Under the Canopy
On Outdoor Journal Radio's Under the Canopy podcast, former Minister of Natural Resources, Jerry Ouellette takes you along on the journey to see the places and meet the people that will help you find your outdoor passion and help you live a life close to nature and Under The Canopy.
Under the Canopy
Episode 72: Organic Farming with Mike Lanigan
Mike Lanigan, a trailblazer in organic farming from Northern Ontario, shares his compelling journey from the forestry world to nurturing the land with sustainable practices. This episode promises to enlighten you on the rigorous certification processes that organic farmers must navigate, offering an insider’s view into the commitment required to maintain these high standards. Discover how Mike has harnessed modern technology to preserve traditional farming values while ensuring animal welfare and environmental stewardship.
Finally, explore the historical and modern-day significance of farming with mules and horses. Our conversation takes us through the art of horse logging, a venture that is both environmentally friendly and economically challenging. From the importance of pollinators in farming ecosystems to innovative crop management techniques, this episode is a treasure trove of insights for any aspiring organic farmer. Whether you're curious about the impact of pesticides on bees or the generational knowledge passed down in farming families, there's something here for everyone passionate about sustainable living and organic agriculture.
Hi everybody. I'm Angelo Viola and I'm Pete Bowman. Now you might know us as the hosts of Canada's Favorite Fishing Show, but now we're hosting a podcast. That's right Every.
Speaker 2:Thursday, ang and I will be right here in your ears, bringing you a brand new episode of Outdoor Journal Radio.
Speaker 1:Now, what are we going to talk about for two hours every week?
Speaker 2:Well, you know there's going to be a lot of fishing.
Speaker 3:I knew exactly where those fish were going to be and how to catch them, and they were easy to catch. Yeah, but it's not just a fishing show.
Speaker 4:We're going to be talking to people from all facets of the outdoors From athletes, All the other guys would go golfing Me and Garth and Turk and all the Russians would go fishing.
Speaker 2:To scientists. But now that we're reforesting and all that.
Speaker 3:It's the perfect transmission environment for life.
Speaker 5:To chefs If any game isn't cooked properly, marinated, you will taste it.
Speaker 2:And whoever else will pick up the phone Wherever you are.
Speaker 1:Outdoor Journal Radio seeks to answer the questions and tell the stories of all those who enjoy being outside.
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Speaker 6:As the world gets louder and louder, the lessons of our natural world become harder and harder to hear, but they are still available to those who know where to listen. I'm Jerry Ouellette and I was honoured to serve as Ontario's Minister of Natural Resources. However, my journey into the woods didn't come from politics. Rather, it came from my time in the bush and a mushroom. In 2015, I was introduced to the birch-hungry fungus known as chaga, a tree conch with centuries of medicinal applications used by Indigenous peoples all over the globe. After nearly a decade of harvest use, testimonials and research, my skepticism has faded to obsession and I now spend my life dedicated to improving the lives of others through natural means. But that's not what the show is about. My pursuit of this strange mushroom and my passion for the outdoors has brought me to the places and around the people that are shaped by our natural world.
Speaker 6:On Outdoor Journal Radio's Under the Canopy podcast, I'm going to take you along with me to see the places, meet the people that will help you find your outdoor passion and help you live a life close to nature and under the canopy.
Speaker 6:So join me today for another great episode, and hopefully we can inspire a few more people to live their lives under the canopy, we can inspire a few more people to live their lives under the canopy Well. As always, we want to thank all the listeners all throughout Canada and the States and in Switzerland and Ghana and Trinidad and Tobago and all around the world. We really appreciate you listening to our program. Of course, I always say it all the time because we mean it. If you have any questions or you have any suggestions for shows, we'd be more than happy to have you. Let us know what you'd like to hear about and talk about and we can see what we can do to wrap, to bring it to your attention. But this morning we have a special guest. We've got an old friend of mine from Northern Ontario and it's Mike Lanigan, who's an organic farmer. Mike, welcome to the program.
Speaker 2:Hello Jerry, I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 6:Well, we appreciate it. And for those that recall the podcast I did with Pierre and we talked about a bunch of stuff that was happening outside of Timmins, this was the guy.
Speaker 2:This was the guy you still got that plane, plane, mike, I still have that airplane. I've had it since the early 80s and uh, um, it's. It's a whole podcast on its on its own to talk about what's going on with that airplane. But it's in a workshop right now getting a complete overhaul and I have my runway on the farm half built so it can come home and, and possibly one of my sons will, will take up flying. And uh, yeah, it's a 1940 piper cub, a j5, which is a three-place cub, and oh, I used to make pierre sick in that every, every trapping season.
Speaker 6:Well, he had a delicate tummy.
Speaker 2:What's that? Pierre had a delicate tummy and I wasn't easy on him, you know.
Speaker 6:Well, I think he's recovering well and pretty much recovered from his surgery now, so things are good there. But yeah, this was the plane that you were actually water skiing behind, if I remember correctly, right.
Speaker 2:Well, that's some of the stories. We wouldn't dare let the truth get in the way of a good story now, would we? Jerry?
Speaker 6:Yeah, that was certainly interesting, and I heard about the bada bing, bada bang, bada boom. What was it? The plywood.
Speaker 2:Oh, that was wonderful. We used to go up and down the rapid standing on a little sheet of plywood behind a boat, and we just had a lot of fun and uh, you know, I mean that that's the kind of stuff you got into when you didn't have the internet and cell phones and diversions from reality like that. But uh oh no, we had an awful lot of fun back there.
Speaker 6:Oh yeah, that was now now. Since then, you've moved down and now tell us about where you're from now, mike.
Speaker 2:So people get a sense, this is the home farm. I was a little boy here. My dad moved here when he retired at 45. He sold his construction company and bought a farm, and I moved here in the very early 60s and when my dad aged, I was working in Chapelleau, which is just down the road from Folliet where Pierre lives, and I was starting to get complacent in my job in forestry and I thought I needed a new challenge. So, by golly, if you want a new challenge, try to farm for a living. So I packed everything up and, uh, moved to this town of uxbridge, which is about an hour north of toronto, and I'm sitting in at the desk that was my dad's in in a, in a in a part of the house that he built in the 70s, and, uh, we're just carrying on doing the farmer stuff here on the old homestead.
