Calvert Haustein takes an immense amount of pride in the operation of the family farm that he helps run.
The farm, located just south of the Hamlet of Erskine, has been owned and operated by the family for over 115 years. Haustein is a fifth-generation farmer himself, but his family, along with his brother's family, still live on the farm, along with his parents.
"It's a bit of an accomplishment for the farm. To be fifth and sixth generations already. It's more motivation to try to do the best that we can to keep that farm up and running," he said.
Haustein said for the most part, when his great, great grandfather homesteaded on the land in about 1905, it was a primarily cow-calf operation.
"There's stories from years ago... there's a big cattle fair over in Toronto, they would send cattle on the rail. They would take them down to the show and that's how they marketed it. They're pure breed animals. They had to get the word out, there was no internet back then," Haustein said with a laugh.
Nowdays, the farm is a mixed farm, with about 80 beef cows, 110 dairy cows and then we crop about 3,600 acres. The dairy side of the operation didn't start until Haustein's parents got married.
"My grandmother and grandfather on my dad's side of the family, they had a dairy operation as he was growing up and they were getting to the age when they had enough of it," he said.
"Dad was going to move back (here), so dad's folks they figured 'if you're going to move down there and going to farm, if you're interested in taking the dairy, you can buy the cows and the quota'... mom and dad were game for that. So the heard basically moved from my grandfather and grandmother down here to my mom and dad. We've just been dairy ever since."
Haustein said that dairy aspect has always been a steady source of income for the farm.
"It's always one that seems to be viable and you don't have to watch the margins as much," he said. "It's always going to bring you home a bit of the profit. In some cases, the dairy does subsidize a bit when it comes to both of the other entities, whether it be cow-calf operation or the cropping side of the farm."
In the last few years, the farm has seen major upgrades to its technology on the dairy side of the operation.
"We're coming up to our tenth year in running our robotic dairy barn. That was a big labour savings... it was about a two-year process to get the lagoon set up and get all the infrastructure in place," he said, adding that there's a lot of time and energy that goes into maintaining the technology, which has to run 24/7.
"We built a new dairy barn and we've got two robots in it... at the time it was. pretty new technology, in terms of keeping the barn clean. It was one of the first ones in Alberta. We're using recycled lagoon water to wash the floors... it's been running good."
While the dairy income is good, and doing most of their own maintenance helps keep costs low, prices on various aspects of the farm continue to rise.
"The cost of equipment has gone up. The cost of land has gone up, therefore any land that we rent, the landlords are looking for more rent," he said.
"We went through a phase too, where fertilizer prices went through the roof. With all of those factors, it does put a bit of stress on our bottom line. Our margins, when the commodity prices are good, and calf prices are good and our inputs stable or low, then the margins are healthy. It does seem like our margins are getting thinner and thinner. The amount of profits stretched a lot more sparingly."
Despite the challenges, Haustein hopes his children will help continue the farm's legacy and pass on that tradition to the next generation.
"I've said to the kids many times, travelling down the highway – you look just off the highway and say hmmm, there's an old barn or farm... basically you know that thing has been abandoned for thirty or forty years. Somebody used to make their livelihood on that pace," he said.
Haustein is confident their farm will write a different story.
