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Ed Tait during his farm equipment auction June 9, 2015 in Meota, Saskatchewan starting his tractor for the last time. (John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail)
All in the family
Last month Carrie Tait’s parents sold their farm operation – but not the land itself. A personal journey through the shifting landscapes of family farms

One day, when my sister and I were little, our dad walked into the kitchen and said something that has haunted us our whole lives.

“I’m glad I had girls,” he said, “so they don’t have to grow up to be farmers.”

It was in the 1980s, when farming was no way to make money. He didn’t mean for it to haunt us, I’m sure. He didn’t even say it to us – it was just a casual comment on a day when one of the many things that can go wrong for farmers did go wrong. Neither my sister Ashley nor I remember the spark, but it must have been major. You don’t wish the end to a third-generation family farm because you can’t find a crescent wrench.

Ash and I didn’t grow up to be farmers. We didn’t marry farmers. And so last month, our parents, Ed and Bonnie Tait, auctioned off everything, from my great-grandpa’s scythe to their 2004 Gleaner R75 combine. Almost everything on the farm, that is – but not the farm itself. That will be taken over by tenants.

The technological chasm between the rusty scythe and silver combine encapsulates how grain farming – and therefore farm ownership – on the prairies has changed in the 89 years since my great-grandparents, Charles and Margaret Tait, settled here.

As a kid, my dad would stook (translation: gather) sheaves of oats so they were ready for the threshing machine. Today’s tractors and combines drive themselves. My grandpa and grandma built about 10 little wooden bins – brown with white trim – and used an old log structure to store a total of 15,000 bushels of grain. Now, my parents have room for 60,000 bushels in the metal Westeel-Rosco bins lining our farmyard. Seeds, chemicals, fertilizers, machinery – they are always changing and affecting farming’s pace and scale.

“It is a young people’s game,” my mom said to me this week.

One thing hasn’t changed: the way my branch of the Tait family values land. My parents are keeping their pasture and 1,280 cultivated acres – a radish patch compared to the mega-operations emerging in western Canada. Owning land, rather than selling canola, has always been the goal on this farm. Mom and dad’s tenants will fund retirement road trips up the Alaska highway and to Prince Edward Island.

The decision to hold on to their property titles puts them in the middle of Saskatchewan’s political fight over farmland. The battle is both hyper-local and global, as farmers and investors jostle to secure land, either to expand their operations or because they want to own tangible assets. In places like Meota, my hometown of 307 people, renting or selling land to one life-long friend means rejecting two dozen others. Meanwhile, the Saskatchewan government is reviewing whether outfits like pension funds should be allowed to buy farmland in the province. Retired farmers are sitting on land these types of investors want, and the offers are lucrative.

And so my parents’ decision to keep the land but auction the equipment isn’t about having daughters rather than sons; it is about balancing the economic, political, and sentimental factors that blanket the prairies.

Potential bidders at the Tait family farm equipment auction June 9, 2015 in Meota, Saskatchewan. (John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail)
Tractor sale and lemon meringue pie

Kim Kramer, a third-generation auctioneer, starts Ed and Bonnie Tait’s unreserved complete farm auction at 10:05 a.m. on June 9. It is in our farmyard, lined by the spruce trees my great-grandpa planted as a shelterbelt. The small stuff – socket sets, jugs of Roundup, a welding table, the scythe – sits on two rows of wooden pallets. The heavy machinery – grain trucks, tractors, the combine – is parked in a circle.

About 300 people mill about, mostly friends and family from around Meota, our lakeside village about 35 kilometres northwest of North Battleford. The vast majority are men. They wear ball caps and jeans. The older fellows wear suspenders.

Kim, like his brother Brendan and father Neil, wears red and calls out bids from the back of one of the Kramers’ red trucks. He taps his left thumb and pinkie finger on a ledge in time with his chants. He calls some farmers by name. There’s a can of ginger ale at his side. It is sunny, which is good for turnout on auction day; people will come by. But it hasn’t rained in weeks and some farmers are having to spend more money reseeding after frost killed some crops, which is bad for an auction itself.

