Intro, interview, and transcription conducted by Shannon Hart and Conlan Donahue.

It’s not difficult to see that Clancy Holthe is a farmer when you meet him; he has a warm, open face that’s always quick with a smile, a strong, callused handshake, and an eagerness to chat about the weather, 4-H, and more. Clancy’s farm is nestled in amongst the coulees, sitting alongside the Little Bow river like they’re old friends. During the photography tour held at the property, goats, cattle, horses, and one happy little pig posed for pictures while the Holthes proudly explained how their operation is run. It’s clear that everything is done with a quiet demeanour and a determination that can only be ancestral, a grit that’s been passed down through generations of farmers that has helped them push through drought, recessions, sick livestock, and more. Last fall, willows were staked along the banks of Clancy’s property in an effort to decrease erosion and promote a healthy riparian area. Before the stakes were even fully secured in the ground, Clancy spoke of the potential for more. The enthusiasm for the future and what it could hold is both exciting and inspiring. Farming is more than a job; it’s a legacy, and one that Clancy intends to carry on. Agricultural producers take their jobs as stewards very seriously; there’s no doubt that the land is in very good hands at the Holthe farm.

1. Tell us a bit about your area of the watershed and what you do.

I live near Turin, Alberta, right in the river valley for the Little Bow river, which runs into the Oldman River, about a dozen miles northeast of Coaldale. I’m on the very edge of Lethbridge County, they call it Feedlot Alley. There are a lot of intensive livestock farms there; there are a lot of feedlots containing cattle, pigs, poultry, and so on. I’ve worked most of my adult life off the farm as a mechanic in Taber, but I brought my tools home about five or six years ago and I’ve been trying to farm and make a living doing that. My wife also works off the farm; we’re not getting rich but I enjoy it. We have about 25 head in a cow/calf operation that we run on our own pasture while I also have another farm with 70 acres under pivot. Mainly, we grow alfalfa hay for the cattle or for sale on both places. The river valley where I am, I have 30 acres of irrigation down there and that goes to feed my cattle in the winter.

On the other farm, the alfalfa there gets baled up and sold. Once in a while, we’ll have a few pigs or chickens but I also have pheasants; I love raising pheasants, they’re a lot of fun.They’re beautiful birds and it’s a lot of fun to watch them too. In the last couple of years, we’ve actually started incubating them to hatch our own so that’s even nicer. I’d never seen a bird hatch until we started incubating the pheasants, it is really neat. When I was in 4-H in the mid-70s to early 80s, there was a pheasant project at that time. My sister and I raised pheasants for about 5 or 6 years and we’d release about 100 per year at that time and it was always excellent hunting. Actually, I found something when we started raising pheasants again. We had to have a game farm license to raise the pheasants in 4-H back then. Just the other day I found my license from back in 1977, it’s pretty cool.

2. How has agriculture changed over time?

We are in the Lethbridge Northern Irrigation District and before irrigation came there, Southern Alberta was basically a desert and irrigation has made a huge difference in the variety of crops and in the quality and in the quantity of the crops grown. Going from a ditch and flood irrigating to now almost everything going pipeline and a lot more pivots and automated systems, it’s a huge difference. Last year, we added a little pump to the pivot on my place and we are able to add liquid fertilizer on the place without ever having to go and spread it. You can do it while you’re putting on the water, it was very convenient to do that. The size of the equipment - from going back in my grandfather’s time farming with horses and my dad talking about digging sugar beets by hand, putting them on a wagon and hauling them to the beet dump to now - everything’s so large. There are huge differences in the last 100 years; even when you look at the Noble blade, it made such a difference in the area and that isn’t even 100 years ago so it’s really something when we start thinking about stuff like that. You look at the technology, the electronics, the computers, all of that stuff is going into the tractors, like auto-steer, all done with GPS and whatnot; it’s amazing, the stuff that they’re doing. When you’re pulling a plough with horses, it’s difficult to feed the world. You get by with enough for yourself, a little bit extra, and that’s about it.

3. Tell us about some of the innovations you’re seeing in agriculture.

I already touched on a few, like the auto-steer with the GPS. When you’re steering manually, you usually have overlap. Auto-steer gets rid of all of the overlap; it knows exactly where you need to be so that the rows are straight, more or less, and it works out well. There’s a lot more being done with drones lately as well. From what I understand, it’s still illegal to spray with them but they do have some tests going on for spraying and there’s a lot of talk about spot spraying for weeds. It will be able to go up and pinpoint the weeds and be able to spray different spots instead of the whole field. It’s great for checking cattle as well. I’m kind of excited, I wouldn’t mind getting one; we calve in the summer and the cattle are out in the coulees and sometimes they hide pretty well and I can’t help but think it might be nice to have a drone fly over everything. I can find her (the cow) and watch her, I don’t have to bother her but I can still make sure everything’s okay. We have used spotting scopes and binoculars to make sure the cattle are calving but for the most part, they’re on their own.

