FARM 23 - Junior Farmers' 'Century Farm Show' showcases farm farmilies
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
Last year, the Huron Perth Junior Farmers embarked on an ambitious project: to highlight 12 Century Farms over the course of the year (and the families that own them) to bring attention to the program and to tell the story of agriculture in Huron and Perth Counties.
The project began in January of 2022 and now the 12th and final episode is due to be released soon after unexpected delays. The final episode will be an expanded story featuring Huron-Bruce MPP and Minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Lisa Thompson and the story of her Century Farm, which began in the family of her husband, Dennis Schiestel.
However, the idea for the project began nearly a year before the episodes started to air.
Nick Vinnicombe of Walton, in an interview with The Citizen, said the project stretched back to when he first joined the Huron Perth Junior Farmers in the fall of 2020. In his first few months with the organization, members were looking for ways to further promote the organization and the work it does. Focusing on the century farm program and its local supporters, he said, only made sense and planning then began about a year ago.
Vinnicombe is now the president of the organization, but also owns his own videography business, Lake Affect Media, and works with FauxPop Media of Goderich as well. He has put those skills to use in producing the videos, which are now being broadcast online, as well as on social media and television, with the help of fellow Junior Farmer members Lauren Bos and Jolande Oudshoorn, both of Auburn, who work together, serving as the hosts of the show (though Vinnicombe would go on to co-host a handful of episodes as well, though that effort came with added challenges, being in front of the camera, rather than behind it).
The first 15-minute episode focused on the farm of Tom and Bev Prout, who live in the Exeter area. The hosts are Bos and Oudshoorn, who were, at the time of the episode’s creation, the president and vice-president, respectively, of the local chapter of the Junior Farmers.
The first episode tells the story of the Prouts’ small-scale farm, which, over five generations, has produced aggregates, cash crops, beef and even bees and honey.
The Prouts are Junior Farmer alumni and say their farm is a place for new ideas where community members are welcomed to learn about the traditions of both agriculture and horticulture.
The second episode, made available at the end of February, featured Hugh and Rhonda Love’s century farm in Perth County.
The farm has been in the Love family for over 125 years. Over that time, it has been home to dairy, beef, hogs and cash crop operations, facing a number of challenges along the way.
While each generation of the family has taken the farm in a new direction, a devotion to Clydesdale horses has provided a through-line that has persisted over the years. Horses from the farm have been sent to national and international destinations, earning recognition at many competitions and shows. The family’s horses and their success even resulted in a relationship with Anheuser-Busch.
The third episode focused on Walton’s McGavin family, specifically Neil and one of his sons, Jeff.
In the episode, the two men recounted the history of their third-generation, 200-acre cash crop farm.
The location was ahead of the green energy curve, generating electricity from a dam and water wheel installed by Neil’s father Gordon decades before the green energy movement began to take hold.
While the farm was the original location of the historic McGavin Farm Equipment, which has since merged with Robert’s Farm Equipment and is now run by Jeff and his brother Brian, it is now home to the Freedom Syrup sugar shack, which donates its proceeds to the families of fallen veterans.
The episodes would continue over the course of the year, with Vinnicombe hosting his first episode, number four, alongside Oudshoorn. That episode focused on Doug Johnston and Maplevue Farms Inc., a dairy farm in Perth County.
The fifth episode, hosted by Oudshoorn and Bos, focused on the farm of Don Dodds, a well-known, well-respected 4-H leader and plowing judge in Huron County.
The sixth episode focused on North Perth’s Johnstondale Farms, followed by Huron County’s Coleman Family Farm for episode seven, the Murray family and Avonhill Farms of Perth County for the eighth episode, Steve and Frank Hallahan of East Wawanosh and their farm that was established in 1856 for the ninth episode, Jamie Rose in the 10th episode and Huron County Warden Glen McNeil and his Heather Holme Holsteins in the 11th episode.
The century farm program was established by the Junior Farmers of Ontario as part of Canada’s centennial celebration in 1967. It remains the only centennial project that has persisted to the current day. (The Junior Farmers of Ontario now even offer add-on signs that signify 125, 150, 200 and now 225 years - the sign which Oudshoorn designed herself - for farms that have remained in the same family for that period of time.)
Supported by the Huron County Museum’s Heritage Fund and the Huron County Federation of Agriculture, the show can be viewed on the Huron Perth Junior Farmers’ Facebook page, as well as on Vinnicombe’s Lake Affect Media site and FauxPop Media’s The Staysh. It can also be viewed on LocalOne via Hay Communications.
Now that all but one of the episodes have aired (though they have all been filmed), both Vinnicombe and Oudshoorn have had time to reflect back on the project and the impact it has had across the two counties... and whether there is still more work that can be done.
Earlier this month, Oudshoorn said she was very happy with how the whole thing went. The push behind it was to, in a way, reintroduce the century farm project to the two counties after it had gradually faded from active conversation, and she thinks they helped do that.
Locally, she said, there has been an uptick in family farms requesting signs and, even as they were interviewing some families throughout the process, they were met by some who had never even heard about the program.
Personally, she said it would be difficult for her to highlight one of the episodes over another, but because of her lengthy and continuing history and involvement with 4-H clubs in Huron County, interviewing Don Dodds was special for her. He is so full of knowledge and stories, she said, that it certainly made for an interesting installment in the series.
On the Dodds farm, specifically, he told stories about his family having to clear all of the land and carve out the roads and pathways themselves, a level of work that is almost unfathomable today.
She says that, while nothing has been made official, there have been discussions among the members about continuing to highlight the importance of and the stories behind century farms, but expanding it to bring in farms from all over the province.
Vinnicombe agreed with Oudshoorn, saying he felt it all went really well. He said he loved, on a personal level, learning more about the farms and hearing the families’ stories when they would film a new episode.
He said that families dated back to purchasing the property from the the Crown and to hear all of that history and the work that had been completed on the land over time was really interesting to him.
Perhaps due to his history of growing up on a family farm himself, but he said he liked the history that came with some of the smaller family farms and the historic equipment and machinery that many of them still had. It might not have had the shine that new equipment does, but it was often still up for doing the job, he said.
From a technical standpoint, since Vinnicombe was the one who did all of the videography and the post-production, he said it was a neat challenge and he was happy to be a part of it. When he would host episodes, it was a little tougher, running the behind-the-camera operation while being in front of the camera at the same time, but he said it was a fun challenge for him.
To view the episodes, find the Huron Perth Junior Farmers on Facebook.