Many people have asked me how I ended up farming in New Brunswick. It is a fair question. I did not grow up on a farm. I went to a military school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and got my undergraduate degree from Harvard where I studied mostly Colonial American History.
I showed no great skills for gardening or even interest in farming while growing up. I am sure my mother thought long and hard about why I decided to farm. I think part of it had to do with me being the first of our family to go to college. Growing up I had no family members who were role models for going to college or for picking a career with a college education.
Everyone told me that I should be a lawyer but I had met few lawyers and none to inspire me to emulate them. By the time I learned about Sam Ervin during the impeachment of Richard Nixon, I was headed in other directions. Even Sam Ervin had some skeletons in his closet that might have made me nervous.
So I missed the law boards my senior year at Harvard. I like to think that was a good thing because I happen to like the life that I have lived. The following paragraphs come from my book, The Road To My Country.
But if we were not going to be lawyers what would we be? There could be only one answer. You had to go back to land to find yourself. It was only there that you could sort out what was good and bad. There you could find out what was important and how to live life the way it should be. That the roads had turned back to dirt was a good thing.
The land was what gave life to us all, and where we go when life was gone. The land was at the center of all, and how could you understand anything without being on the land? You take whatever road you can find to get to the land even if you have to build the road yourself.
With six thousand dollars from my mother, I bought an old farm of 140 acres on the shores of the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia. The first year was spend remodeling it with help from some college friends that followed me north. After the first year, most of them disappeared, and I was left with some cats and my two Labrador Retrievers.
Two years of hard work in Saint Croix Cove had given me tremendous respect for electricians, plumbers, painters, and carpenters. Fixing the house up had required learning enough of all trades to keep us from freezing to death. Spending time working with my hands had been good for me and convinced me that farming might be a life that I could love.
Working the land and doing it well had a great appeal to me. It seemed to connect me to my mother’s family. Some of those relatives still farmed or worked on the land. Our family had no history of lawyers, but we had a long history of farmers and millers.
So I decided to try farming. With some money from my father, I got my first few head of cattle, a John Deere 2120 tractor, and some basic farm equipment. It did not take long to learned enough to know that I was in the wrong place if I wanted to be serious about growing hay and cattle. The foggy shores of the Bay of Fundy were not an easy place to hay and the heavy soils made for even more challenges.
We looked from Newfoundland and Cape Breton to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. When we first saw the Tait farm in Tay Creek, we knew it was the place for us. We move there in the fall of 1974. I believe it was early November. There was already snow on the ground and we brought with us a few head of black Angus to go with the cattle we bought from Harvey Tait. That winter would be the last year, cattle were kept in a barn.
The next year we bought a round baler and set about building our first pole barn where we could keep the spring calves but the barn was a shed so they could spend plenty of time outside. The cows from then on wintered in the forest. We were officially doing things different from the ways recommended by the Department of Agriculture which maintained that round bales would never work in New Brunswick. Today most hay in New Brunswick is baled with round balers. There are more tales of the farm in my books and at my blog, The Canada I Miss.
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