Something that’s been touched on the last little while too, especially for larger operations, is using the same wheelbase and width of equipment to go in the same tracks all the time. You go and put in your seed in the spring, your tire tracks are on the same spot. You don’t even plant anything there; where there’s tire tracks, it just stays empty and those tracks are there year after year. Your combine goes down those tracks, the tractor, your sprayers, everything, is in the same tracks and it’s getting a lot easier to comprehend that, especially with the GPS and auto-steer. You can get everything set up so that the wheels are in the same spot and you don’t have to worry about compacting the soil and the seeds not coming up during germination. I was reading the other day about using more precision planting as well. Instead of using an air seeder, they’re using something with plates where the seeds fall in. With precision planting, they said that the rows have to be a little further apart and it’s not as nice to cover in. You lose a little more evaporation that way because of the sunlight hitting the soil but they said that the seeds all come up and they’re all the same maturity. There’s no variance in the field because they’re all planted exactly the same and it makes it a lot easier to plan for harvest or spraying or whatever. It used to be that you’d plant corn or beans or something with the seeder and that was about it but they’re looking at canola now and lentils and other crops; it might make a difference.

4. How has drought impacted you?

I find value in being well insured because of different climate happenings, hailstorms, etc. I’ve told you this story before; we got hailed out and the pivot was flipped over, but it was only two years old. I think you’re going to find a lot more of these issues in the future. I would like to do a little more with my rotational grazing but the way my farm is, it’s difficult to rotational graze because of the coulees, the water sources, and all of that. It makes it a little more difficult, if I had a little bit better water source for up on top in the pasture, it would make a difference. I would like to do rotational grazing, I think that would be a huge benefit when it comes right down to it. We’re trying to help the riparian areas more and protect them because the riparian area can repair a lot! Just allowing the water to slow down before it reaches the river, a lot less silt and erosion and stuff like that, filtering out the nutrients and the stuff that should not be getting into the river.

At my place, we had a bale feeder and I’d put in enough bales to last the week and I’d go on the Saturday or Sunday. I’d fill every weekend because I was working off the farm and they had to be good for the week. The problem with that is that you end up with a big pile of manure right there and a lot of waste. When spring runoff starts, the water is yellow because it’s got the manure in it and is running through the corrals. We’ve been feeding with the bale processor over the last three winters now. I have to start a tractor and feed a bale every day, but I take a bale out, it shreds the bale up and spits it out in a row, so I can lay out a little bit each day for the cattle to go out and eat. The manure is all out in the field already, so I don’t need to load up nearly as much. I still have a place in the trees and the orchard where I bed them down and I still have manure and bedding that needs to be spread afterwards but it’s probably cut down the amount by 2/3 because they’re not eating where they’re laying. In the spring, I go out with a tine harrow and I break up the lumps so that the rains and irrigation take care of the rest. In Lethbridge County, you’re supposed to keep operations so many metres away from a water source like the river. I don’t feed right along the river and don’t spread my manure by the banks. We keep the manure to a minimum along the edge of the field; it’s not much but it makes a big difference so there’s less going into the river.

5. What are you doing to help the water and land?

We’re trying to keep the riparian areas healthy. Since we’ve fenced off the river entirely, I’ve noticed that the cattle aren’t in there and vegetation can grow. They don’t use it as a water source; we water them with an automatic waterer and they aren’t into the river at all until usually about September when we’ll let them in just to clean up the banks and the vegetation after it has already matured to keep down the fire hazard. We try to keep the manure out of the river and in the field where it benefits everyone. Those are the two main things. At the other place, we try not to disturb the soil. We’re not going in and spreading fertilizer or anything, the only time the tractor is in there is when it’s haying or silage time.

6. What’s the most fun part of your job?

The fun part for me is going out and cutting hay; I love the smell of fresh cut hay. I love cutting hay and I love bringing the last bale in after it’s all done. It’s that week in between that drives me up the wall. *laughs* This year, we cut the hay and I needed one more day, but then it started raining and snowing. I’ve got 70 acres of third cut hay over there that still needs to be baled. But yeah, that’s haying, it’s fun for me.