Guy St. Amant, another retired farmer wearing a Saskatchewan Roughriders shirt, shakes my mom’s and dad’s hands at the start of the sale. “Good luck, guys,” he says.

Small-town farm auctions are community gatherings where sprayer nozzles and tandem axle grain trucks just happen to be for sale. Farmers go to support their neighbours, gossip about what others are willing to pay for a 1999 Hesston swather and eat Cando Country Catering’s lemon meringue pie. Mom and dad pay for everyone’s coffee.

The back-slapping stops at noon, after the tools and antiques have new owners. The crowd gathers around the heavy equipment. This is where all the money is. Internet bidders sign on.

Bonnie Tait and her sister Sherry Stalwick clean out the farm's shop. (John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail)

My dad sits on a 2000 John Deere F525 lawn mower, cartoonishly out of proportion with the massive machinery around him. His arms are crossed.

“Edwin is a third-generation farmer,” one of the auctioneers says over the loudspeakers. “Ed grew up on the family farm, along with his three sisters, Trudy, Marnie and Aleata.”

Dad looks down at the mower’s steering wheel. Checks his chewed-up fingernails. Toys with something dangling from the steering column. My mom stands a few feet behind him, part of the crowd. She fiddles with the rings on her fingers.

“Ed started farming with his father, Donald, in 1972,” the auctioneer says. “Ed and Bonnie were married in 1975 and built a home here right on the home quarter. They have two daughters.”

Dad cracks. He rubs his eyes under his wire-frame glasses with his right hand. He’s crying. To others, it might look like he has dust in his eyes. He looks down and his black Titleist hat shields him a bit.

The auctioneer rat-a-tat-tats on. His voice, his chant, it is all so familiar.



'It's big business now,' says third generation farmer
Globe and Mail reporter Carrie Tait's family is auctioning off farm equipment to earn money before her parents head into retirement.
Brightcove player

There were 117,781 farms in Saskatchewan in 1926, the year my great-grandparents started farming our home quarter. The number peaked at 142,391 in 1936, but has declined ever since: There were only 36,952 farms in Saskatchewan in 2011, down 16.6 per cent from 44,329 in 2006, according to the most recent census.

By way of comparison, the number of farms across the country dropped 10.3 per cent, to 205,730, in the same time frame. This comes as grain production balloons and farming equipment has become enormous – and nimble – in order to keep up with the amount of grain pouring into combine hoppers.

In absolute terms, Saskatchewan’s 7,377 lost farms represent the largest provincial decline in Canada. At last count, Saskatchewan hosted 18 per cent of the country’s farms, down from 19.3 per cent in 2006.

Farmland in Canada

Total number of farms per province
Statistics Canada, Census of Agriculture, CANSIM table 004-0001

But Saskatchewan’s farms are the biggest in the country – and growing. They averaged 1,668 acres in 2011, up from 1,449 acres in 2006.

“The economics of agriculture dictate that farms have to be larger,” Saskatchewan’s agriculture minister Lyle Stewart said in an interview a week after my family’s auction. “Farm equipment, for one thing, is very technologically advanced now, but it is expensive. It takes a certain land base to justify a line of farm equipment.

“You can’t really be small and survive in agriculture without either expanding your operation or getting out of the business.”

My parents, who grew mostly wheat, barley and canola, have rejected those options. They are taking a third path – a hybrid of the two. Their tenants’ rent will be largely determined by how well their crops do. It leaves mom and dad’s retirement income exposed to droughts, wheat midge and all of farmers’ other foes, but it also gives them running room when crops flourish and commodity markets cooperate. It is a risky retirement strategy.

Carrie Tait's great-grandma and grandpa. (photo courtesy of the Tait family)
An eight-horse team and a plow

My great-great-grandpa Walter Tait Sr. came to Canada in 1901 after hearing he could secure property in the New World for $10.

