Duane Hicks
Timo Brielmann wished it would stop raining so he could combine the soybeans.
It was a thought that never would have entered his mind three years ago when he and his father, Amos, were focused on raising cattle, not cash crops.
But Brielmann Agriculture Ltd. in Pinewood is among several district producers who have invested in tile drainage and shifted their focus from livestock to canola, soybeans, and more.
“We had 700 cows three springs ago, with all of their calves and the bulls,” Timo Brielmann said. “The cattle market was going up and we just thought that our land was a little too good for cattle farming.
“It wasn’t rocky or sticky,” he noted. “We had a lot of flat land where we thought we could grow some crops.
“We’d started working with North End Farms and they wanted to do cash crops,” Brielmann added. “They had the equipment there, too, so we were like, ‘Why don’t we do it on our own farm, too?’
“And it just kept growing and snowballing from there until one day Dad said, ‘Well, why don’t we just focus on one thing?’
“Because we were running around like chickens with our heads cut off, trying to seed and cut hay and spray—it was insane,” Brielmann recalled.
The Brielmanns started to have tile installed in their land three years ago. Then after about a year, they participated in the first intake of the then-new tile drainage project offered by the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corp., whereby the province would pay for half of the cost per acre to install tile drainage in farmlands.
The cost to tile an acre of land is upwards of $1,000.
Brielmann credited Geoff Gillon, client services manager with the Rainy River Future Development Corp., for getting them and other district producers on board and doing the considerable paperwork to help them get in on the tile drainage project.
“That was when the provincial election was going on and if it would have been a Conservative government, they would have most likely cancelled the program,” Brielmann chuckled.
The second round of tiling at Brielmann Agriculture Ltd. just now is being completed, bringing the total of tiled acres there to around 2,200 acres.
A third round will follow next year.
Tiling entails putting pipes in the ground to remove excess water in the soil below the surface. Many plants can’t tolerate excess water, so removing it quickly is important.
The quicker water can be drained off the plot, the better the yields.
Thanks to the improved drainage, the Brielmanns now are growing oats, wheat, canola, and soybeans, with corn being a future possibility.
Having tile drainage installed is essential to growing cash crops, Brielmann said.
“You can’t grain farm here without tile drainage,” he stressed. “You see some guys try it, and they might be lucky or they might have a dry field that works out here and there.
“But you can’t really depend on it.
“They have their cows, too, and they know if it doesn’t work out, that’s fine,” Brielmann added. “They’ve got something else.
“But I don’t have anything else,” he noted. “I need to make sure this is going to happen.”
And it has been happening.
“With our tile, there’s at least a 20-25 percent yield boost—that’s huge,” Brielmann said.
“You drive over the same acres with the same inputs but you have a higher return,” he explained. “It makes it that much more worth it.”
Last fall, Brielmann was tilling two weeks later than everyone else because his fields were dry.
“The time of the fall when everyone was trying to get field work done, it started raining and I just kept on trucking,” he recalled.
“Everyone else had to stop because it got too slimy or too wet.
“My soil is like a sponge,” he added. “It takes a lot more water to make it wet—[and] you can’t work wet.”
And in the springtime, the tiled fields don’t have dry patches that are going to be bare all year.
“My field efficiency goes up because I don’t have to do all of these funny loops,” Brielmann noted. “Just straight up and down and it’s done.
“If you pull into a field and it’s not tiled, you don’t know if you can go all of the time, so you’re waiting and then it’s going to rain,” he added.
“Here I can just power through.”
Brielmann said tiled land also means a more even emergence of crop. When a sensitive crop like canola or soybeans come up, they all come up evenly.
“Then my weed pressure is even,” he reasoned. “So when it’s time for spraying, it’s easier to make that decision and I can go in and spray any field at any time.
“This year, the one field was a little difficult even though it was tiled, just because it was freshly-tiled and not working at its maximum capacity,” Brielmann admitted.
“It was muddy in some places.
“But then there’s fields that aren’t tiled, and I couldn’t go in and spray even though my sprayer can go through mud,” he added.
When it comes to harvest time, Brielmann noted the crops also will have matured evenly.
“When you’re doing fungicide applications, you want all of your crop at the same stage,” he explained. “Those sprays are expensive—you don’t want to waste them.
“When I am doing work with the combines, they’re heavy,” he added. “When you go through a field, since my soil is dry or drier, I have less compaction.”
Overall, Brielmann feels the tiled fields are just going to get better and better as time goes on.
“If you have a wet field, it can just get worse and worse every year you work it,” he warned. “Some years, you won’t be able to get in and till at all or you won’t be able to combine—it’s just a mess.
“Or you can’t spray—and if you can’t spray, you have weed problems and you can see those problems for four years afterwards.”
While there’s no doubt the cash crops have been successful, Brielmann conceded he still has to “be careful.”
“It’s not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” he stressed. “It’s a lot of work and there’s a lot of set-up time.