7. Beyond what you are doing now, how is the industry managing its impact?
I think there’s a lot more interest in sustainability; people are thinking more about how what they’re doing affects people downstream, and how what they do affects the public’s perception as well. You’re finding a lot more people telling their stories and explaining why things are done the way they are, even when they seem harsh. You’ll see a lot more of the feedlots doing more composting. When they’re running manure or silage trucks down the road, a lot of the feedlots will have a water truck going and wetting down the road so the dust isn’t as big of a factor. There’s a feedlot out by Turin where they’ve planted trees and shelterbelts as another way of dust suppression. A lot more people are more concerned about the environment, how what they do now is going to affect generations later or even a few years from now.

8. What do you see as the future in your industry?

I see — and it’s happened — there’s a lot more expansion of irrigation in the province. They’re looking at the feasibility of thousands of acres up around Empress and Hanna, they may open that up and start irrigating that. They are working towards the Chin Coulee reservoir and expanding it, there’s Dead Horse Coulee out by Enchant where they’re saying that’s going to be expanded for more irrigation as well. When I bought our farm back in 1996, the Bow River Irrigation District sent out a letter. I’m in the Lethbridge Northern Irrigation District from the other side of the river; towards Vauxhall, that’s the Bow River Irrigation District, and they said are there people interested in getting irrigation and I have some land up on that side so I said yes. Now, to the north and the east of me within 4 miles, there’s irrigation and it’s expanding as well. I see irrigation put so much more into the province as far as GDP. There’s more money to be made through irrigation than dryland, it’s as simple as that. I see more irrigation happening, I see more automation happening. There are prototypes of planting decks and stuff that go out that are fully automatic. It might be years and years down the road but that’s where we’re going. It’s only a matter of time. Once again, more with the drones, more with the spot spraying, even smart sprayers on regular ones now that will only spray when they see a weed. It is amazing! A lot more field mapping is happening—that part of the field needs more, this part of the field needs less. Being able to vary the rates from one part of the field to the other, is something I see happening in the near future as well.

9. What is your favourite thing to eat in the watershed?
My favourite thing to eat has to be a steak, I love my Alberta beef. I love steak and I’m very fortunate to have access to the best meat, my own. I know where it comes from, I know what it's eaten. We don’t butcher it ourselves, but it’s still our own meat and that makes a huge difference. We hunt a lot and so we make a lot of sausage and jerky. We do a lot of preserving and freezing; we make a lot of our own salsa, our own spaghetti sauce and we do a lot of our own meat processing. We’ve also started eating pheasant eggs as well. There’s nothing wrong with them, they’re just a little bit smaller than chicken eggs.

10. What do you find inspiring about the agriculture industry?

There’s nobody more optimistic — there's always next year. I think that it’s inspiring to see so many developments, to see what people can do on an acre of land. You can grow 30-40,000$ worth of garlic on an acre of land. It’s inspiring to see the innovation of young people coming up and taking the initiative in farming. There’s a lot of people that had no farming background at all trying to get into it, whether it be agronomy, something else farming related, or actually getting an acre of land and raising crops. It’s inspiring to hear some of the stories, I read a lot of different magazines and some of the things that people are doing… If I was 30 years younger, it’s something that I’d seriously be thinking about. You have to be an optimist.

11. What is one thing you would like the public to know about the agriculture industry?

Let’s see….one thing? *laughs* We’re not the enemies, for one thing. We’re trying our best to do what is best for everything, for everyone, for every animal, for the planet, we’re trying to do our best. I don’t think anybody is going out of their way to damage things, we are trying and that’s one thing that I’d like people to know. We are not backwards hillbillies; there’s a lot of technology and a lot of intelligent people. We’re not backwards or anything because we’re just farmers. There’s so much more to it, it’s what we need to be able to understand as far as technology or electronics or stuff like that, it’s a lot more than what the public thinks. Going out to gather eggs in a basket, you know? That’s not how your cartons of eggs end up in the store. It’s a lot more than that. There’s a lot of very high-tech stuff going on and happening in agriculture and it’s only going to increase. It used to be that agriculture was quite a few years behind vehicles when it came to technology and that, but I think they’re evenly matched now, if not more towards agriculture. It’s not Old MacDonald anymore, for the most part. Well, it still is around my place. *laughs*

This was produced by the OWC as part of the "Uniting Rural Producers and Urban Consumers" program, which was made possible by the support of Canadian Agricultural Partnership program, the Government of Alberta, and the Government of Canada.

Thank you to Clancy Holthe for his contributions to this project and to bettering the watershed for all those who live, work, and play here.