A life of farming certainly isn’t always easy, but for Barb Miller and her husband Brent, it’s a life they feel very lucky to lead.
The Millers have been married 33 years in October, and farming all the while. While Miller said her husband has always been a beef farmer, she had a different purview growing up in Southern Ontario.
“I come from farming as well,” Miller said.
“I’m originally from southern Ontario, and my parents were hog farmers. They had a herd to finish operation, so I grew up on a pig farm. I’ve been farming for a long time.”
While she grew up working and farming with her family on the hog farm, it was a different job that brought her to the Rainy River District. Miller is a member of the ordained clergy of the United Church, and so it was originally because of the church that she wound up in the area. It was a chance meeting, however, that kept her here.
“Actually, our meeting is a funny story,” Miller said of her first encounter with her future husband.
“My husband at that time worked for Bell Canada in the I&R Department, which is Installation and Repair. My brand new puppy had chewed through my phone cord, and he came to my house to fix my phone. So that’s how I came to be here. I was placed at the United Church in Rainy River and then I met Brent, we had a whirlwind relationship and got married actually within the year. We must have been right, though, because it’s been 33 years.”
In those years, the Millers have kept at work on their own farm, a medium sized beef farm where they also grow some cash crops and keep other animals. Miller said that while her husband works fulltime with Bell and does the tractor work on the farm, she says she tends to more help with calving, vaccinating and keeping their books.
“His grandmother told me when we first got married, she said don’t do anything you don’t want to become your job,” Miller said.
“It was very good advice, because I wasn’t feeding cows everyday. We had small children at the time, and I was working off the farm with the church.”
The work of a farmer is never done, and they keep long, oftentimes irregular hours throughout the years. However, as much as the work might be crazy and overwhelming, as Miller put it, she also noted that it is deeply fulfilling.
“There’s just something about being so rooted in the earth that is essential,” she said.
“There are mornings, like yesterday morning in particular, where you go outside and the birds are chirping, the sun is coming up, it’s just a gorgeous way to live. We are so fortunate, my husband and I, we have cattle, we also have chickens that are meat birds, so most of our food is from our plac.e We have a garden that is not huge like some people’s but all winter long we’ve eaten our corn from last year, are eating our carrots until March. We’re very fortunate that we can feed ourselves so well, but it’s just being connected to the animals, moreso for me, that grounding and caretaking is something I grew up with.”
Miller pushes back against the idea that farmers are disconnected emotionally or mentally from the work that they do, owing to the sometimes unforgiving nature of the job.
“We are not,” she said.
“I have dragged, I have tied a rope around my waist to drag a newborn calf through the mud because it was too big for me to carry, but I needed to get it in the barn, otherwise it would die. That’s what we do, we do things like that. I got it in the barn, got it cleaned off and dried off, and then when my husband got home, we brought it into the porch so it would get warm. And it lived. That’s what you do, and that’s not just about the money in the bank at the end of the year, it’s also about the life and taking care of it. It’s your job, and it’s a privilege and responsibility when you’re doing things like that.”
Miller is also a member of the Rainy River Federation of Agriculture, which she said has been a privilege to serve on, but through that work she has become part of the Guardian Network, which helps connect farmers who are struggling with their mental health to others who can support, and most importantly, understand them and their unique challenges.
“They, whoever ‘they’ are, have done studies and found that farming is one of the most stressful occupations, because so much of what we do is out of our control,” Miller said.
“There’s different things with each profession, and so farmers need to the person is going to get it, they get it when they say ‘the hay got rained on.’ Most people, what does that mean when they say it to you? When they talk to another farmer, they might understand the devastation that is, because that’s how we feed our animals for the year, and if you’ve lost all the nutrients in that hay because it got completely soaked after it got rained on, what are you feeding your cows? We are not saying people aren’t smart, just if you don’t have the experience, you don’t have anything to compare it to.”
While local farmers have definitely seen their share of struggles over the years, Miller noted that one of the best parts of the agriculture community in the District is how supportive they are of each other when someone is in need.
“When the farming community has struggled, they’ve done a beautiful job of leaning on each other and helping one another,” she said.
“That’s a real gift. Different times when farmers have been injured, neighbours have been there immediately. When the dairy barns burned down, the cows were taken care of so fast it would make your head spin. That’s something to be proud of, that we take care of each other so well.”
