by John Demont
Marj has always liked a daylight start: because she’s fondest of the world at that hour but also because cattle ranching is what economists like to call “labour intensive” toil. Toil is my word, not Marj’s. That’s simply not how she sees things. Spring, when the two-year-old heifers calve, may mean a parade of eighteen-hour days wrestling with half-ton animals out in the calving pasture. It may mean checking every head of cattle daily and new calves twice or even three times in the run of twenty-four hours. (“No daylight,” she tells me, “is wasted.”) But she thinks of it as “a time of rejuvenation. The air smells so fresh, the crocuses are growing, everything is new and fresh and young.”
Don’t expect her to complain, either, about the summer days, which also start before light, since it’s the easiest time to check the cattle and the mosquitoes aren’t buzzing yet. To hear her tell it, no better time can be had on this earth than when dozens of family members descend on the ranch for the annual ritual of branding the calves in June. Things get easier in the fall, when they get the hay in, fix the corrals, vaccinate the calves and wean them from their mothers. The rest of the time is spent preparing for winter, during which she says the cows “pretty much take care of themselves”—a statement that I discover is not quite true.
It is, by Alberta standards, a balmy minus two farren-heit by the time we set out. Normally Marj would have her rifle propped up in the passenger seat. Since I’m there, we’re unarmed as we take a right past the grey mailbox that just says “R.R. 1 Hanna, Alberta.” We pass her two saddle horses—Yikes, who is reddish, Vegas, mostly black, and a donkey that goes by Jenny inside a fence close to the road. Marj hangs a left and stops. In a greenish canvas jacket, yellow work gloves and pull-on rain boots, she gets out to open the gate.
This is the “West Place” ranch, since expanded from the original Jager land, where she, daughter Janet and son-in-law Steven run three hundred pairs of cows and calves year-round. To keep predators out and the cattle in, their three ranches have sixty-nine miles of three- or five-strand barbed wire fencing, strung between wooden posts sunk sixteen feet apart. At sixty-nine cents a foot, that’s one of their biggest costs. So part of every day is spent splicing damaged fence or, when it’s beyond repair, rebuilding the entire section.
A dozen or so scattered heifers and calves give us the eye. And well they should: in time the good-quality ones, along with young yearling bulls, will be sold to other ranchers for breeding. Steers (castrated bulls) and older heifers go to feed-lots to be fattened for slaughter. It’s a Darwinian world on a cattle ranch; producers need to get rid of animals that lower the genetic quality of the herd. So Marj is always examining the cow-calf pairs to see which ones are doing well and which ones aren’t. “That time pays off when it is culling time,” she explains. Each year around 10 percent of her breeding herd is sold at an auction.
As we walk around, Marj tells me that she’s looking for other things too. “You’ve got to know, are they satisfied?” she says. “Are they wandering too much? If they’re wandering too much, they’re looking for something. They need minerals. They need salt. They need grass. Maybe the water is dirty.” She fiddles with a siphon, capable of moving eleven to twelve gallons of water from a coulee to a water trough every thirty seconds when wide open. Then she scrambles down an incline, shovel in hand. She keeps talking as she chops a water hole in the ice for the cattle. Marj has got a bad back and on days like today feels the chill in her bones, several of which have been broken in on-the-job mishaps. But ranches die without water.
They also need grass. It takes two years for a calf to reach full size, which is 1,200 to 1,400 pounds for a cow and a little less for a bull. Cows, as we know, have a fairly narrow range of activities. They sleep, they stare, they move their bowels, they wander slowly around. Occasionally, when scared, they take off with a little gallop. Mostly, in their own distinctive way, they eat. They swallow grass. The food comes back up into their mouths as cud, which they chew again. Because Marj’s cattle spend most of the year out on the pasture, it takes thirty acres of grassland to raise a single head of cattle.
