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The manure tour
I used to think milk came from the grocery store. Five days of working under the backside of a herd of Holsteins cured me of that.
By Dawn Calleja with photography by Dawn Goss
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THE MOMENT I MET Jule Brüeggen, I was glad I’d left my hot-pink rubber boots
back in Toronto. The night before embarking on my first trip to a working farm (any farm,
actually), I’d dragged my husband to Canadian Tire in search of a more dignified black
pair. Still, it soon became clear that, like my pink ones, these boots were strictly for
splashing through puddles, not protecting myself from projectile manure.
Brüeggen wore her knee-high gumboots like a runway model. A six-foot-tall German goddess
in rolled-up corduroys, she’d been working on Sue and Larry Black’s organic wheat
and dairy operation for a month. Brüeggen was a WWOOFer — a volunteer with the
international organization World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, which hooks up willing
workers and farm hosts. For the Blacks, who’ve hosted 125 or so WWOOFers on their farm
in Deloraine, Man., four hours southwest of Winnipeg, she was a dream come true: an agricultural
economics student who was gearing up to buy her own spread in Germany. (An added bonus: the
local vet had been far more attentive since she’d rolled into town.)
I, on the other hand, just wanted to survive my five-day WWOOFing stint without humiliating
myself — or worse, doing actual harm. I’d been having vivid nightmares (one of
the many delights of being three months pregnant, along with the nausea and exhaustion) about
accidentally setting free the Blacks’ entire herd or burning down the barn.
I’d arrived at the farm a few hours earlier, after a seemingly endless drive along
roads lined with golden wheat and the occasional field of rusty flax. Sue Black, a tiny woman
with shoulder-length brown hair and calloused hands, met me in the driveway. I could have
killed for a cup of tea and a nap. Instead, before I’d even taken my bags out of the
trunk, Sue was leading me on a tour of the spread she and Larry have been running for almost
three decades. They’d met in Alberta in the mid- 1970s. She was a back-to-the-lander
from Montréal who wanted nothing more than to buy her own farm. He had just escaped the family
business — organic crops. But in 1978, they bought a quarter section across the road
from the homestead where Larry grew up (his mother still lives there). “The Black family
farm — where hippie meets redneck,” Sue is fond of saying. During their first five
years, they didn’t have a day off. They grossed $12,000.
These days, the Black farm produces wheat, barley and a few other rotation crops, and operates
a herd of 120 cows (60 of which are being milked at any given time). Sue’s domain is
primarily the kitchen, the turkey coop and the vast garden that provides the family with
veggies and herbs. That’s where we met Brüeggen, who was picking green tomatoes,
one of the only crops left in mid-September. Next, we threw some kale to 20 fat, white, organic
turkeys that had arrived in the mail as chicks eight or so months earlier and who would meet
their fate in about a month.
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