Healthy crops start with healthy farmers
BY: Ashley Robinson, editor
As a farmer, your farm is your life. In most cases you live on your farm, meaning every waking hour is tied to your business. Because of this, it may not be easy to stay healthy while also keeping your farm healthy. We talked with a few Manitoba Pulse & Soybean Growers (MPSG) members about how they, or their farm, stay healthy and why it’s important to do so.
Healthy Soil, Healthy Farm
For MPSG board member Frank Prince, healthy soil is the backbone of his farm.
“It’s like your best cows. You got foot rot, and she can’t walk around. She’s not going to eat, and then she’s not going to feed herself or her calves. Soil health is the same way. If you have concrete out there and you’re trying to feed into it, nothing’s going to grow,” he says.
The Hartney, Man. farmer has spent most of his career working to take care of his soil and keep it healthy. He farms on sandier soil and when his family first started growing crops, they quickly learned they needed protect their most important asset – soil.
“Soil is like having an employee. If you want your employee to show up and work hard, you treat them well. It’s much the same with the soil. You don’t want it to blow away or wash away. You want it to hold nutrients and hold moisture. You’ll feed your plants so you grow high yields and make money,” Prince says.
To take care of their soil the Prince family has experimented with everything from cover crops to minimal tillage. They’ve found that depending on the crop they’re growing and the field they’re growing it in, they have to treat their soil differently. Strip tillage works well for their corn fields, along with planting soybeans into corn residue. The payoff for all this work has been increased yields leading to rising profits.
“We have no complaints about yields, and we don’t have dirt blowing away,” Prince explains. “When you get drought conditions we get higher yields, because it handles the stretch better.”
Running to Stay Healthy
Holland, Man. farmer Reg Marginet has always been a workout fiend, but he didn’t get the running bug until he made a bet with his sister in 2002 to run the Manitoba Marathon. Since then, he’s run it every year except for one.
“When I first started, I really got into it. I would get up at quarter to six in the morning, and I would run three miles, and then I would have breakfast and I’d be busy on the farm at seven o’clock,” Marginet says.
The 70-year-old doesn’t train as hard anymore, but he still enjoys it. Before he started running, he had always liked taking walks and doing physical activities such as participating in the Highland Games carrying competitions.
Marginet finds that during the winter it’s easy to become couch bound as he doesn’t have as much daily farmwork to do. He’s even found that in the spring he’ll be at his most fit, but then as the growing season unfolds and he gets busier with work, his fitness declines.
Running isn’t just about his physical health though – it helps his mental health too. It’s an opportunity to destress and get his mind off of work.
“Once you get into it, you’ll learn that’s all you really focus on when you’re running – this is how fast you can run the next half mile,” Marginet says. “It relaxes the mind and straightens the body.”