I grew up in the 1940s and 50s on a small farm about 15 kilometres west of Kitchener. My parents – a school teacher and an immigrant from Germany who fled Hitler before he became Chancellor – bought a 50-acre pile of sand and gravel that wise observers said could never be profitable.

Dad agreed that selling livestock, milk and eggs at market prices would be a recipe for disaster, so he chose to specialize so he could realize premium prices. He chose purebred Yorkshire pigs, a fortuitous choice because England began importing pork during the war and then countries around the world sought Canada’s best genetics.

He also invested in purebred Holsteins, one of which captured All-Canadian young bull honours and sold to a Colombian for almost enough money to buy another 100 acres.

But times were tough for farmers, and I recall walking in bare feet to one-room, eight-grade SS#8 Rosebank school and lunching on lard or mashed-potato sandwiches. We had a two-seater outhouse, Mom grew vegetables and picked raspberries, strawberries and red currants to sell at the Kitchener market and then we helped peddle the leftovers door to door in the new Forest Hill subdivision. She also kept a few chickens for eggs and meat.

We separated the milk from our small herd of about 15 to 18 milking cows and fed the skim milk to the pigs so they would have smooth, white skin under short hair to look their best for the show circuit, which began at New Hamburg and Cambridge, moved on to the provincial championship at Erin and then the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Toronto. Dad never went a year without at least one first at the Royal. I loved showing pigs, especially the year we had twin six-month-old boars and I took the Junior Championship with the twin that the judge had mysteriously placed fourth in his class while my father’s twin took first. The judge obviously could not tell the difference between the twins, and we could only because one’s ears were slightly different than the other’s.

I recall driving a team of horses while neighbours heaved sheaves of oats or wheat unto the wagon. The threshing machine was in the barn, powered by an old steel-wheeled monster tractor. The barn dust was unbelievable, especially when I was the brother who drew mow duty. Threshing was a team operation with five farmers co-operating to buy the equipment and help each other harvest; meals were always generous and laid out on planks mounted on trestles.

Things changed dramatically when combines and balers arrived, but so did neighbourhood team work.

It was a different world for children and teenagers. The closest friends my age lived a kilometre or more away, so I we grew up in a society of adults. We also grew up with morning and evening barn chores and shirtless summers of hard work. But I also recall the solitude of scuffling corn or cultivating a field; it provided plenty of time for innovative problem-solving and imaginations.

I think the biggest revolution of my time was the opening of Waterloo-Oxford District Secondary School. I was in the second ninth-grade class; my older brother in the first. Before that school opened, it was a rarity for a “farm kid” to attend “continuation school” in the nearest village, in our case New Dundee. The typical pattern was also for the brightest and best children to move to off-farm jobs and futures; that left the “dullards” to farm, and that persisted for generations before ours. It had a profound impact on farming and rural society.

Now the brightest and best farm children gain university degrees before taking over the family farm and that, too, has had a profound impact, not only on the economics and productivity of farming, but also on rural societies. The days of “poor farmers” are over and now many are managing assets in the multi-millions.

I have been privileged to have a front-row observation seat as an agriculture reporter for 54 years; my first freelance assignment in 1963 was for the Farmers Advocate under publisher Doug Waterston of London whose wife, Elizabeth, was one of my English professors at the University of Western Ontario. Today I still freelance for a farm publication based in London and others. What great luck! •

— By Jim Romahn