How Did All This Start?

About me?

First of all I’m going to blame genetics and Dick King Smith.

Not really, but also really.

I come from a family with farming history, as many of us do I’m sure. Some days I’m convinced all their hopes for the future of agriculture somehow distilled into my veins and here I am to do this thing. They couldn’t have picked a worse candidate.

Then there’s Mr Smith. An author of a number of childrens books (a lot of them in fact) which lovingly describe the pastoral life of British farming life and make it seem like a great idea. I was obsessed with “The Sheep Pig” when I was a kid, the book that would later be adapted to be the movie Babe. This is important because it totally speaks to the childhood disappointment that has made me want to spitefully become a sheep farmer. In Canada at least we have this thing called “Battle of the Books” and it is something of a team jeopardy model but with an emphasis on literacy. I was a voracious reader and was always on the team. In about 4th grade, shortly after Babe came out, the final championship deciding tie breaker question was in reference to a book where a pig became a sheepdog. I wasn’t playing that round but I sat INCENSED in the crowd as they gave the opposing team a pity point for “Babe” and we lost the district championship. I cried to my mother that it was in fact “The Sheep Pig” by Dick King Smith and I was so sad that we didn’t win. I learned in that moment that things can be set in motion to sit on your heart and one day you’ll do something with it. I don’t know why little kid me loved Farmer Hogget so much, maybe some past life recollection of minding flocks in open fields, I don’t know. I just know that I loved sheep.

My family was dedicated to keeping an understanding of country living and source of food in everyone’s awareness. My mom says I was born in the wrong place, being a mid 80s suburban kid. However, my family did a good job. It was important to them that the coming kids know that meat doesn’t come in plastic wrap at the grocery store and that there is a living breathing process across everything we consume.

Every year I was treated to tickets to grand prix night at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, which meant a day of frolicking about exhibition/international centre. My autistic little sponge brain absorbed an awful lot more than anyone ever guessed. I learned about the secondary products primary agriculture makes. I looked at crops; I looked at butter, cheese, fleeces. Everything was so exciting and tactile and interesting. It all was plain info that made sense. You see, as I said I’m autistic. People are very complicated, yet I found ways to bond with people over asking questions about butter carvings and fleece processing. I had questions about chickens, bunnies, and pigeons. People warmly wanted to share their knowledge with me.  They smiled and seemed interested in my curiosity. For a kid like me who struggled through every day to understand what it was people wanted, it was the one day a year that I never had to guess if someone liked me or not. They were happy to talk to me.

I dragged my poor mom through barn after barn of horses and livestock. I needed to know everything about every animal I came across. I was obsessed. There were so many creatures, they were all amazing. I didn’t understand why it was deemed unreasonable why I couldn’t just put all of them in the backyard, clearly I had learned enough to know how to look after them.

I was cheeky and I was clever, and in those early years it became clear to me that animals made more sense than people and obviously I was eventually going to be a farmer.

Back to why I am mad at Dick King Smith. He made it sound like everyone just ended up living on a smallholding like it was a normal life progression. I grew up in southern Ontario. Boy was I about to get a shock about how real estate actually works.

At one point my grandfather decided he wanted a bit of a “gentleman farmer” property. It was in St Clement’s and surrounded by the Mennonite farms. They tapped my grandfather’s sugar bush in spring. They were super indulgent when little me in my marshmallow snowsuit asked about how the harnesses worked on the big horses and how they made syrup and what they did. If I woke up early enough on Saturdays I could catch Papa on the way to St Jacob’s market. Willy (the west highland white terrier) and I would get cured meats and tiny tim donuts for breakfast. We would walk around and talk about grown things, and foods. Papa would even let me sit and watch the auctions after walking yards and yards of pens looking at livestock. He always wrapped his arm around me. I think it was both to prevent me from accidently bidding, but also a moment where we had a silent understanding of loving watching animals.

I never met my Dad’s Nanny and Pop but I lived through hours of stories about him tilling field with the big old horse, and Nanny making pies on the old McCleary stove in the basement. Selling them to cottagers coming through Shanty Bay on the weekends. How she made preserves and breads, how my dad used to go help, how my aunt used to take him and Pops their lunch in the old metal tins.

Farming lived around me in the idealism of simplicity. Sure it wasn’t easy, but with heart and care you could at least be right, even if everything went wrong.

Being an Ontario kid, not born on a farm, who wants to farm puts one in an incredibly frustrating circumstance.

I lived rurally with an ex of mine for some time. I helped on horse farms and sheep farms. I learned a lot about agriculture and everything. If it wasn’t for him I’d have stayed, but cheaters do how they do (turns out he’s actually good luck chuck, but I’m sure we’ll get to that at some later point).

When I returned to “city” life in Guelph I was already a couple years deep in researching how one starts to become a farmer. My Paternal side hails from Nova Scotia. Upon visiting the province, I felt like I left my whole heart and soul there and now I’m just trying to work a way to go back and reunite with myself.

So here we are.

I have an amazing husband and awesome pets. Everyone it seems is on board for this project of ridiculousness. Fact is, we will never afford a farm, not even a house, in the area we’re in. So here we are trying to find a way to bravely leap 2000km away to start over in a whole new province, where property is affordable.

The province is depressed and quiet. The median age sits around 52. Yet I know over a dozen families who’ve gone in the last few years and never looked back.

Not only do I want my sheep farm, to offer a way to carry agriculture forward in this post plague world in an uncertain economy. I also want us to find a way to breathe life back into a forgotten part of the country. Well, not necessarily forgotten, it is stolen land, that will also come up in future.

So here we are, sharing this adventure.

I am queer and nonbinary. I’m autistic with a whole big laundry list that goes with it. I’m disabled and have been told I’ll never be of any use. Yes I’m leftist as heck, and I know I’m up against a lot when it comes to the agriculture/homesteading worald. This is part of why I’m doing this. I know there are lots of people like me who struggle to see themselves represented in this area of happenings. Here I am. Let’s talk about it. I want you to live your dreams just like I’m trying to live mine.

Thank you for stopping by Autistic On The Range.

Quin Poxleitner