around it.

City people may not always see that divide. Farmers never lose sight of it.

“I used to help dad combining, and any combine I get in I get teary-eyed,” Taralea says. “I don’t know what it is. It’s like, you’re feeding the world. Nobody really sees that, I don’t think. A lot of people don’t. But farmers feel it.”

•••

The next morning, over eggs with marigold-yellow yolks laid by the Farm Away chickens — “those ladies worked hard to make our breakfast,” Tracy says — the hostess remembers something she read.

“They have a term now,” she says. “NDD — nature deficit disorder. It’s a thing, because kids are inside more.”

She laughs a little. “They have a term for everything now.”

Nature deficit disorder is not, to be clear, a clinically recognized disorder. It is better understood as a statement of concern, of things feared and observed, that urban-dwellers have grown too alienated from green growing things.

That divide, in theory, includes farming. Over the years, the sisters noticed the gap between rural and urban life, revealed by funny questions: for example, city folk sometimes ask how chickens can lay eggs without roosters.

How did it happen that two complementary worlds, urban and rural, became so disparate, so disconnected?

In a way, you’d expect it in the vast steel-and-concrete mazes of Los Angeles or Tokyo or New York. Yet even in Winnipeg, where many residents are only one or two generations removed from a farm, that life can seem distant.

On the surface, it makes little sense. Winnipeg is deeply connected to farm country, by space and by dollar. The city’s tallest building belongs to the Richardson International agriculture giant; plot the right course from its headquarters at Portage and Main, and you can be on a farm within 20 minutes.

And in a way, Manitoba itself was built on the farm. It was the fur trade that put a trading post on what would become Winnipeg; but it was agriculture that colonized the plains, drawing thousands of European settlers to transform the land from tallgrass and bush to crop fields and pasture.

Today, more than 17 million acres on nearly 15,000 farms spread across Manitoba. Agriculture and agri-food delivers $3 billion to the provincial GDP; nearly 40 per cent of Manitoba’s exports come from this sector.

Yet for many of us who grew up in the city, with no family or work ties outside the Perimeter, these facts fall away. We don’t often think about the struggles farmers face and the work it takes to grow the food we depend on.

Bridging that gap became part of Farm Away’s mission. It could be for gathering and relaxation, the sisters envisioned, but also for questions. A place to be immersed in farm or nature, and maybe learn something new.

“People my age, lots of them had grandparents that lived on farms,” Tracy says. “Now they don’t. They had kids, and they’d like their kids to be able to experience it, too, and maybe they don’t have the access to experience it.”

That experience, the sisters believed, had value. They should know, they’ve lived it their whole lives.

Across the world, cities have slowly sucked life out of farm country, drawing youth with promises of economic or personal opportunity. In Canada, there are signs this trend is reversing, but in the 1990s, one magazine reported, the exodus was so visible that some prairie farmers shared a dry one-liner: “Last one out, turn off the lights.”

In this milieu, Tracy and Taralea never considered leaving. They are farm people not just by birth, but by choice.

“I don’t really know any different,” Tracy says. “It’s just in your blood, it’s just in you. I would feel completely out of place if I was in the city. Actually, I do feel out of place in the city, even if we’re visiting. It doesn’t feel like home.”

Tracy lived two years in Winnipeg to get her agriculture diploma — “that was enough for me,” she says — and Taralea stayed for four. Although they had a place in the city, they drove back to the family farm every weekend.

“I can’t say I enjoyed being in Winnipeg,” Taralea says, with a matter-of-fact shrug. “It just seemed so big, and foreign and sterile. There’s trees and grass, but it just doesn’t feel the same, with all the houses side by side.”

Even as kids, they remember visiting cousins in the city and feeling the stark difference. At home, they worked on the farm alongside their parents, played in the nearby forests and bushes, fed and brushed cows for 4H projects.

But in Winnipeg, Taralea recalls, it felt like kids were “much more centred around their friends.” When she would stay for sleepovers, they would spent most of their time on the street with other kids, not so much with the family.

After they grew up and had families of their own, the sisters came to a new appreciation for those values. Now, they are betting others will want to share in what it means, to grow up connect through barn and family and soil.