Speaker 6:Right. So when, mike, just to elaborate a bit when you're working up in Chapleau in the forestry sector, what were you doing in the forestry sector?
Speaker 2:up there. Well, in Chapleau I worked for the Ministry of Natural Resources and it was my job to put the forest back. So I worked in timber and then that's where I met Pierre, as he was in Folliette, which had a little substation, so it was just me and the game warden that was at this big base in Folliette that had kind of been shut down, and but then after a while I moved to Chapelleau and then jumped ship from the government to the private sector and and I worked for Superior Forest Management out of Chapelleau. And uh, and I worked, uh, for superior forest management out of Chapelle and it was, I was the silvicultural coordinator. So I, it was my job to put the trees back from whence my logging companies removed them. So, um, oh yeah, we had a great time.
Speaker 2:I had my little plane tied up on the lake and, uh, uh, they actually bought me an airplane. The company bought me a company airplane and we put a camera mount inside it and we had we would do all our aerial photography. Oh, I see it was a gag and I could fly to meetings and stuff. It was a real luxury, yeah. But you know, in every job well, I work on enthusiasm. And when my enthusiasm started to wane after I've done it for a decade and a bit, I needed a new challenge. And then I came back to the family farm. My dad was quite aged and he didn't want to keep going and I thought well, I can do that. I didn't know what I was getting into. Surprise, surprise.
Speaker 6:Now you mentioned the game warden up Folliett Way and I always remember the story when I was up there in the 80s and it was just after it happened where the game warden and the OPP officer were fishing. And the OPP officer looked over the game warden. He says, well, the game warden, here, I guess we don't have to worry about fishing limits, do we? And the game warden looked back at him and said, yep, and we can go rob a bank right after we're done this, if you'd like Implying that you know it's okay to break your rules, we'll break mine too.
Speaker 2:There you go. That's a good one. We had a good relationship with the game warden and the police. You know the government all the government workers always hung out together. The police used to come to my little farm in Folliette to practice their handgun use, because there's no ranges anywhere near. So we had targets set up, and when they get bored they come for a coffee and then they'd practice their shooting.
Speaker 6:Oh, by that old sauna you had.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we had a sauna there and a barn and it was a real shack. I don't know if it's still standing or not, but it was the only farm for an awful long way. You know, we always had some pigs and chickens and turkeys and a couple of pigs. I think we even had a couple of cows at one time. All the neighbor kids who are now parents, they all remember to come out visiting the cows in Fouillette, at my place.
Speaker 6:Oh yeah, it's like when I was down in Newfoundland there it was you know well where is this place he said Newfoundland. They said to me they said, well, you go down here and when you get past the cow you turn right. And I said what he said yeah, you go down here and when you get past the cow you turn right. And I said what he said yeah, you go down the road and when you get past the cow you turn right. And I said the cow. He said oh, the cow was in the barn, it wasn't out, it was just like there you go.
Speaker 2:That's Newfoundland directions, eh.
Speaker 6:I remember the shack you were in when we had to slide the door, open the garage door sideways to walk into the building. When you and John were there.
Speaker 2:I did put hinges on it at one time.
Speaker 6:Yeah, that was something. Anyways, Mike, tell us a bit about the organic farming. What makes an organic farm organic Like? How does it get that?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean this could be a long tail, but the bottom line is you don't use chemicals to cure all your problems and to be able to be certified organic you've got to adhere to quite a stringent process and meet international standards of what's expected. So I mean I can't even envision how many pages that the organic standards is now I think it was 100 when I was doing it and to be able to really call yourself organic you needed to be certified. I mean, you can call yourself organic, but my neighbor said he was organic, he only used Roundup. But the standards are quite in-depth and the process to make those standards is very stringent. The record-keeping is atrocious and the inspection was so in-depth. I had an inspector at my farm once for a day and a half and they went through every bill and I mean you spend a lot of money on the farm. He, she went through every bill and she actually found one receipt that didn't match a seed purchase and it was that stringent and it took me a long time to find that receipt. It happened to be pinned on the wall at the feed store. They hadn't given it back to me when they were ordering. They didn't have a price, so I didn't have a bill to match this 50-pound of organic red clover seed I'd bought from the feed store.
Speaker 2:But the bottom line is we farm without the use of chemical fertilizers or chemical pesticides. And we but it's not just that there's the process. You go to farming. You've got to make sure you have enough room for the animals, you've got to have enough air, you've got to have enough sunlight, you've got to treat them right. You've got to carry them in a truck that's proper to the butcher shop. There's a lot more to it than just no chemicals. That's a real short answer. They actually had to have film pictures and film of my farm before they'd even consider it. They wanted to make sure that I lived a lifestyle that they wanted to put their name to. They wanted to make sure that I didn't grow GMO or beans down the road at a different farm and that I did things the way that they thought I should.
Speaker 2:And it's quite an in-depth thing. So when you see something that's certified organic, you can have faith in it, that someone has been well tortured to get that sticker on his product Right. And I was certified since 1991 until I shut down my business during COVID. But I was certified with different outfits. I was with ProCert, I was with the OCIA and also I was double certified with another outfit, demeter, which was one of the oldest certifying boards. They were right back from the 1920s in Germany. One of the oldest certifying boards. They were right back from the 1920s in Germany and it was quite an in-depth thing. To be certified organic.
Speaker 2:A lot of people now are being organic and not able to keep up with the records that are expected of them.
Speaker 2:So a lot of people now try to meet the standards but they don't write everything down. Oh really Well, I do have friends that are really good organic farmers and they follow the guidelines, but they just couldn't keep up with the records that are expected and they're in depth. I mean, I would have the inspector come here and they'd see that I was cutting bok choy and they would make me track that bok choy to the day that I started in the greenhouse, what soil I used in the tray, where I got the seed, where's the certificate for the seed, where is it planted. Show me in the records when you planted it, how many you planted and where it's going, and they would do that regularly and when you're growing 110 to 120 different varieties of vegetables. It gets pretty demanding and it was good that my one son that worked closely with me he was good with modern technologies so everything went in his phone so he could answer those questions a whole lot easier than this old farmer that was, you know, running ragged.
