Vanden Bosch elevator boss dies at 78

By Connor Lynch

CHESTERVILLE — After a lifetime of involvement in both agricultural and rural life, Stan Vanden Bosch, the namesake of Vanden Bosch elevators at Chesterville, died last month at age 78. He was diagnosed with cancer four years ago. It returned this January.

Born and raised on a dairy farm in the town of Perth, Vanden Bosch made the move to Chesterville in 1965, said his wife Betty. He’d been doing tile drainage in the Chesterville-area, and the length of the commute meant he was away from home during the week, only home on weekends.

So, they bought a farm near Chesterville and operated a dairy farm for a few years until they transitioned to the grain storage business.

The last of the Ayrshires dairy cattle went out the same day their second son was born, she said.

Starting out, the elevator had only one customer: Bob Smith, a farmer in the area, who still brings his crop there, she said. The family continues to crop the land and run the grain elevator at Chesterville, with Bosch’s two sons, Greg and Brent, co-owning the elevator, and two of his grandchildren, Sawyer and Shaye, working there.

Vanden Bosch wasn’t just active in the farm: A member of the Rotary club, he was a community-minded man and a great reader, particularly fond of Yukon-born journalist and non-fiction writer Pierre Berton. The family also had a family summer destination in a cottage at Robertson’s Lake, about two hours west of Chesterville.

Bosch was notorious for a saying enjoyed by farmers the province over: “Get ‘er done.”

No stranger to modern technology, one of Vanden Bosch’s crop-scouting and general entertainment devices was a drone, which he used as often as his arthritis would allow before he passed the drone on to his grandson, Sawyer, last year.

A distinguished and accomplished farmer, Vanden Bosch was recognized with various awards throughout his life, including the Angus Smith Memorial Award in 1977 for his work with the Chesterville Fair (Betty won the same award the year before) and the American Forage and Grassland council certificate in 1987, one of only two Ontario farmers to be recognized for their use of forages in crop rotation. He was named Dundas County’s farmer of the year in 2003.