Back on dry land she uses her hand to ruffle snow off the ground cover. At the “Home Place,” a trio of creeks meet on a large flood plain that is naturally irrigated during spring runoff or during large rainfalls. The 2000–2009 period brought droughts, complete with associated grasshopper infestations, rivalling those seen by her grandparents. The past three years, though, were characterized by better-than-average rain and decent winter snowfalls. Consequently, her cattle have had lots of prairie wool, a hardy and nutritious native grass for grazing.
Some things have changed a lot since her grandparents first broke ground in this area, Marj says. Being able to “read the grass” is 100 percent the same. “You have to understand what time of year cattle prefer what kind of grass. Tame grass, the stuff reseeded by man, is typically at its best in the late spring and early summer,” she says. “You’d better be using that then if you’ve got some and then save your prairie grass for this time of year, because that’s when it shines. It’s great stuff to winter cows on. They stay healthy. There’s lots of minerals and lots of nutrients in it. It’s just something you learn.”
WE’RE back in the truck, heading east, then north, then east again. From the looks of it we could turn southward and, except for the occasional cross fence, not hit a single thing until we reached Cessford, where the Nesters still farm. Shifting down and up, Marj tells me how her dad, Jack, stayed in school until grade eight, then began driving teams of horses and pitching bundles of hay like his brothers. His first trip to Calgary was to enlist in the Canadian army after receiving his conscription letter. He served in Britain and northwest Europe from February 1943 until he was discharged three years later. Then he came back to work the family farm.
On the way home he passed ghost towns, abandoned homesteads and shells of grain elevators. So many people just up and left from southeastern Alberta during the Dirty Thirites that the provincial government moved in to administer vast regions of the dry belt that no longer could sustain themselves. In 1938 three “special areas” were created to be administered by the provincially run Special Areas Board. Newcomers with the stomach for it could purchase twenty-year leases for abandoned lands. In the early 1950s, Jack acquired 2,560 acres on the Berry Creek, which was in Special Area 2.
“It was just a dot,” says Marj. “There was a grain elevator. A little country school where fourteen was the biggest class ever. I still remember being amazed at all the other school buses and kids on my first day of grade one. But you are who you are and it was a great place to grow up.” When opportunity knocked, Jack added to the farm. Marj remembers her mom Lillian’s big garden on the ranch homestead, the parade of family dogs and the saddle horses—Sandy, Dixie and Starr—which were the main mode of transportation for her and her brother.
There were only two other girls in the area. So Marj grew up rough and tough, doing what the boys did. “Chasing cattle, feeding cows, butchering beef, chickens and pigs, helping get the milk cow in so that Jack could milk her.” They fished in the creek beside their house. The kids taught her how to play fastball and hockey and to go tobogganing. “I would go and check cattle with Dad on horseback, always watching the wildlife, learning to respect the weather,” she says.
She finished high school and got a job for a while in an accounting office. (“I learned what I didn’t want to be,” she says. “I was inside all of the time. I felt like a gopher.”) At nineteen she married Greg Veno, who grew up about forty miles northwest of the Nester place, but went to high school in Cessford. He and Marj met on the school bus. “We had similar backgrounds,” she recalls. “We both knew how to laugh and have a lot of fun while we worked or whatever we were doing. We were best friends before we were anything and remained best friends through thick and thin.”
For five years they managed a feedlot near Bassano. It was enlightening to be around the owner, Bud Stewart, who showed them how
to feed cattle to butcher weight, how to deal with meat packers and how to hedge cattle stocks on the commodities market to protect against prices heading the wrong way. Marj calls what they learned a “university-class education that no school could offer at the time.” But they were kids with dreams. They wanted to keep the family narrative moving forward. And then they heard about this land.
