Plowing Match 24: The Vermue family is ready to host
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
The 96th annual Huron County Plowing Match is taking place near Bayfield this year, and this year’s host is the Vermue family, of Vermue Farms Ltd. Hosting a county-wide plowing match can be a daunting task for even the most seasoned farmers, but, as it turns out, the whole Vermue clan isn’t just ready for this year’s match - they’re absolutely raring to go! The Citizen sat down at this fantastic family’s expansive kitchen table for some hot coffee, good cookies, and a plowing match prep. update from Koos, Nathalie, Robin, Lindsay and Nicole Vermue.
In terms of getting their family farm ready to host a huge crowd, parents Koos and Nathalie think they’re in pretty good shape at this point. Beyond having the fields that fit the bill, their farm already has the concrete-floored space required to house all the hungry guests at the match’s Friday night dinner, which will be provided again this year by the always-phenomenal Cardiff Catering out of Brussels.
The Vermues’ soon-to-be-dining venue started its life as a three-storey barn, but they converted the building into a shed years ago, in order to hold the fleet of farm equipment that the family requires to bring in the harvest every year. Each member of the family has their own role to play during harvest time, and each one has their own favourite piece of farm equipment that helps them get the job done.
Koos is content to be the one manning the giant combine - it’s currently his favourite piece of farm equipment. It’s Nathalie’s job to transport all of the wagons full of crops from point A to point B, and she favours using her own personal tractor to do so. Their son, Robin, is a die-hard fan of one of the unsung heroes of farm and field: the planter. “That’s what I spend most of my time doing,” he said. “Come springtime, that’s my job.”
Nicole, as a mechanically-minded young person, finds it difficult to choose between the family machines, so she just picked one. “I don’t know, I guess the tractor? I’ll drive anything!” Lindsay followed suit at first and chose the tractor, then changed her mind. “The buggy - my favourite thing to do is the buggy.”
They may be twins, but sisters Lindsay and Nicole certainly have their differences. When asked which cash crop each one prefers, Lindsay went with wheat, just like her mother. Nicole, on the other hand, takes after her father - they both believe corn deserves the title of top crop. As tiebreaker, Robin chose corn, which means the Vermue family is officially a corn clan.
Right now, the Vermue family tractor is a Massey Ferguson, and their combine is a New Holland, but that could change. Koos is less particular about what brand he’s buying than from whom he’s buying it. “In my eyes, all equipment is good - it doesn’t matter what colour or brands. It’s about service and the people at the businesses you deal with. For me, certainly, that’s the most important.” His favourite places to deal with these days are McGavin's Farm Equipment in Walton, and Hyde Brothers Farm Equipment in Hensall. “Their service and their people are great,” he said.
When Koos and Nathalie Vermue left their poultry farm in Holland and came to Canada in 1999, they weren’t just coming for the fertile soil and favourable growing conditions - there was something else about the environment here that they were excited about. “There’s a lot of countries in the world where there is awesome soil and awesome opportunities to farm,” Koos explained. “But for the lifestyle, the social part, there’s not that many countries around! In Europe, there’s a lot of really nice soils where you can have excellent crops and farm at 150 per cent, but you never will become part of the community. You will always be that outsider.”
Koos had already spent a fair bit of time in southwestern Ontario before they made the big decision to move to the great white north. His sisters were already farming in nearby Wellington and Lambton Counties, and he came to visit them a number of times. “I guess I just fell in love with the country,” he astutely surmised. He views the plowing match as a real opportunity to express that love, not just to other farmers, but to anybody with an interest in how their food is produced. “It’s nice to have more people outside of agriculture who can visit and who can see what’s going on. And that’s an important thing - just to show what you’re doing. And that’s not always easy.”
Nathalie pointed out that their immigration journey at the turn of the millennium was a bit different than the typical tale of migration that was common half a century earlier. “We always say that the people who immigrated in the 1950s - they immigrated. We moved. Yes, we went to a different country, but we could bring everything we wanted to bring and we didn’t have any restrictions to come here.”
Since the day this pair of farmers first arrived in Canada, the Vermues have certainly become well-known members of the community. In fact, they won the Conservationist of the Year Award from the Ausable Bayfield Conservation Authority in 2019, in recognition of their dedication to education, their soil and nutrient management, and their continuous stewardship of the land.
Awards are all well and good, but, in Huron County, there’s no better way to confirm one’s status as community members than being involved with the annual plowing match. While they’ve never hosted a match before, the Vermues have been to a number of Huron County matches, and, of course, they attended the International Plowing Match (IPM) when it came to Walton. Robin volunteered at the Walton IPM when he was in high school, and still remembers what a wild scene it was. “I think the first word that comes to mind is ‘big’! There was a lot going on... a lot of people walking around and seeing the older equipment driving around still, and in pretty good shape.” This year, he’s going to be helping out at the Huron County Soil and Crop Improvement Association’s strip-tilling demonstration.