“Walter Tait, the shepherd at Pirntaton Farm south of Edinburgh, with no hope of ever owning land or significant property in Scotland, could see the advantage for his wife and family of 10 in moving to this new land,” a Tait – it doesn’t specify who – wrote in Footsteps In Time, a 522-page community history book composed by local residents.

My great-grandpa Charles followed in 1903, when he was nine. At 18, he homesteaded near Glaslyn, Sask., but gave up there because that land was too rocky and returned to the original Tait farm near Meota.

Charles and my great-grandma landed on the first patches of my family farm in 1926 – we’re practically squatters in Saskatchewan terms – just down the road from his dad’s homestead. One field was already cleared, the other was wild prairie and poplar bluffs.

“Charles worked very hard breaking the land with an eight-horse team and breaking plow,” Footsteps in Time recounts. “He was well known for his great strength, and combined with accuracy with an axe, was able to fell the six-to-10-foot young poplars and proceed with the breaking plow.”

Charlie and Maggie raised three boys and one girl on our farm. My grandpa and grandma added four kids to the clan. Then came my mom.

The three men who married my dad’s sisters have all worked on the farm – sometimes for a day or two, sometimes for months. All of the men and women who stood here before me are responsible for our farm’s success.

The original home on Ed and Bonnie Tait’s family farm (photo courtesy of the Tait family).

Now, demand for land like ours outstrips Saskatchewan’s supply. This imbalance is driving an economic and political shift in the province.

Saskatchewan farmers worked 61.6-million acres of cultivated and pasture land in 2011, census figures show. But collectively, farm operations producing agricultural goods with the intention of selling their products owned just 39.62 million acres, or 64 per cent, of the province’s farmland that year. In 2006, they owned 66 per cent of the land in use.

Farmers rented 24 per cent of Saskatchewan farmland from other owners in 2011, up from 20 per cent in 2006. All other options for accessing land, such as leasing from the government, declined.

The Tait family farm as seen from the air on June 9, 2015. (John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail)
Shifting landscapes

Farmland is lucrative, and therefore out of reach for some producers. The price of farmland in Saskatchewan rose by 18.7 per cent in 2014 and 28.5 per cent the year prior, according to Farm Credit Canada. By way of comparison, farmland in Alberta gained just 8.8 per cent last year and 12.9 per cent in 2013. Nationally, farmland appreciated 14.3 per cent in 2014 and 22.1 per cent in 2013.

Saskatchewan has strict rules on who can own farmland in the province, and those rules affect the market value of this type of property. In 1974, the government decreed that only Saskatchewan residents could own more than a quarter – which is equal to 160 acres – of farmland in the province. (Existing landholders outside Saskatchewan were grandfathered.) Legislators argued Saskatchewanians who make a living by farming should control the province’s agricultural resources.

The restriction kept a lid on land prices, which was good for farmers who wanted to buy more property in the province, but bad for folks who wanted or needed to get out of the game. Saskatchewan relaxed the law in 2002 to allow Canadian residents and Canadian corporations to buy land for agricultural purposes. This more closely aligned the province with regulations in Alberta and Manitoba. The value of Saskatchewan’s pastures and cultivated acres has been rising ever since. Some ownership restrictions remain, and because of the sharp interest in farmland from investors such as pension funds, Saskatchewan is in the midst of reviewing the rules.

Those in favour of letting outsiders own land, particularly as an investment, argue it allows local farmers the chance to expand their operations without taking on significant debt. Higher land prices also mean farmers leaving the business will get more money for their acres. Opponents argue it mean Saskatchewan farmers, especially young ones, are unable to secure property for themselves. (Much of the value in farming is derived from owning land.)

Brett Wilson, the Canadian financier, philanthropist and former TV personality, is among those who invested aggressively in Saskatchewan farmland when the province eased its protectionist laws. He’s a Saskatchewanian by birth, but initially lost the right to buy land in the province when he moved away.