Speaker 6:So is there an advantage to being certified, Mike? Oh, you get credibility.
Speaker 2:I mean you get credibility. I mean you can't sell a product as organic without a certificate. Really, people would always ask you and you need a lot of trust to do that, whereas that sticker and that certification gives you that element of trust. And you know, nobody trusts the big guys. You know they think they're all out to scam you. I worked really hard to get my clientele to trust me. I had lots of farm tours and when someone bought a lettuce, they saw it growing in the field. They saw my big patch of kale and broccoli and cabbages. And when they, when they went to my little farmer's market in Thornhill, they had a good connection to it. And they, they knew I, I, I wasn't fibbing. And they, they saw how I, I kept the weeds down and um, they got to know it.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a real art to that. I actually used to teach a class on that, on weed control, and I use a tractor called a Farmall Cub. They're nine horsepower when they were brand new they were designed in the 30s to take the place of a mule and it basically cultivates a single row of vegetables, and I had five of them, all set up for different types of vegetables. So I had some that would do tiny little carrots with shields on, and then I had some that were higher tractors to do taller corn, and a lot of it is timely cultivation and also the love of a good, sharp hoe, and I had some workers that they hoed almost all the time they were here.
Speaker 6:So it's very costly to do all this, is it not?
Speaker 2:Oh, especially when you know we paid more than minimum wage and I had Jamaican workers here. I had two that were here until we retired and they came back year after year and, yeah, everyone has paid. Well, they always went home with more money than I made, but they earned every nickel of it. They worked hard for me, did a wonderful job and it made a good life for them Right, and we're still good life for them Right, and we're still in contact with them. We talk on the phone quite often, you know.
Speaker 6:So that's mostly because it's difficult to find workers committed to do the work here in Ontario.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can get someone for a year, that's good, but of course anyone with lots of motivation. They're not going to stay on a minimum wage job doing hard labor for long. So and then you could rely on them coming back, because this may, you know, so much more money than they'd make in Jamaica and you could expect them to return year after year until one of us retired first, until one of us retired first and I did have one fellow stay until he retired and then they actually get Canada pension when they're in Jamaica. So they're doing all right in their old age in Jamaica with a Canadian check.
Speaker 6:So when they come across they get room and board and a wage, correct?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, they get a trailer. I have a trailer set up for each person like a little mobile home and it meets the standard. The Canadian health inspector comes and they have to sign off to say they have enough room, they have heat, they have cooling, the fridge works, they have all their needs. And then every once in a while, without warning, the Jamaican liaison inspector would come and they would go out in the field and talk to them privately and if they had any grievances they'd come up and they'd go to their trailer and check it out, make sure everything's up to snuff. And it was well run. Some of the things you hear on the news, it's not the agriculture program Well run. Some of the things you hear on the news, it's not the agriculture program. It was well organized and well overseen by everybody and my workers.
Speaker 6:They wanted to come back every year and they were sad when I stopped farming. So, mike, tell us a bit about, for example, um, did you have animals, do you? Well, you, you had you mentioned about the ones up in foliette, but uh, same here on the farm here.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, it's a farmer weakness we have. We had a herd of herd of cows. There is some certifying boards for being organic that will not certify you if you do not have animals. They don't think you should buy fertilizer in a bag. So the one certifier Demeter they wanted me to have a well-managed herd of cattle and I had a bull, I had cows, I had calves and that's where we got our fertility from.
Speaker 2:Jerry is the management of their manure. So I take really good care of their manure. I would never give it to a friend, I'd never sell it to a customer. It was like selling blood off the farm and I needed every bit of their manure I could get and, as we stand right now, the farm has never been healthier and because it's taken, well, you know, some 30 years of mine to get this farm right up to snuff by, um, taking good care of the manure and spreading it at the appropriate times and and rotating my crops and, uh, taking really good care of it. But, yeah, we had, we had a herd of cows, uh, and we had, uh, we had turkeys and chickens and pigs and, um, every, everything that you could have and I sold every single thing to the end user at my farmer's market.
Speaker 2:I went to this farmer's market in thornhill for 29 and a half years every single saturday, yeah and and then, until the covid kind of beat me up. You know I couldn't get my job in workers. We struggled so hard to keep selling and they made us go to. You know we had to do online ordering and it was painful for an old guy that had a hard time getting a mic to work for this podcast this morning. It was a forced sort of retirement, which I'm so grateful that it happened, because I likely would have worked myself to death.
Speaker 6:So, mike, when you have these, you mentioned the cattle and that you have to feed them organic material as well. Where do you get that? Do you grow your own for that?
Speaker 2:I had, and that was the trick is that if you wanted chickens, I had to grow a field of of of grain and corn. And uh, and I would, I would grind that up myself. I had a well, I I had a mix mill and, uh, you would even put a bale of second cut alfalfa hay through it and it would chop it all up into powder and you'd mix that with your organic uh, and it's tricky to get organic seed all the time. So I've saved my organic corn seed for 30 or 40 years and every few years, when none of my neighbors have corn planted, I'll plant a row of corn just to save the seed from it so that it doesn't disappear. And I actually I put it on Facebook and offer it to anyone that wants it to keep a good cow corn. It's a really good variety, it grows really well, and when you see this beautiful cob of corn, you wouldn't know why anyone would even worry about doing a GMO breeding for this. It's just marvelous.
Speaker 6:So is that heritage seed, or is that something different as well?
Speaker 2:It's old, it doesn't have a name. I got it from some old organic farmer and it produces a big, beautiful ear of corn and really tall stalks. A lot of the modern farmers don't want to grow a big stock because it's wasted energy. They just want a little tall plant to grow a big cob. But this one grows well and uh, so I've always tried to save it and uh, not too much, uh, bug pressure. But yeah, back to the original questions. Yeah, I would grow everything. So I have a couple I have actually three old combines that are dying um of neglect out there. But I would get the corn with my corn picker and I would do grain with the combine and then I would mix it together in my hammer mill and I would do that every once a month because you know when you buy feed that's been around for five or six months, the quality diminishes. So I would do it regularly and my animals just flourished and if you follow the standards and if you follow some of the old ways, you don't have all of the pressures of sickness.
Speaker 2:I didn't have a sick cow here for 30 years and a lot of it was because I let the cows have everything that they needed so lots of fresh air. I don't put them in a closed up pen with no air moving. And also I had a closed herd. I didn't invite people to come give them pets and I didn't. I didn't get the vet to come here. If I had an emergency and the vet would come, I'd make sure he came here first with all clean clothes and stuff so that he couldn't bring something here.
Speaker 2:You know, one time he came here and he had all manure up on his shoulder where he'd been in doing internals in a cow and he came to my farm from a big dairy farm. I said, no, you're not going in my barn with like that, yeah. And he didn't even understand what would happen if he'd brought a sickness to me. But no, I mean I've had injuries. You know where things got hurt and I had the prolapsed uteruses and stuff. And you have to make the decision. If you're going to save the cow and have to use drugs, then it's no longer organic and I can't sell it at all. So if I had that happen, no longer organic and I can't sell it at all. So if I had that happen, we would have to.
Speaker 6:Well, sometimes my butcher would buy them if I'd have to make an intervention and so yeah, everything all the way along had to be certified organic and we had to prove it.
Speaker 2:So the cattle in that can't have drugs and medications then either in order to be organic, no, not for meat, never so all the way along. So you know we have to work very hard to do that. But the nice thing is that I had this little farmer's market that everything was sold by the small package. So the lettuces that I grew were sold for retail. My beef was sold for retail and I had a real strong following because it's not easy to find organic beef and especially they liked the way that I raised them. Not everyone likes killing animals for meat but my customers were grateful that they were well cared for. And my last market I sold an entire cow. It was 1,200 pounds and I sold it in nine minutes and I had ladies line up at my market at 3.15 in the morning to be first in line and they came in and they hoarded and I was completely gone in nine minutes.
Speaker 6:What time does the market open so people understand?
Speaker 2:Well, it opened at eight o'clock and they'd waited there from 3 15. They thought they could load up and go and I said no, I said I can't sell until we open. And uh, so they all stood. I had three ladies in line there and then at eight o'clock there was a big rush and they were. It was kind of a bit of a feeding frenzy, but uh, yeah, that was one of my better markets, you know right. But there was a certain demand.
Speaker 2:Uh, when I stopped killing animals, uh, a lot of my beef customers were some mad at me. They still call me once a year. There'll be someone calls hey, mike, have you, have you started killing cows again? And I said no, no, because I, I don't know. I told you, jerry, I don't know if you know, I've still got that big herd of cows and they're getting old, just like I am. I actually started a farm sanctuary. So I had this silly idea One day I was trying really hard to keep a baby calf alive. That was premature and anyways, I had this funny epiphany I didn't want to kill my cows anymore. And to keep this story as short as we can is that now I have a herd of cows and they're all mine from the old days. The youngest is eight and the oldest is 26. And they're spoiled, rotten here and uh, people from all over the world send donations to help me feed them, and uh, it's actually a registered charity now, uh, jerry so yeah, yeah, I actually have.
Speaker 2:People have put us in their will. So when, when they pass on, there's, there's a little donation coming to help feed the old cows. So if you want to bring your family out to cuddle with a cow someday, jerry, give me a call.
Speaker 3:Back in 2016,. Frank and I had a vision to amass the single largest database of muskie angling education material anywhere in the world.
Speaker 5:Our dream was to harness the knowledge of this amazing community and share it with passionate anglers just like you.
Speaker 3:Thus the Ugly Pike podcast was born and quickly grew to become one of the top fishing podcasts in North America.
Speaker 5:Step into the world of angling adventures and embrace the thrill of the catch with the Ugly Pike Podcast. Join us on our quest to understand what makes us different as anglers and to uncover what it takes to go after the infamous fish of 10,000 casts.
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Speaker 6:Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts. And now it's time for another testimonial for Chaga Health and Wellness. Okay, we're here with Kim from Bob Cajun and Kim, you had a great experience with the Chaga cream and your grandson. Can you tell us about that a bit?
Speaker 7:Yeah, so my grandson actually struggles with psoriasis. He's only 16 years old, so of course, the self-esteem right. He doesn't want his face all covered in scales and stuff like that. And I picked him up on a weekend to come and visit with me and I had overheard you talking to somebody about psoriasis. So it kind of piqued my interest and I thought I would ask you about that. And when you explained it to me I took a container home for him right and in one day he was over the moon, happy that his face looked clear.
Speaker 7:And he was and he's gonna be religiously doing it because he's so self-conscious about it so he tried other things uh, the, the medical system and things like that. And yeah, he just didn't have any success, correct, he had a prescription of cream and you know, it would sort of dry it up a little bit. But that was the problem it just dries it up and then it's flaky on his face and he doesn't really like that and it leaves a lot of little red blotchy stuff right.
Speaker 7:So after he rubbed that stuff on the chaga stuff he was. His face didn't look so angry, you know, because it's a red, angry sort of look on his face and it didn't look so angry, it looked soft and clear. So he was over the moon happy, and so I took him home, and then he messaged me after a couple of days to tell me that he's so, so happy that his skin looks clear.
Speaker 6:Great. Thanks very much, kim. From Bob Gajan, you're welcome. Okay, we interrupt this program to bring you a special offer from Chaga Health and Wellness. If you've listened this far and you're still wondering about this strange mushroom that I keep talking about and whether you would benefit from it or not, I may have something of interest to you. To thank you for listening to the show, I'm going to make trying Chaga that much easier by giving you a dollar off all our Chaga products at checkout. All you have to do is head over to our website, chagahealthandwellnesscom, place a few items in the cart and check out with the code CANOPY C-A-N-O-P-Y. If you're new to Chaga, I'd highly recommend the regular Chaga tea. This comes with 15 tea bags per package and each bag gives you around five or six cups of tea. Hey, thanks for listening Back to the episode. So, mike, in free range, you mentioned chickens and things like that as well. Free range chickens.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's a struggle because we also have free range predators.
Speaker 2:I mean we did have a pack of wolves here one year that killed three calves, 56 full grown turkeys and 65 chickens, and, oh goodness, I was losing sleep over that one. That pack of wolves died in the fall. I tried to make some of them die, but uh, um, they died a mange and I saw them going across the field in the fall and they had no, no fur from their shoulders back. So I knew that they weren't going to make it through the winter. And when that pack died I didn't have the same troubles anymore.
Speaker 2:But uh, it's, it's. You have to make sure it's not always free range, but they got to have lots of room, right, so, or they're moving. You know, sometimes it can be a, a coop that's on wheels, with a portable fencing system, but they've got to have a certain amount of, of, of, of square footage and, uh, lots of sunlight. And, um, the cows too can never be locked up in a pen for very long. You know, if they're sick or something you do. But uh, you kind of you kind of manage everything like they would in the 1950s when you couldn't control everything with a, with a vet or with a drug. Uh, you know, I've got, I've got an old textbook from agriculture I study and they said well, you know, a female mother pig is never healthy if it's not on pasture at least a third of the year. And you know this is something in modern agriculture they like to house everything up, so it's in a real nice, safe environment when in the old days they liked to have sunshine and exercise. So I'm always 30 years behind, jerry.
Speaker 6:Yeah, so something. I recall a couple of things. One was Morris O'Neill was a dairy farmer south of me when we lived in a place called Crooked Creek for a few years and Morris used to say, well, it was just south of Starkville, you know, east of Brownsville, if you know where all those places are Of course it's down the road and Morris used to say.
Speaker 6:he said you can always tell when the chickens, when it was going to how was the weather was going to be. If it was going to be a short rain, the chickens ran to get cover, but if it was going to rain for a long time, they just stayed out in the field and didn't worry about it. So you knew when it started raining.
Speaker 6:If the chickens were out and not running for cover, it was going to rain for a long time, but if they were running for cover, it was only going to be a short spurt. And you kind of learn these kind of different things. And and I also remember john jack mcgooey telling us that, um, because he had a small farm as well, but but yeah, and I remember him saying and you can enlighten me even more, and I never questioned it, I never found out anymore, but he said you can always tell, because if you got a goat, a cow and a horse, one of them got sick before the other and before they passed it on. So they knew if the goat got sick, that the cow and the horse was gonna get sick after, so they could deal with it right away. But these are kind of things that old farmers would pass on, information that you never really heard of, or at least I hadn't even thought about at that time.
Speaker 2:No, and sometimes it might be knowledge just stayed within a family, you know. And it may not even meet up to scientific review, you know. But who knows?
Speaker 6:So how did you deal with bugs and insects?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I mean they can be a real pain in the butt, and we used to use a lot of floating row cover. Floating what Row cover? It's a spun polyester, it's a fabric, and we'd buy these huge rolls. They'd be 50 feet wide and 1,200 feet long. And I have these great skids of sandbags here, and when we would put a crop in that was susceptible to bug pressure, we would cover them with this fabric and put sandbags all around the edge and the sun would go through and the rain would go through, but the bugs would just sit on the top and get pissed off at me.
Speaker 2:And so you planted the cabbages and broccoli. You could come by and there'd be the flea beetles and stuff sitting right on top in a cluster trying to find a way into the plants, and the plus side is that the bugs can't get in and it also makes it cozy and warm. So actually things do well in the early spring. In the summer it sometimes makes it too warm. So I mean broccoli and stuff like that. They don't like to be warm, so there's downsizes and then whenever you have to weed them, you have to undo. To undo it, you got to take all the sandbags off. You got to roll the fabric back. You got to hold them, weed them, then put it all back. So very labor intensive.
Speaker 2:Um, there's a material you put on, you cover it over and in. Before I had sandbags, I used to bury all the edges, so it was really intense to do. My fields were all in about 0.6 acre fields, so it was really intensive, but I grew beautiful crops under it. But you know, every couple of years these fabrics the ones I would buy were extra heavy and I could get three years out of them. You know, sometimes the weather would be hard on them and they'd start to break down after that and you did make a big pile of garbage at the end of it all. So there's a downsize, there's the purchase price, there's the installation, maintenance and then garbage at the end. But how?
Speaker 6:old were these plants or how big were the plants that you're putting it on top of? We transplant.
Speaker 2:It would just be the we would plant them and the same day we would cover them. Okay, so they'd be three inches tall, so the broccolis and savages, and after, sometimes after they got big and strong, then we'd uncover them. They were just fine then. Uh, this cover makes it cozy and warm, so it protects against frost. So sometimes we do this to plant our lettuces earlier, because you could go down to to a minus temperature of like minus three before they got killed, right, and, uh, you know, in the fall you could stretch your. We'd use these covers to protect some of the tender things like tomatoes and peppers, to get a bit more time out of them.
Speaker 2:A real skill set. This is a modern invention that came out in the 90s, this row cover, and it really made organic farming. It really changed it. But another thing I would often do is I often had three patches of different the plants that are susceptible to bug pressure. I would grow them in three different places. So sometimes kale in one place would get flea beetles real bad, but not in another. So my whole farm was in production. So I had about 29 and a half acres of crops and they were always rotating, they were always changing their location and so that the crop that is there today will help the crop that goes there next year, and there was a rotation, you know. So, oh yeah, we had lots of maps and flags in the field and, yeah, it was interesting.
Speaker 6:And how else did you? What else did you do? Did you introduce, you know, bugs that would eat the problem?
Speaker 2:bugs. Well, I did try that in the greenhouse. Mainly, I forget what we put inbugs. I think you know to try to do aphids and stuff, but they're very expensive and they're shipped from I think it was from manitoba, um right, but we didn't. I think we did it once as a trial, um, but uh, not much you know, what about bees?
Speaker 6:did you have bees? We?
Speaker 2:always had. We always had beehives. It was quite interesting the one year that I lost all my hives. They were poisoned by that neonic insecticide and I was out. I had buckwheat in my field. I used to grow buckwheat for the bees and also it's really good as a cover crop. And also it's really good as a cover crop and oh my goodness, they were just humming. There was a bee every three or four inches in this beautiful crop of buckwheat. And I had a school group coming and I thought, oh, I got to go show them the buckwheat and the bees. And I went out and there was no bees at all and I found some walking on the ground and after the school group left I went to the hive and the hive was empty. All the hives were empty and the bees were on the ground walking in circles. So I called the bee inspector and they come and they tested them and I found out at Christmas time that they had been poisoned by this neonic. It's a beautiful insecticide that controls pests on corn and soybeans and it turns out that a neighbor of mine about a kilometer away had planted corn at that time and when you plant the corn the neonic is on the seed and all you need is three bees to fly through that field and bring home that insecticide to the hive and it killed everything.
Speaker 2:And really that that next year, when I didn't have any bees, my crop of certain plants was absolutely disgusting. I had the sort of same size field of squash every year 0.6 acres of squash and the year that I did not have bees I got six tubs of squash. Six a tub is 40 pounds. That's how I harvested, so I had six tubs. The next year the universe brought me a a swarm of bees. I found a swarm of bees on the farm. Bees that's how they reproduce, is they'll. The queen will move with half the hive and and start a new one. Anyways, I found a swarm in an apple tree. I put it in a box and the next year I got 6,600 pounds off of the same size field and the only thing that I saw that changed is that I had pollinators right there in the garden.
Speaker 2:And uh, so we, my son, has beehives. Now he, I think he's got three or four hives. And so my son has beehives now I think he's got three or four hives, and it's just all part of that farm being an entity of itself. It has its own pollinators, it has its own fertilizer. The cows eat the grass, they make manure. I apply that manure and we get enough vegetables to maybe pay the tax bill and the insurance bill. And it all makes to make your farm healthy. And it takes a couple of generations. I've heard it takes three generations to make a farm what it should be.
Speaker 6:So mine's just about there yeah, well are the, are the? Are your kids taking over mike?
Speaker 2:well, my one son, uh rowan, he, he, he is. He has agreed to to take over um when I when I take a rest yeah, I mean the dirt, the dirt sleep, um, oh yeah, he said he'd take care of the cattle because I was worried that the cattle wouldn't have a, a home, you know right, and uh, so in my will I've left them all the equipment and the land to be able to farm after. And he's really good, he's a farmer, you know, right now he's an arborist working for the city of Ajax. When the COVID hit he went back and got training to be an arborist. And farm is not an easy, easy go and it's really nice when you get a government check every week and weekend's off. So he's happy and he can farm on the weekends, you know, just to have fun.
Speaker 6:So how many acres is it that you have?
Speaker 2:Yeah, my farm's just a hundred. I rent a couple of farms from the neighbors because my herd of cattle have never been this many animals I shouldn't say many animals. I've had this many cows before, but never this big. There's about 40,000 pounds of cows because they're all huge. And so in the old days I had eight cows, eight yearlings, eight calves, and a cow eats 4% of his body weight per day, so now I have 26 head, I think, but they're all 1800 or 2000 pounds. So they eat a lot and none of them leave. Well, I mean one leaves every year or so, but uh, um, they're all buried around the fence rows. But, um, yeah, I have to be able to meet their feed needs as I have to rent some land from my neighbors. So I had never made so much hay. I made 463 of those big round bales last year and they eat every single thing I give them, but they're all fat and dumpy. I've never had cows look so good.
Speaker 6:Now you mentioned about the wolves getting mange. Is there other wild animals that would transfer diseases to your animals or to your food?
Speaker 2:I've had foxes here cover with mange. Twice I found a fox hiding in an outbuilding just trying to stay warm because he was. They were suffering, but I don't know and I often thought that the pigeons in my barn would convey sickness. Now I know that they can get the bird flu and they can spread it to the chickens and stuff and we've been careful that way. But it's hard to keep the pigeons out of the barn. I've been working really hard to seal all the holes up because I'm afraid that they might bring something with all their poop all over the hay. You know, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know we always worried about rabies.
Speaker 6:Um, you know, we always worried about about rabies, you know, because cattle can get rabies too and um, yeah, when I was minister that was one of the things that was found very interesting was the third most common animal to be, uh, to have rabies was cattle. Oh my, the reason for that was because there was a hundred percent reporting of any cow that ever had rabies. Where? Fox and fox and number two. Most people. You know what number two was. Fox was number one.
Speaker 2:Number two is bats oh yeah, I should have guessed them. I had a friend get bit by a bat and he had rabies.
Speaker 2:Oh, really well they this a long time ago. It was was in grade seven and it was in the house and his mom was screaming and they were trying to get it out and it bit him when he tried to get him out and he was tested and he was treated for rabies back in the days when it was not a pleasant go. I don't think today it's good either, but he went through that thing where you get a big needle in your belly every day for a month or something.
Speaker 6:Yeah, well, fox rabies is almost completely gone in Ontario. They've eradicated it pretty much because of all the aerial drop, the bait drops that they've done.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I used to find them in the field and I often well, what's this? And I go, oh, what a neat idea.
Speaker 6:Yeah, and they use that technology.
Speaker 2:I'd find a little waxy little pellet and it'd have a sign on it say rabies vaccine or something, yeah, something like that. And I just left it there and they find everything. Foxes and wolves find everything. I dropped my cell phone once in the garden and I went back the next morning because I knew where. I jumped over a ditch and I thought, oh, I lost it there. And I went back and a wolf had found it and shoot it all up in the little bits and yeah, and it's a great big farm, but it was just telling me you know where to go almost gone but one of the big concerns is that there's a separate strain of raccoon rabies that has now made its way.
Speaker 6:I'm not positive, but I think there are some that have made its way across the border and Trump will probably take care of that right and put up a raccoon rabies mall.
Speaker 2:He'll take care of it all. We know He'll take care of it all we know.
