Bert Rammelaere – Part 2
By Kim Cooper
This is the rest of the life story of Bert Rammelaere, a long-time friend and farmer in Chatham-Kent. This is Bert’s story, as told by him.
Since our farm had no hydro, we used a lantern to do the chores at night and in the early morning. We had to milk the cows every 12 hours, 7 a.m. in the morning and 7 p.m. at night. Then the milk had to be separated to get the cream out and the cream was sold. The cream was picked up every week. The milk that was left after separating went to feed the pigs and calves.
Since there were no soybeans at that time, if you wanted to grow wheat, you had to grow oats or barley the following year and plow that ground for wheat. If you didn’t want to grow oats or barley, you had to leave the field in summer fallow.
When they started using nitrogen fertilizer on the wheat fields and saw that it produced better yields, farmers did the same with the corn, and that made quite a change in yield!
In the late 1940s, soybeans were introduced to Canada. The first varieties were not very good because they came from the USA, and originally from China. After we started planting soybeans, then you could plant wheat after the soybeans.
The problem with soybeans was that early combines had no straw choppers, so after the combine went through the field, the bean straw was left. That had to be raked into windrows and burned, and then the ground worked up with the disc to plant wheat. There was no such thing back then as a ‘no till drill.’
In the early 1950’s, a soybean variety called Harosoy was developed by Agriculture Canada at the Harrow research station. It became a very popular variety across Ontario, Michigan and Ohio.
Hybrid corn became popular in the late 40’s and 50’s and the Dekalb xl45 variety was very good and could stand a higher plant population.
Tractor threshing machines were finished in the early 1950’s, as combines took over. There were still a few, but all the big farmers had combines. Everyone had tractors after 1946. Horses to pull farm machinery were pretty-well done by then.
Most corn planters in the 1940’s were two rows at 40-inch spacings. Early drills were 8 and 10 feet wide and pulled with horses. They were used to plant oats, wheat, barley, and sugar beets. The two and three furrow plows were the most common, and if you had a bigger tractor, they had 3 furrows.
The eight-foot disc was the most common. Every farmer had a roller, some had cultipactors, but everyone had rollers. The Harrows were nine feet wide. If you had a bigger tractor, you could get a wider roller, but most had small ones. The field cultivator was eight feet wide also. Wagons were steel wheeled, holding 75-100 bushels. They were flat wagons that you had to shovel out.
Sugar beets were blocked by hand with a short handle hoe, and then in the fall you plow them out, and then “top them” (chop the leaves off), pick them up with a beet knife with a hook on one end, and put it in wagon or in a pile, then a truck picked them up and took the load to the sugar factory in Chatham.
There were no chemicals (herbicides, insecticides, fungicides) until the early 1950’s. The first one was 2,4-D. Soybeans and corn had to be cultivated because there were lots of weeds. The fields were also hoed by hand. Some fields had stones that had to be removed by hand.
Most farmers owned 100 acres, bigger farmers had 200-300 acres and smaller farmers had 50 acres. You could make a living from small farms back then. Most farmers had at least 2 horses and a tractor.
Everything was sold at the grain elevator. There were no radio stations with grain prices, but the prices were fairly stable. We did have a battery radio!
You had to fix everything on the farm and had to be a jack-of-all-trades. Farmers were and are the biggest gamblers, because we always gamble on having good weather and good prices.
Bert served 14 years on the Township of Tilbury East Council, as a Council member, Deputy Reeve and Reeve. He served 11 years on Kent County Council and also worked with the Thames Valley Conservation Authority (LTVCA) for 20 years as a member, Vice-Chair and Chair. He was a past Director of the Ontario Soybean Growers, six years on the Ontario Grain Corn Council, and was Past President of the Kent Soil and Crop Improvement Association.
Bert and his wife Marg were married in 1958 (65 years!) and she worked alongside Bert for many decades on their farm in Tilbury East. They both now reside in Tilbury.
Bert Rammelaere is another example of the amazing farmers we have in our agriculture sector in Chatham-Kent.
Kim Cooper was involved in the agribusiness sector for over 45 years. He can be reached at: kim.e.cooper@gmail.com
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