Mr. Wilson has the capital to buy vast swaths of land and make it available to farmers who want to work more acres but have do not have the money or desire to own. He never farmed, but it was all around him as a kid: He grew up in North Battleford, had a lakeside cabin in Meota and hauled bales for cash in the summer. He is a hard-nose investor, but admits his Saskatchewan roots and family ties triggered his curiosity about investing in farmland.

Now, he works with about 30 farmers.

“Most of our deals are cash rentals,” he said. “But let’s just say we do some creative work with helping farmers get going.”

Mr. Wilson has assembled blocks of land near Estevan (population: 11,054), Weyburn (population: 10,484), and Colonsay (population: 475). His tenant selection process is politically correct: “All of my land is farmed by someone who lives local,” he said. “The deals I’ve cut with those farmers vary.”

Mr. Wilson will not reveal how many acres he owns. He did, however, say that while he is no longer collecting more property, he isn’t selling either.

Vancouver’s Torch River Agricultural Corp., which owns 12,000 acres near Choiceland (population: 381), employs a different strategy. It tries to make money by actually farming, rather than just collecting cash as a landlord. It’s an unusual approach to corporate farming.

You’re never going to grow really rich off of farming the land
David Hughes, Torch River’s chief executive

“You’re never going to grow really rich off of farming the land,” David Hughes, Torch River’s chief executive, said. “When you look at it from an investment point of view, the land is where the value is.”

One of the investment firm’s three partners grew up as a farm kid in the area. Romance, rather than financial logic, drives Torch River’s style.

For now. The land is still the prize.

“It is a long-term investment,” Mr. Hughes said. “[Farming] is not something you turn a profit on every year, but at some point down the road, if they liquidated, there’s real value there.”

Tension between Torch River and area farmers rose as the corporation started to accumulate land. Torch River eased those feelings by hiring a local farmer to run the operation, and by participating in community events such as curling and 4-H.

Corporate operations are no more immune to the inherent risks of farming than their smaller-scale counterparts. When Calgary’s Broadacre Agriculture Inc. went into bankruptcy protection last November, it owned 9,000 acres and leased another 56,000. That is 50 times larger than the cultivated acreage of my family’s farm, and five times larger than Torch River’s operation. Broadacre has eight employees in its head office. On the ground, it employed 60 people during harvest as well as four farm managers on monthly contracts.

“The company encountered serious difficulties relating to its first crop harvest in 2011, which did not generate a profit,” Broadacre’s chief financial officer said in a court document. “Its 2012 canola harvest was severely impaired by weather events that reduced anticipated revenues of $40-million to approximately $24-million.”

Broadacre’s revenue totalled $23-million in fiscal 2014 (reflecting the 2013 crop year). But the company’s net operational loss reached $9.18-million in fiscal 2014 and $12.19-million the year prior, according to court documents.

Now, Broadacre is liquidating land and selling equipment to pay creditors, according to court filings. Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, a publically traded company that started as a family business in British Columbia and held its first unreserved auction in 1958, has already hosted three sales for the defunct mega-farm, and the final sale is on July 14.

Meanwhile, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board purchased 115,000 acres of Saskatchewan farmland for $128-million in 2013. The laws allowed it, but increased interest from institutional and out-of-province investors prompted the right-leaning provincial government to reconsider the rules. Saskatchewan launched a consultation process in April, and banned organizations like CPPIB from buying more land until it is complete.

Ed Tait cleans the truck one last time in hopes getting a higher price at the auction.(John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail)
‘You can’t make more land’

The outcome of that debate will not change the trajectory of our farm. Barring financial catastrophe, my parents will never sell. Both sides of my family have been guided by one investing tip: “You can’t make more land.”

So while my parents have isolated themselves from the international spat over Saskatchewan farmland, they must navigate the local battleground. With a tight supply of land, friends are inevitably shut out.

But my 59-year-old mom and 61-year-old dad have air cover: My maternal cousin Jason Ray and his wife Amy are renting most of the Tait farm. Our operation wouldn’t exist if not for my mom (and the women who preceded her), so renting to Jason and Amy counts as keeping it in the family. Mom is the farm’s co-CEO, CFO, head of the legal and HR departments, and runs its complex catering business, focused on homegrown vegetables and butter tarts made from scratch. (Two neighbouring families secured smaller parcels of our land. I grew up with them, too.)

Mom and dad, while renting some of the land at fixed prices to give their retirement income a floor, struck crop-share deals tied to some of their other acres. The economics of crop-sharing are elastic. Under such agreements, landlords collect a percentage of the revenue tenants generate on the property, rather than a flat rental price. When farmers have a bad year – perhaps demand from China wanes, or strong production out of Brazil floods the global market, or it rains too much or too little – their revenue drops. But crop-sharing mitigates this pain because those farmers will write smaller cheques to their landlords. Conversely, during good years, tenants will fork over more cash compared to fixed rental deals, but their income will be stronger, too. In short, my parents and their crop-sharing tenants are splitting farming’s unpredictable risks and rewards.

But for my parents, it is about more than money. “I want to give the young guys a chance,” dad said years ago.

One day, my sister and I will try to do as my parents have done: honour our predecessors’ work on the farm and their wishes for its future: Keep it in the family. If we can do that, we will successfully balance the competing economic, political and sentimental factors weighing on our farm.

About 300 people, mostly family and friends, attended the Tait family farm auction. (John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail)
Tears, and a good day

Neil Kramer is getting ready to auction lot #25 – the combine. Nothing says farming like harvest, and combines are the glory machines of the season. Harvest measures how well farmers do each year, right down to the kernel. It means meals in the field because there’s no time to stop. It means sweltering days and nippy nights. Harvest air smells like dry hot dust mixed with grease.

“Now, give Eddie a little room – all right, he’s going to run that Gleaner combine,” Neil says.

Dad climbs into the cab. He starts the combine, spins the swath pickup, swings the auger out, and revs the machine up and down.

“Well guys, I’ll tell you what, we’ve got a rrrrreal nice combine here to go. Gleaner R75. Pretty hard to beat one of these guys,” Neil says. “This baby down here is an ’04 R75.”

Dad gets out and walks to a black pickup truck a few feet away. He leans on its box.

Neil starts the bidding at $100,000. Nothing. He drops to $80,000. Seventy-thousand. Sixty-thousand.

“We’ll go down to $50,000 and let’s get started,” Neil says. It is an instruction.

Dad puts his head down. He bites his lip.

Someone gets in at $50,000. Neil asks for $60,000. “Who came for it? We just got that starting bid, guys. Let’s get in there. She should be double that money.”

The ringmen yell “yeeep,” when bidders give the nod. We get to 60, 65, 70. Neil calls for more.

“Seventy-five, 75, 75, 75, get in there guys,” he says. Someone goes for it. A rival bidder counters with 80. Neil asks for 85. “Come on in guys, keep it live,” he says.

“Eighty-two and a half? Eighty-two and a half. Let’s go that way.” he says. A ringman finds a taker. Then up to 85.

“We’ll run her one more time,” Neil says, and dad climbs back into the cab. He revs the engine again. He spins the spreaders at the back of the machine. A bit of chaff flies out. He shuts off the combine, climbs down the ladder. It is the last time dad will ever get in and out of my parents’ combine. There are tears in his eyes. I join him at the truck. I rub his back. There are tears in my eyes, too.

The $85,000 bid stands. My dad walks over to the buyers – my great-grandpa’s nephew and his son – and shakes their hands. It is a fair price.

And it is a good day. The auction brings in more than the top end of mom and dad’s estimated range. Today’s tears were never about money.

The auction is one of the most significant milestones in our farm’s history. But what happened two nights prior will stick with me far longer, and best reflects what my great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents, achieved.

I sat cross-legged on the foot of mom and dad’s bed as they tucked in. The three of us were crying. I blubbered the truth: That my sister and I are so proud of them for making it 40 years with their marriage, bank accounts and limbs intact; that part of the reason I don’t want kids is because I wouldn’t be able to give them the childhood they gave me and Ashley as farm kids; and that while Ash and I are grateful they let us find our own way in life, a big part of us wishes one of us had grown up to be a farmer.

Through tears, shaking her head, my mom spoke.

“The farm isn’t going anywhere.”








The Neighbourly way to sell your old combine
Small town farm auctions serve as community gatherings, bring neighbours, family and friends together.(John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail)

Kramer Auction Ltd. – known just as “Kramers” to the farm set – is an institution around North Battleford, Sask. It is a generational family business, just like so many of its customers. Farmers relate to that. And Kramers relates to farming, and how it has changed.

Eiling Kramer conducted his first farm auction in 1949. The three generations of his family – Eiling, Neil, Kim and Brendan – sound alike, but their tools and style have changed in lockstep with the technology used in the machines they auction.

“I can remember as a kid, when grandpa would sell, it was totally different. It wasn’t the pace that it is nowadays, it was more laid back. He would always be telling jokes and stories,” Kim says. “He would even at times shut the PA system off, because he never used that stuff for years. He would just use his own voice. The crowd would go completely quiet when he would start talking, because they would want to hear his stories.”

Auctions were all-day affairs then, with breaks for lunch, dinner and maybe a drink. Now, farmers don’t have time to dawdle until sundown.

Eiling, who was also a long-time Saskatchewan NDP MLA, extracted bids from the crowd without a microphone. At my parent’s sale, some distant farmer bought the grain cart – a machine that holds freshly harvested grain when trucks hauling the kernels out of the field can’t keep up – by bidding online. Kramers launched its website in 1998 and added Internet bidding in 2004. They have expanded into land auctions too, as generational farms hit the end of the road.

Red remains the company colour. The trucks, the portable office (cash or cheque only), the remarkably clean Porta-Pottie trailer – all red. Staff shirts are red, their kids wear branded red coats and toques when tagging along. Kramers ringmen point at items on the auction block with red canes.

Family remains the backbone of the business. Kim and Brendan have a brother-in-law who’s an auctioneer; Kim credits his mom for keeping the operation on track. But when he talks about his family’s success, he talks about his grandpa. Eiling, long after his son Neil became the voice of the family, remained a crowd favourite until his death in 1999.

“They’d want to hear a joke and a story because it was always different,” Kim says. “Then he would sell an item or two, and that was it. Then he would go around and visit and handshake with people.”

Eiling knew every farmer by name – auctions were generally within a fairly tight radius of their home. Now, Kramers runs about 70 farm auctions a year in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Bidders need ID and proof they can pay, and they’re assigned buyer numbers because not all their faces are familiar. Sales run on schedule and usually wrap by 3 p.m. Marketing, rather than auctioneering, is key to the modern business.

“The actual bid-calling is just putting the finishing touch on it,” Kim says.

Good auctioneers captivate, engage and steer crowds. Modern farm auctions proceed like thriller novels – the pace is rapid, wealthy villains thwart friendly locals, neighbour competes against neighbour, some characters stealthily nod to indicate they aren’t backing down while their brash challengers yell and wave their arms. There are winners and losers.

The auctioneers mix chit-chat into their inaudible but culturally understood chant, especially when competing buyers play chicken, forcing suspenseful lulls. “Nice rain you guys had last week, eh? You’re gonna need a bigger truck to haul away all that canola. And right here we gotta Ford for the job. You’re gonna wish you spent that extra thousand when the hoppers overflow.”

It was never a question whether my parents would hire Kramers for our auction. It was just a matter of when. And so, 40 years after my mom and dad married, a Kramers auctioneer talks up a lawnmower at the Tait family farm auction.

“This baby here, she’ll turn on a dime, she’ll leave you a little change,” he says.

– Carrie Tait