OPINION: The kids can leave the farm but the farm doesn’t leave the kids

The farm I live on stands within eyeshot of two ski hills which have long been the main source of economic activity for this community. I was never a skier myself but I grew up with skiers and I came to associate that crowd with a lot of poor life choices. Sliding down hills too fast is habit-forming and a gateway to a lot of other risky behaviour. I thought the farm offered all the risks any normal child required so when my own children arrived, I decided to discourage extreme sports of all kinds, apart from 4-H calves and roofing.

I’m not proud of this, but when my kids inquired about skiing, I lied. I told them the hills were closed. I got them toboggans for the hill behind the house and spent a lot of time building igloos with them. When they asked about all the sodium lights on the hills in the distance I explained that they were growing hydroponic lettuce in greenhouses. They accepted that whopper for quite a long time, just as they accepted my story that the abandoned grain elevator in the harbour was the tooth fairy’s house and she stored all the baby teeth there. My eldest was 11 years old before she suddenly burst into the house and yelled, “Dad, Dad . . . they’re skiing again on the mountain!” I said that was very interesting and suggested that she could go over there and get a job in the cafeteria. She did and over the next few years all four of the children found their way into the hospitality industry.

I’m not sure which was worse. Restaurants share a lot of the same problems as skiing. You grow up watching people making poor life choices, spending too much money on food and drink that is laden with salt and sugar. The restaurant business model pretty much depends on getting the public to pay your staff for you through tips, which are a kind of charity. I noticed that all of the restaurants would also hand out shifts sparingly so that the kids were always eager for the work. In the shoulder seasons, there was often no work at all.

One by one, three of the kids soured on the restaurant business and found real jobs: One as an arborist, one in the military and one in early childhood education. But my eldest now runs a high-end restaurant in Calgary where the oil recession has been in full swing for a decade. This is a town where bumper stickers say things like, “Just give me one more oil boom. I promise not to blow it again.”

You could have 13 children and still not have one that wanted to go to the barn, let alone take over the farm one day. But it is interesting how the farm has shaped the career decisions each of them has made. My daughter fills her menu with as much locally-grown food as she can find. The military son says that growing up with a flock of sheep was great training for looking after a flock of men. “You have to know what they’re thinking all the time,” he says.

My other son took up rock climbing on the Escarpment, which led to wild food foraging, which led to mushrooms, which led to a study of trees and their relationship with mycelium. On the weekends he comes back to the bush on the farm to tend hundreds of logs he has inoculated with shitake, oyster and lion’s mane mushrooms. If all goes well, my sheep may be able to retire on the income from the mushrooms.

The influence of the ski hill remains a potent force. It used to be that I had to drive all the way to the city to feel like I wasn’t making enough money. Now I just have to drive into town. The traffic is a dangerous mix of hedge fund managers in BMW’s and old shepherds in pick-up trucks weaving down the road on a crop tour.

But as my old neighbour used to say, “It’s no hardship living on the highway.” The constant stream of traffic from the city brings with it tremendous diversity and opportunities that did not exist 40 years ago when I dreamed of making a living out of the farm. For many years, my neighbour ran a fruit stand that the big apple growers sneered at, but he made as much money as any other grower in the region because he asked for and got a retail price for what he grew.

The children will find their way in spite of all our efforts and even though their paths lead them away from the farm they will still carry an understanding of the farm with them wherever they go. In the end, that may be more important because it will make the community a better place to live.