“People want to be involved in how their food is grown,” Taralea says. “Let’s come out and learn, so you know where your bread comes from. You know there’s wheat in it, but do you know what it looks like, how it’s grown?”

Their idea is timely. Recent years have shown a resurgence in city folk trying to reconnect to the work of farming: community gardens, farmers markets. Programs offering the opportunity to buy food directly from the people who produce it.

Western Europe now boasts thousands of care farms, an innovative social enterprise designed to use farms as healing places for kids, seniors, people with mental illness. So far, that concept has been slow to cross the Atlantic.

And there are movements, too, to bring more of that work into cities — everything from backyard chickens, attracting a passionate core of advocates, to urban beekeeping, which launched in Winnipeg in 2016.

All of those signs point in the same direction. More people are hungering to rebuild the bridge between farm and city. To reconnect with the land and to recover the essential relationship between growing and living.

That’s where the sisters see Farm Away thriving. It can be whatever visitors want it to be: a simple retreat or an education. There is never a shortage of things to see or do on a farm, only a shortage of hands to help do them.

That means crop tours in the summer. At other times of year, there will be seeding to do, or silage piles to cover. New lambs will be born in March and some will need bottle-feeding. There are always fences that need building.

“Hopefully, everyone leaves a little bit more enlightened,” Taralea says.

•••

I should have brought someone out with me. Thinking of it as a work trip, I left my partner at home. So now, after the sisters leave for the night, after the chickens scamper back to their coop, I find myself at Farm Away all alone.

The quiet of the country wraps itself around me, so velveteen dark, so totally unlike my urban home.

Before night fell, I thought I might take a flashlight and go for a midnight walk in the pasture. Now, I am huddled against the outside wall of the house, unable to bring myself to step beyond the comforting halo of its yellow light.

Instead, I do the only thing I know how to do to stay calm. I open my laptop and start to write.

This is what I try to say: that for all the comforts of urban life, we have lost touch with something essential. The names of flowers that hide in the bushes, the growing season of grains, the ways that all things live and flourish.

As I write, a black calf is being born in one of Taralea’s pastures. It slips free of its mother and tumbles to the ground. It will stay there, in a stand of rangy prairie grasses, until it is ready to stand on knobby and trembling legs.

In the morning, Taralea takes me to meet the newborn. She checks to make sure it suckled, show me where it pulled the teats of its mother’s udder. The cow eyes us warily and delivers a long, low moo. Is that a warning?

“I don’t think so,” Taralea says. “She’s just talking to him.”

We spend the morning walking the pasture, the cows ambling curiously around us, closing in a great semicircle of bulk and languidly grinding jaws. I quiver as they gather, first with fear, then awe, then elation.

But for now, I am absorbed in the totality of a rural night. There are no growling engines. No firetruck sirens. No hushed arguments outside the window. I realize I’ve learned to find peace in that, in the sounds of other people.

I begin to understand why, in the days before cities and electric light, people believed monsters dwelled in the shadows. I begin to understand why we became afraid of the dark. I understand why we tell tales around fires.

The lights, the cities, the humming distraction. Great glittering artifices built on the premise that there is anything other than this: the cycle of day to night. Of life and death. Of summer to fall and winter, and then to spring onto summer.

A cycle of fences to be built and feed to be fermented. Of calves to be born and fields to be tended. Of roosters that shout at the light, and of long days that seem to sigh as they sink behind the tops of gossiping poplars.

We lit the cities at night to make it easy to get around. To make them feel safer. They changed us.

I want to say we became more afraid, but that’s not quite right. Maybe it’s more that we became consumed by the illusion that the world was ours, that we could bend everything in it as easily as we lit the vast shroud of the night.

On the farm, the illusions of control fall away. Farmers know this. Their livelihood depends on a multitude of factors they cannot manipulate — biology, the markets, the weather. They learn to bend with nature as long as they are able.

They become accustomed to the mysteries of the country night, and find their rest inside it.

It is raining. In the darkness, the rain makes its own music. There are no street-sweepers. No cars. No well-lubricated lovers staggering home from a night at the bar. No street lights buzzing just loudly enough to detect.

Nothing except for my thoughts, whispering in my head, and all the secrets the land rustles to tell me.

 

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca