FARM 2025: Howick organic farmer goes green and turns to politics
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
At an agriculturally-oriented Huron-Bruce all-candidates meeting (ACM) in Teeswater last month, Green Party candidate and organic farmer Matthew Van Ankum made more than a few interesting points about the politics of farming throughout the spirited question period. So much so, in fact, that after the electoral dust had settled, The Citizen sought out Van Ankum for a frank conversation about how he got into into politics, which evolved into a wide-ranging conversation/pastoral walkabout with his family’s herd of hounds during a brief but welcome break in the winter weather.
Van Ankum estimates that his parents first came to Huron County in the late 1960s, early 1970s. “They bought 300 or 400 acres of land - this was when farms were much more reasonable,” he explained. “My parents’ farm was about five minutes down the road from where we are here… they told me once that they picked Howick because they felt that the outbuildings were in better shape in Howick than in other areas of the province, leaning towards the fact that there might be a tiny bit of extra money in those farms.”
Before heading out into the snowy woods, tea was served, alongside a bit of family history. His parents started out raising pigs, and then beef, and, finally, pure-bred Simmental breeding bulls. His father was involved in different organizations in the beef industry, like Beef Farmers of Ontario (BFO), and Bio-Beef Improvement Ontario, and he could often be found at one of the many bull testing stations scattered across the province, thinking about how to bring out the best qualities in each breed. “They’d be doing weights and average daily gain, and then cross-breed comparisons - he played a large role in that…. a Simmental goes into the same pen as similar bulls in the Simmental breed, and there would also be Angus, and Charlais. And you’d get a cross-breed comparison of these different genetics,” Van Ankum recalled. “Dad was always very good at choosing the best-looking, and the best performing animal.”
Every year, they would hold a big sale, and this was before the proliferation of the internet. “We would have this sale at Carson’s in Listowel,” he explained. There would be a catalogue of all the animals in the sale - the big job with that was putting together those catalogues. There’d be about 60 or 70 or 80 lots in that sale. And so every animal would have a picture, and their pedigree would be in there - it was kind of like a showcase… that was a big deal - the printer would print out all these catalogues, and we'd have a mailing list, so you’d have to hand-write the addresses from this mailing list for about 600 different catalogues. It was going out across Canada, and down to the States. Anybody interested in Simmental purebreds would get one.”
The second-most laborious part of the annual sale? Making lunch for all the customers! “The night before, we’d do buns for this sale. We had to do like, 300 buns! The choice was summer sausage, cheese, mustard and margarine, or ham, cheese, mayo and margarine,” he recollected. “We’d get all these fresh big buns from Zehr’s, and we’d spend the night before, slicing and stacking all these sandwiches. And then we’d give them away for free at the sale the next day. You got a free pop and a free sandwich - it was just a thing that we did.”
The last production sale was in 2002. “Dad got out of the beef business, and we did cash cropping. We did hay. And I went to the University of Guelph, and I came back with this big idea - I was going to sell small square bales of hay down to Florida.” It was a sound business plan - in Florida, the climate is less than ideal for hay storage - the humidity tends to make everything get really moldy, really quickly. Therefore, Floridians could be expected to require a steady supply of reliable northern hay. “That’s what we did growing up, all summer long - we’d do small squares of hay, we’d do small squares of straw. The straw is much lighter than the hay, so it’s easier. On a load of small square bales, you probably get about 110 bales, and it takes you about 15, 20 minutes to unload that hay, right? So that was a big part of growing up. We would probably do about 12,000 or 14,000 bales of hay and another 6,000 or 8,000 bales of straw. It made my arms as long as they are.”
The only problem with his plan: Van Ankum didn’t like dealing with the small, square bales of hay, at all. The business lasted about 10 years, and by the time it came to an end, one of those hay-bale buyers, Danielle Van-Sant, had been upgraded to wife status. “I was selling Danielle a small square bale of hay, and then she figured it was a better deal if she just bought the farmer,” he joked. The pair bought their current farm together in 2004. “Pretty much the whole way, we were leaning towards just doing grass-based stuff, forage-based, pasturing,” he explained.
His first brush with rotational farming came while he was working on a dairy farm in New Zealand. “I think it was an 80-hectare farm… and they had 36 paddocks. They would split each paddock, so the cows go in the morning on one half of one paddock, and then they get the second half after the second milking in the afternoon, so they would always get fresh grass. It was all done with electric fencing, and it was a very efficient use of New Zealand’s ability to grow quality hay for almost 10 months of the year.”
The farmers he worked for in New Zealand didn’t own the land they were farming. “That was the way that it was set up - it allowed someone to enter the dairy industry in New Zealand. There’s no quota, and you can enter the dairy system in New Zealand by buying some cattle, starting on a small farm, working your way up, putting your capital back into the farm, and building yourself up so you might be able to buy your own farm after a certain point in time. In Ontario, it’s more difficult for us to begin as a beginner farmer, unless you have the capital and the family that’s going to help you get to that point.”
Van Ankum feels that his preferred farming style can sometimes be perceived as being a lot more work, but that’s not how he sees it at all. “I’ve just always thought that the approach to a pasture-based system was more efficient, because you weren’t constantly feeding your animals. The way of rotational grazing is that you provide the background - the fencing, and the water, and then all you’ve got to do is move the cattle around the field. For six months a year, you’re allowing the cattle and the sheep to feed themselves instead of constantly harvesting, hauling, storing, feeding, cleaning out the manure, hauling manure out… you’re simplifying your system. There’s no way that can’t be more efficient.”
While he’s happy to be out of the baling business, Van Ankum hasn’t fully escaped the small square lifestyle. There are plans to someday rid the farm of the square baler in favour of a unit that produces big, round bales, but that day has not yet come. In fact, his brother, Johnny, has just loaded some of those small square bales into his truck.
Right now, the Van Ankum family farm is home to 70 or 80 head of cattle, about 200 yows, a mix of pigs, a handful of chickens, and at least one peacock. During the lengthy process of loading all the dogs into the van for the drive to the woods, one of the farm’s Giant Brahma chickens stands watchfully by the door, weighing the pros and cons of attempting to enter the mudroom. “I think they’re the biggest breed of chicken you can buy,” he mused. Van-Sant confirmed the validity of that fact, and, in the end, the feather-footed fowl thought better of making a break for it.
The drive to the dogs’ favourite walking spot takes you past a few of the fields where his cattle go to nosh. “With rotational grazing, you’re maxing out your rest period as you rotate around your field,” he explained. “You’re allowing a 30-day rest period from when they leave field one to when it’s back to field one. They go through 13 or 14 different fields - you’re maximizing your yield per acre on that little package of land there.”
The dogs pile out of the van and head straight into the woods, stopping at various points to eat snow and drink from the river. The entry to the trail is marked by a sign memorializing Hilbert Van Ankum, Matthew’s father. On the other side of the trail entrance is a pile of snowshoes, which, until recently, were an essential element of the daily dog walking routine. “The snowshoes have been a life saver,” Van-Sant declared.
At the heart of Matthew’s decision to enter politics is the sense of connection he feels with his surroundings. “I like the Green Party, and I plant trees, you know. So I just kind of felt as though I had to. I made a sign request at some point, and I had my membership, and then I’d donate. I thought, at least I’ll give some money to these people, because I think they’re doing the right thing.”
But it wasn’t until the possibility of the Deep Geological Repository (DGR) came to town that he decided he needed to do more than just donate money. He made a call to the Green Party, asking what they could do for him. “I was kind of like, you know, ‘what can you do as the Green Party of Ontario (GPO) to help me try and make a bit of a pushback against the NWMO, who has all this funding and all this power, and seems to want to implement the DGR into my backyard.”
Then, the GPO representative on the phone turned the tables on Matthew, asking what he could do for them. “He said, ‘Why don’t you run?’”
That question gave Matthew a lot to think about.
“It all comes back to doing something so you don’t look back with regret as not having done enough with your talents,” he explained. “You have a certain amount of talents in your life, and if you don’t take advantage of those talents, you feel guilt and regret. That, I think, is part of the reason that motivates a lot of Dutch farmers in the area to do as well as they do, because they feel they need to take advantage of the talents they were given, and to use them to the best of their ability.”
In this instance, however, Matthew was fairly certain that he didn’t have the requisite talent required for the task. “I said, ‘Well, I’m not a very good speaker. I’ll get nervous and that, and I’ll fold on stage, and it’ll be a sad story.” Nonetheless, he felt that the DGR was enough of a threat that he set his misgivings aside, and threw his hat into the ring. “It was 2022 when I started, and I was kind of slow out of the gate because everything had started already, and I was kind of behind. I had to get my signatures, and this and that… It was a fantastic learning curve! It kind of woke you up a little bit to what you felt strongest about.”
Matthew knows it isn’t enough to just care about agriculture and the environment - a real leader needs to have a comprehensive plan that includes healthcare, education and the cost of living. “It’s touching on all of them, and trying to understand what are the negatives and the positives, and to be able to spit out what you feel that the Green Party is going to change to make it a better situation for people in Ontario, right? If you don’t understand the background on the healthcare system, if that’s new to you, that’s a lot to understand. So you try to glean different points from different people you talk to, and develop an idea in your head of the direction that the government should be going in.”
There’s a long stretch of the trail that runs right along the mighty Maitland River, which was swollen that day from the recent thaw of false spring. “It must have come up a full foot since yesterday,” he observed. “You have the Green Party platform, which is the work of a group of people to develop what you should be saying about these different items. So you do have something to say about them, you know, right? But if it’s not something that you have experience in, or your own personal opinion of, it’s not going to come across nearly as well - you don’t really have any passion in the game, because it’s all just you spitting out what other people have decided is important, which is good - it gives you something to say. But unless you’ve talked with five different doctors and nurses and personal support workers, and all the people that were struggling in the situation, how are you supposed to actually realize what direction the change has to move in?”
After the meeting in Teeswater, Van Ankum knew that, if he didn’t gain any traction with voters in his second election as a candidate, he would be getting out of politics. “I was just going to say, ‘This isn’t for me, the Green Party can do better with somebody else’. And then I did get an increase - I think 800 more votes this time, which was fantastic. It’s a little bit of an acknowledgment that the direction that you’re heading in is a positive one.”
At the meeting, Matthew was critical of the direction that the Conservative Party has chosen. He also thinks that it’s just not enough to focus solely on the trouble brewing south of the border. “Trump says he’s going do one thing, and then, if he doesn’t actually do it, there’s no topic. There’s no debate, and it’s just kind of wishy-washy… Doug Ford says, ‘Yeah, protect Ontario,’ and he does what he thinks best, which is good. But if it doesn’t actually happen, then it’s not a topic. There’s other issues - you can talk about the increasing average age of farmers across Ontario, and the fewer new farmers entering the industry. Or the increasing costs of everything. They’re more talking about what they’ve done in the past, rather than the direction they want to move into. And I think that we’re selling ourselves short for what we could get done, compared to what we are doing.”
At one point, the trail ahead is washed out by the accumulated melt, and the dogs turn back the way they came, piling into the van and returning home, until tomorrow.