Speaker 6:Anyways, yeah, because raccoon rabies is a big concern because they don't have the same abilities and far more raccoons than there was foxes out there, but rabies, like you said. You know, the mange took care of the wolves, and the same with foxes. Rabies used to knock the numbers back quite a bit. Foxes rabies used to knock the numbers back quite a bit. But when you start messing with nature like people do and they do all this, so virtually no fox rabies around anywhere anymore. The fox population increased immensely. And guess what foxes are eating? They're eating all the rabbits and the chickens and everything else out there. Once all the partridge and the wild rabbits are all gone, then they start consuming other areas and then we have different problems in other ways.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, the wolves had a good system for getting because I had a guard donkey and what the wolves would do is I watched them. One day I was working in the garden with a crew planting cabbages and I couldn't leave and I saw the wolves come across and they encircled a small field on three sides and they just sat down. And for an hour they just sat down. They didn't move a muscle and the donkey was giving them the eyeballs and the big mama cows were giving the eyeballs and they didn't do anything. And then all of a sudden, they raced into the herd and chased the babies under the electric fence. All of a sudden they raced into the herd and chased the babies under the electric fence. So and then they would attempt to devour, because I found the calves from previous attacks off by themselves just outside the wire. So this was their system they had to get the babies away from the guard donkey, was to chase them under the electric fence because the donkey couldn't follow right so a lot of people don't know about donkeys and wolves.
Speaker 6:Maybe you can elaborate on that a bit.
Speaker 2:I know about them, yeah I mean, the donkeys are the sweetest beast in the whole world, but they don't like canines and, uh, they kind of give them the eyeball and uh, and they'll trample them. I have the offspring of this old donkey. She died of old age at like 56 and, um, yeah, they live a long time. And I have this little donkey, uh, buckwheat, that was born here on the farm and, uh, she's not as as tough as as her mom was. But, um, if my dog goes into her pen, it's lookout. Um, oh, yeah, you'll kind of eyeball it and then she'll, she'll trample it and kick it and uh, I don't know how good they are keeping the wolves at bay, if they were big and tough or if there was lots of them, but uh, the wolves have a different. You know, if it's, if it's too hard at this farm, they'll go to the neighbors, right, and they'll leave this one alone. Mules are even tougher because mules are bigger, faster and they're tough.
Speaker 6:So a mule I know what a mule is, but maybe you can just kind of let our listeners know oh yeah, Well, a mule is. What's the difference between a mule and a donkey?
Speaker 2:Well, a mule usually has a mother of a horse and a father of a of a of a donkey. So, um, jack, and so they're a crossbreed and they can't breed.
Speaker 2:Then they're, they're uh, I don't know what you call that okay, yeah and and um, but a mule is half and half and uh, uh, they're one of the toughest things in the world. I think the King of France gave a breeding team of big jack donkeys to George Washington as a I think it was a congratulatory present. After winning the war, the Revolutionary War they sent them some breeding big donkeys mammoth donkeys they call it, and this is what sort of set America apart. They had some of the best mules in the world Because they're big and they can breed these big mammoth donkeys to Perthrons and Belgians and they get a really big, strong mule for working.
Speaker 2:But it takes a special person to be able to farm with mules. They're smarter than most humans and they take someone that's very gentle to train them. They've got a long memory. And donkeys too. You can't train them with a stick, You've got to use just the carrot. And oh, I just love donkeys, they're just sweethearts. The one I have here. I have a pack saddle for it and I haven't used it for a long time, but she used to just follow me when I was repairing and maintaining fences and I'd put all my tools and rolls of barbed wire in her pack saddle and she'd just follow me along and I had often planned to go camping with the donkey on the pack saddle, you know, because she could carry my cans of beer and all the food.
Speaker 2:And I never did get that far. But you know, you got to have dreams.
Speaker 6:Oh, yeah, yeah. I had a friend of mine bless his soul, doug who was a horse guy and he used to go down to the Milwaukee Fair every year and he would drive the Milwaukee beer wagon with his team of horses that he'd bring down. Oh, okay, Did he have big Belgians or Clydesdales?
Speaker 2:No well, he preferred Percherons himself, but I think they were Clydes. I think, yeah, Budweiser had Clydes.
Speaker 6:Yeah, I think and anyways, he used to tell me about getting those large mules from Clydes or Belgians and Percherons, that they would crossbreed and be in large, very large mules that were very impressive and hardworking and do lots of work. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, and I had some here and I never got them to working. I sold them beforehand. They were a bit neglected and it was hard to train a big, tough, neglected mule. Oh, that got older. But I did at one time have a team of Belgians here that we had equipment for them here on the farm. So I cultivated and disked and pulled hay rides and logged in the bush. I had sleighs that I used in the bush and I loved it.
Speaker 2:And up north, back to Pierre, myself and Pierre used to log with horses and you know it's funny because we're both allergic to horses. So when it was 20 below it didn't bother us. But when it got warm out I could tell where Pierre was. I could hear him sneezing over his chainsaw. Really, yeah, yeah, we had a couple of horses there. We had a, an old moth eating percheron that's what they call them when they're gray and kind of getting old. His name was King. And then we had a big, bad Belgian that tried to kill both of us and well, would they be Pierre's, or were they Armand's horses?
Speaker 2:No, they were Armand's yeah.
Speaker 6:Yeah, I figured that.
Speaker 2:It was all Armand's deal and me and Pierre worked for Armand.
Speaker 6:Yeah, Armand for those is Pierre's older brother.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he still has a good bunch of horses there and he still works hard with I think he has Belgians.
Speaker 6:I'm not sure what he's got right now, but I know he's a horse guy and appreciates them. Yeah, horse logging was something that we tried to do a bit of to promote when I was in as minister, but the industry was not favorable about it at all because horse logging is less impact on the environment, but not only that, but has a large impact of individuals working in that area. So it's, you know, you've got all the work and the care and the animals and all that, so it's a lot more. You'll get a lot more people working in those fields, and places like Folliette, where they were, could employ a lot more individuals if they're horse logging as opposed to mechanized harming forestry as they do now for most cases. But anyways, those were days gone by. Another talk on another podcast. But, mike, how can people you know, how can people start their own organic garden or farm or what do they look for and where do they?
Speaker 7:find the guidelines.
Speaker 2:How can they find out more information? You want to start a farm. The first thing you do is marry a dentist. Pay in the bills on it or on a farm is really hard. I mean, my bills here at the farm are, you know, I pay eight thousand in taxes, about almost the same in insurance, and that's not counting debt or anything else, and it's really hard. The prices have not kept up. I mean, in 1991, I got two and a quarter for a lettuce and now I just checked on the website here and you can buy them for $2.97. So it's only gone up about 20% or 25% in the last 40 years and it just doesn't cover the bills.
Speaker 2:It's a hard, hard goal. But you know I'm not as supportive as I used to be. I used to try to encourage people all the time to try to be farmers, but it's getting hard now. It's hard to buy land. It's hard to. You can maybe borrow or rent land, but you just get it healthy, Then you lose it. So I'm not as supportive as I used to be. But I don't want to stop someone that has the has the drive, because I think there's a genetic weakness that us, we farmers, have, that we have to farm, even if it hurts us. It's just something we have to do. We always have to grow, we always have to keep animals. There's something that we have to do, but the best way.
Speaker 2:If you want to be a farmer, there's an intern outfit in North America called CRAFT Collaborative that's an acronym Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training and it is just marvelous. It has a listing of all the farms that are enrolled and if you want to grow herbs, then you can find a farm that grows herbs and they'll take you on as an intern, and I don't. Most places don't pay you very much, it's mainly to learn. But the key is you can't be, you can't teach someone that craft if you're not making a living at it. So when I took on interns on the craft program to be vegetable growers, I was making a living growing vegetables. So when you weren't going to one that had the lawyer as a wife or husband, you have one that's making a living and it's just absolutely marvelous. And I had some interns here that went on to great and wonderful things. They learned a lot from me. Then they went to college, Then they went to university and now this one girl owns a farm down in the 519 area code and she's just prospering and it's marvelous.
Speaker 2:Now there's lots of support too from the EFAO, which is the what's the EFAO? Efao another acronym Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario. They put on lots of classes and courses and they can guide you to move toward an ecologically sound way of agriculture. And yeah, I mean, and the certifying bodies there's a few of them out there. There's a local one here, I think, based in Lindsay, called ProCert. I mean, these guys won't give you any guidance on how to do it, they just tell you the standards, so you're not actually allowed to ask the inspector well, what would you do?
Speaker 2:They're only there to observe what you're doing and record it. So pro cert is a big one. A demeter is that? Uh one that's international, that was based in germany um, that goes way back. And another international one is the organic crop improvement association. Those are the certifying boards, but the craft thing is just absolutely.
Speaker 6:ProCert just outside of Lindsay and Cambrai. I had to go by their building about well. It was in the past month and I saw a for sale sign on the building. So I'm not sure where they're moving to, because I had been in to see them about some of the other aspects of what to do and how to do it.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, I hope they're still going.
Speaker 6:I'm not sure, because I saw the building was for sale, which was surprising.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know. I don't know, but things do change. I don't know whether organic farming is growing. I know that the amount of profits they make maybe don't make up for the amount of work you have to do. You know just the record keeping. It was hard for me at the end to be able to meet their demands, because now the demands are based Everything's recorded in spreadsheets and on the computer and I just I wasn't able to do that. All mine was in a book and it doesn't put everything together as well.
Speaker 6:So, mike, if somebody just wants their own organic garden, where do they start, how do they find seed and how do they get the details of what you need to do to be in compliance with all that?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I guess it's the website that looks up all those things. I mean, if you went on to the ProCert one, you can easily download their standards. The EFAO is much more human-friendly. They're there to help farmers or people that want to be farmers, and they put on lots of courses for that all the time. They have workshops throughout the winter, every month there's two or three different ones, and they put on a lot of farm tours. And also, I guess there's the NFU, national Farmers Union, of which I'm a member. They put on lots of farm tours so someone that's local and they're growing organic seed, you can go and wander around and pick their brains. And yeah, today, with it used to be all a book, you know you'd buy a $50 book and that's what you studied. Now it's, it's, it's, it's all on the Internet. It's different. We used to have to find an old farmer to learn from, and now you catch a long-gone farmer on.
Speaker 6:YouTube. Well, mike, we really appreciate you taking the time, mike, to enlighten us on organic farming and what's it all about and what's the difference in the hows and the how-to and the how-don'ts. It was shocking to hear about the corn and a kilometer or a kilometer and a half away and your bees dying off from just walking on it three bees and getting infected and killing all your bees off and the impact there, and I'm sure a lot of people don't realize that these sort of things happen and what's involved to make a make a difference. But certainly you know, asre always said, the most important thing we can do is the is take care and make sure we know the food we're putting into our body to make us what we are today, and it's just a something a little bit different that we're learning out there under the canopy. But yeah, well, thanks very much, mike. We really appreciate you taking the time absolute pleasure.
Speaker 2:Pleasure, jerry. We'll see you again soon, my friend.
Speaker 6:As always. Okay, bye, folks.
Speaker 4:How did a small-town sheet metal mechanic come to build one of Canada's most iconic fishing lodges? I'm your host, steve Niedzwiecki, and you'll find out about that and a whole lot more on the Outdoor Journal, radio Network's newest podcast, diaries of a Lodge Owner. But this podcast will be more than that. Every week on Diaries of a Lodge Owner, I'm going to introduce you to a ton of great people, share their stories of our trials, tribulations and inspirations, learn and have plenty of laughs along the way.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile we're sitting there bobbing along trying to figure out how to catch a bass and we both decided one day we were going to be on television doing a fishing show.
Speaker 4:My hands get sore a little bit when I'm reeling in all those bass in the summertime, but that might be for more fishing than it was punching.
Speaker 2:So confidently you said hey, pat have you ever eaten a trout?
Speaker 4:Find Diaries of a Lodge Owner now on Spotify, apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.