WHEN Greg died, Marj knew she couldn’t keep raising cattle and growing wheat by herself. So she bought some grass and hayseed. That first spring her dad, nephew and brother-in-law helped her seed all the farmland to hay and grass for the cattle. The rain helped: twenty-one inches the first year and eighteen each for the next two years. Getting rid of the crops allowed her to trade in her combine for a new haybine, a baler and a baler-mower. She bought Angus bulls to crossbreed with the two hundred Limousin cows she already owned. Then she used the resulting crossbred heifer calves to build her herd up to three hundred cows. Marj called the result “cattle that work for me, not me for them.” For the next five years she and her daughter, Janet, worked the range, cutting and baling the hay and raising the cattle. “The days were long—daylight to dark,” says Marj. “But hard work kept me sane. Or at least, I thought I was.”
Her focus, besides keeping the farm afloat, was ensuring that Janet got to play sports and do the other things teenage kids got to do. That meant a major dose of empty nest syndrome when her daughter—often the only person Marj saw during the workweek—headed off to college in Lethbridge. Worried about becoming “some kind of kooky eccentric,” Marj found a young guy who wanted to learn, please excuse me, the ropes of cattle ranching. She put him on the payroll and gave his family and him a place to live. That took the pressure off Janet to come home on weekends to help out. It also gave Marj the leeway to have a life. At a bull sale in 1995 she met Murray, a cattleman from Ontario who had taken to raising Angus beef in the Chauvin area of Alberta. “As time passed he became a permanent fixture” is how Marj sums up the courtship. They married in 1998.
Our feet make a bubble-wrap noise as we traverse East Place, where the ground is sandy and covered with lots of natural bush. The water table is uncommonly high for this country: the dugouts are spring fed; the water wells are about a hundred feet deep but never run dry. That allows Marj and Murray to raise 180 cow-calf pairs and a hundred yearling heifers for nine months of the year here. Marj knows what she can get for her cattle: $3,500 or $3,600 for a breeding bull, sixty to seventy cents per pound for a slaughter cow and $1,200 to $1,500 for a heifer. She also knows that profit margins are variable depending upon a whole range of factors: the world market for beef, how much supply is out there, the public perception of her product. In other words, they are price takers rather than makers, in economics-speak. So the easiest way to maximize profits is by keeping costs down and timing the market so that she sells on the price highs, not the lows.
Marj checks the gate—the start of deer season is days off—and considers the water holes. Then she looks northward, stands straight and says, “I think that’s a bull moose.” Marj gets out her binoculars, scopes the animal a couple of hundred yards away. She says, “Oh yeah, that’s a bull moose,” then hands the glasses to me. There turn out to be two of them. We trade the glasses back and forth, watching them grapple using their antlers for dominance. Marj tries to get their attention with a moose call. We can’t tell, from this distance, if they notice or not. But after a while they saunter off.
This isn’t the sort of thing I see every day. For Marj, who likes the wild better than cities, it is. “You get to see nature from the perspective of how it really is,” she says of her life. “It isn’t in a zoo or a book. It’s out there. It’s pretty easy to drive by at sixty miles an hour and not even see that stuff. Just slow down and take your time and you see that little three-point buck that was standing at the gate.”
At which point I ask myself—what little three-point buck? For that reason, I vow to try paying attention when we get back in the truck. Whether it’s the focus or just coincidence, all of a sudden animal life is everywhere: an owl sitting on a big rock, a weird little bird that Marj tells me is a prairie chicken, a coyote that lives another day because Marj doesn’t have her rifle with her today. The three ranches, she tells me, support mule deer, antelope and, during the last ten years or so, more moose and elk. Marj says the Hungarian partridge, which I gather is some kind of pheasant, finds good habitat to thrive there regardless of coyotes and foxes. Her land is also on the main migratory flight path of the Canada goose and millions of ducks, which like to drop in.
In a copse of trees near the road she slows down to point out a pair of white-tailed deer. They freeze for a minute, then bound away as others join them. By the time the last one disappears I’ve counted twenty-seven. I realize that could be more than the total of all the deer I’ve glimpsed in the wild in my lifetime.
WEST Place, which Marj owns herself, is twenty miles off. The occasional gas well—ugly, black and often fenced off—breaks the ice-frosted grassy plain. Ranchers only own the surface rights of the land; what’s underneath is the possession of the province of Alberta, which auctions off the mineral rights. Gas wells are a real pain in the ass if something goes wrong, Marj says. Most of the time, the ranchers are happy for the royalty the well operator pays them.