“But it’s going to get better as I go forward.
“I’m learning things,” Brielmann added. “We have our grain dryer set up and I guess I messed up with it there a while back, but yesterday I found out what I did wrong.”
With the transition to cash crops, Brielmann also has had to make many changes to how the farm operates.
“It’s totally different,” he remarked. “The first thing is in terms of bookkeeping and accounting—it’s just a different way of looking at it between cattle and cash crops.
“The nice thing is I get a yearly reset, so if something really didn’t work out, I can change it in the winter and fix it next year,” he reasoned.
“With cattle farming, it’s a little more difficult.”
The workload also is different.
“In the springtime, we are going long hours,” Brielmann noted. “You have to keep your butt in the seat to get things done.
“And there’s a lot more time-stress to get things done.
“Like, this weather is horrible,” he added. “We should be combining our soybeans right now but we can’t.
“We can’t even drive because the headers need to slide on the ground and it’s too wet.
“With cattle farming, it was all throughout the winter,” Brielmann said. “It was every day feeding.
“But now in the wintertime, I just do shop work, push snow, take it easy,” he noted.
“Harvest is a busy time and we expect a lot from our guys, too,” Brielmann added.
“In the summer, they like to take it easy, too. I’m spraying. They have full days’ work here every day if they want it, but they take the weekends off and go fishing,” he remarked.
“But at harvest time, they have to be here.”
Since making the transition from cattle farming, Brielmann also has had to build grain bins, purchase equipment like an air seeder, grain cart, combines, and tractors, and make changes to existing assets, like changing part of the shop building into a separate chemical storage area.
“Everything changes,” said Brielmann, noting there’s even been a big learning curve in operating the new equipment.
One of the new tractors, for instance, has eight different screens to look at while one is driving it while the sprayer took Brielmann a year to figure out all of the buttons on it.
“It’s insane how much you have to go through this stuff,” he admitted.
In addition to taking care of their own business, the Brielmanns also tend to 1,700 acres of tiled land at North End Farms, which is managed by a group from Kingsville, Ont. and the owner of which lives in Austria.
The Brielmanns do all of the seeding, spraying, combining, and tilling at North End Farms.
Brielmann also runs a licensed spraying business which he does for neighbouring farms. This is done using equipment he needed for his own farm, anyway, so it’s a bonus.
“We do some tillage, too, for some neighbours but we’re so busy with our own tillage, it’s hard to do it all,” he conceded.
“We do some seeding. The one neighbour likes us to do his combining for him, too,” added Brielmann. “He does some things for us and we do things for him.
“It works out pretty nice.”
Looking ahead, Brielmann said they’ll be expanding their operation and having more tile drainage installed next year—and quite possibly beyond.
“You can’t stand still. We’re growing all of the time,” he remarked.
“You can’t stop. If you stop, you go backwards,” he added. “We’re just going to keep pushing forward and see what happens.”
Provincial funding
The NOHFC has been helping to clear land and install tile drainage in the west end of Rainy River District for the past two years, with a third and final round of projects being lined up for 2017.
The whole idea of the tile drainage program is to increase the amount of agricultural land across Northern Ontario to give the region more of a leg up by helping diversify the area economy, said Gillon.
He noted tile drainage is essential, especially here in Rainy River District, which more often than not lives up to the “rainy” part of its name.
With this comes a transition to a “cash crop” economy, with producers growing canola, winter and spring wheat, barley, oats, and soybeans.
This, in turn, creates more “spin-offs,” creating an economy around itself, Gillon said.
Producers have to till the land, plant the seeds, and fertilize them—there’s lot of activity so they have to hire people to do it.
On top of that, there’s the sales of fuel, equipment, seeds, and fertilizer.
Gillon feels the initiative has been successful.
Should the NOHFC approve the third tile project, more than 6,000 acres of district farmland will have been tiled.
The first tile project happened in 2014-15, with six producers participating with varying amounts of acreage.
Then in 2015-16, seven producers got on board. Some of them were new; some were getting involved for a second year.
For the next project, Gillon said a total of eight producers have put their name on the consortium application to the NOHFC—five new ones (including one for nearly 400 acres of tileage) and three from a previous year.
“There’s increasing interest as we go along,” he noted.
“It’s continually building and there’s more demand—people asking questions about it, people saying we should do it,” added Gillon, saying hopefully the NOHFC decides to support fourth and fifth round of tile drainage projects in the future.
Applications to the NOHFC have to be made as a consortium (group). This is because in order to get a tiler to come to Rainy River District from southern Ontario, there must be a significant number of acres lined up to be done here to make the job worth the while.
At the same time, other producers who are not participating in the NOHFC program have been getting tile drainage installed, as well.
“There’s a pretty good uptake, a good mix of uptake,” noted Gillon. “The bigger guys give us bigger acreage, which allows the little guys to get stuff done.
“That’s the beauty of it all.”