Once your eyes get accustomed you can tell that it wasn’t always so empty around here. Some of the old homesteads—the ones abandoned when their owners gave up hope, were starved out or went broke back in the early thirties—are just a remnant of a wall, a foundation or a corral now. In others, abandoned more recently, it’s like a set for The Walking Dead: skeletons of old trucks in the yard, pigeons flying in and out through broken windows. Some people just couldn’t take the isolation, the economic uncertainty. They blew their brains out with dope or booze or their guns. Or, in most cases, one day they just left.
When she and Greg moved into the area thirty-two years ago, it wasn’t exactly Yonge and Bloor in Toronto. They had neighbours. But a lot of them were getting up there, wanted to retire and had no kids interested in the farming or ranching life. Or they had financial issues that forced them to sell out and try something else. All told, forty families who used to live on or around her land have packed up and vamoosed since she arrived. “Leonard and Martha Faupel sold to us and another neighbour to retire in 1989,” she says, running through the list. “Clarence Heggen wanted to retire 1988. Ed Housch retired sometime in the late eighties. Hector Lloyd moved on to other things in 2002 or 2003. Eric Walper moved on to other things 2000. Wayne Faupel moved to another area to farm in 1996.”
It’s about 3 p.m. The sky is darkening and the temperature dropping as we make a little detour. There’s nothing remotely derelict about the Senkiw Ukrainian Orthodox Church. It’s white, small and wooden, with a gabled roof topped by a small cupola bearing a mounted cross. The windows are glassed in, the small cemetery next to it neat and orderly. Senkiw is the surname of lots of settlers from the western Ukraine who settled in Alberta and Manitoba. Someone somewhere still looks after the church, which I’m guessing still holds services when a Ukrainian cleric makes his way to these parts. Also well maintained is the graveyard next door, where I imagine a lot of those Senkiws are buried, which adds a mournful quality of the scene.
When Marj and Greg bought West Place from old Leonard Faupel in 1989, it was about a third of the size it is now. It was also mostly a wheat farm. “I knew what I knew best,” she says, “and it wasn’t farming.” Now the prairie grass from the seed they planted feeds two hundred cow-calf pairs year-round. The ranch is gently rolling prairie with some bluffs of poplar and willow trees. Marj shows me coulees and one heck of a dam, which we look at for a minute before hustling back to the truck.
We zig and zag. Eventually we hit a long stretch of straight road on which something moving approaches from the other direction. It turns out to be a friend of Marj’s named Sue who is clad in a snowsuit. Her husband, John, is away hauling in hay for
the winter, so Sue is heading to a friend’s place for dinner. She’s on foot even though the friend, whose place we passed, lives some five miles away by my reckoning. We chat for a moment. Then she picks up where she left off, long strides chewing up the road, a singular figure heading cheerfully into the open prairie.
Back at the Home Place, Marj shows me the inside of the barn, which is patrolled by eight comical border collie puppies that slip and slide on the upstairs loft floor like it’s a sheet of ice. When she and Murray hold their spring bull sale, the proceedings take place here, where the guests look at videos of the bulls penned outside. At other times, an old-style country and western band sets up in the loft. Friends, neighbours and family two-step into the night.
Tradition, like history, matters to Marj. From the walls of the loft, it’s obvious that she’s proud of her people, how they’ve carried on and what they’ve done. In a place of honour hangs a 2009 poster celebrating “100 years of ranching in the Special Areas by the family of Hugh and Evelyn Nester.” There are old black-and-white pictures of the Home Place as it was in 1954, long before Marj owned it; of her dad hauling loose hay in 1949 with a four-horse hitch. Over there is Hugh Nester’s homestead, circa 1912, before he married Evelyn. (A cousin of Marj’s still owns and operates the original property.)