Last year, the Huron County hosting honours went to the Albers family near Brussels. The Vermues were planning to attend the match, but life got in the way. “We wanted to!” Nathalie exclaimed. The weather last year was unusually wet and cold, which meant their own farm needed their love and attention. “The weather didn’t co-operate,” Koos recalled. “and the work at home didn’t co-operate... but the work is there when the work has to be done, and that can be all hours of the day. You have your busy times, and you have your slow times - but that makes it beautiful for us. It’s never the same.”
Not one to be deterred by the unexpected, Nathalie loves the unpredictable element of farming. In fact, she loves everything about farm life. “Being at home, with the family, working together - there’s nothing that beats that - to work with your own family, to build up something, just working together,” she said. “It can be awful long hours, but it’s so nice because you’re all doing it.”
She may not have traced her family’s farming history all the way back to the year 1500 yet, but Nathalie also has deep agricultural roots. “My mom and my dad were both from farming families,” she said. “And I did agricultural college, too. And I always wanted to be a dairy farmer, ‘cause we had dairy and cash crops at home. That’s what I knew, so that’s what I wanted to do. But then I met him, and, well, you can’t milk any chickens!”
Despite the lack of poultry milk, Nathalie quickly found she had a knack for farming a slightly different sort of chicken. “It was fun to learn something new. Something I didn’t know. We had some laying hens at home, and that was all the chickens we had! So it was really nice to see the meat side of the chickens - how that goes. And the cash crops too, are different!”
Over the course of 25 years, the Vermues have really gotten to know the land they came here to work. “It’s a little bit more open landscape here - a more rural area. Holland is a very crowded country, and it gets more and more difficult for agriculture. Because there’s more people, there’s more regulations. More people outside of agriculture have an opinion, and it’s getting more and more difficult for farming there.”
Robin thinks that the farm’s position in Bayfield will attract some extra summer visitors to the match as well. “In this area, we also get a lot of cottagers, being so close to the lake,” he pointed out. “So it’s something for them to come out to as well.”
Rather ironically, the family hosting this year’s plowing match doesn’t actually do much plowing these days. In fact, several people have approached them and asked why they, as non-plowers, are even hosting a plowing match in the first place. But, although this local family may not feel the need to plow the rich soil they found in Huron County right this minute, you’d be hard-pressed to find a longer, unbroken lineage of plowing in the whole history of western farming. Koos can trace his family tree all the way back to the turn of the 16th century. “As far as we can see,” he explained, “it has always had to do with farming and land. So it’s very deep in our roots... And in Nathalie’s family too.” That means that Robin, Lindsay, and Nicole are the 14th generation of their family to grow up knowing what it takes to farm.
In Holland, the Vermue family always plowed their fields, but, as they began stewarding the land here, they found that different methods could work for them. “The ground here in Canada, we have never plowed, in 25 years,” Koos pointed out. “We do our soil tillage, but no plowing…. This particular field has been plowed in the past, but not by us. It’s more the history.”
It’s not just 16th century farming that the Vermues place value on - they also show a real appreciation of more recent history. “My grandparents got the opportunity from their parents to farm,” Koos explained thoughtfully. “And my dad got the opportunity from his parents to farm, and we’re more than happy to give our kids the opportunity to farm. If they want. Or not! In farming, you have to love it 150 per cent.”
Of their three children, both Robin and Nicole are all about continuing on with the farming life. Nicole is currently attending the University of Guelph’s Ridgetown Campus, where she studies agriculture. “I’m hoping to possibly do an apprenticeship afterwards for agriculture mechanics,” she explained. “And I’m hoping that’s just something to bring me into knowing more things about the equipment, I think. I know for sure that I want to farm. When I’m out of school, and done with the apprenticeship, and been working for a bit, I hope to get back to the farm.” Her favourite thing about farming is working on the mechanical side of things. “I just like fixing things, and finding problems,” she admitted. “And I just like the field work and the livestock - basically everything about it.”
Robin graduated from Ridgetown in 2020, and then from Alberta’s Olds College in the spring of 2021. Once he finished school, he came back to the family farm, and took over a section of it. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” he confided. “To continue this on - that’s always kind of been a dream of mine.”
Things are a bit more up in the air for Lindsay. She just finished her first year of university in St. Catherines. “I’m going to Brock for International Business, but apart from that, I don’t really know what I want to do after school. For now, she’s loving attending the school’s Niagara campus, and knows that her family is genuinely excited to see what she decides to get up to with her life.
For Nathalie, the impending match is also a way to celebrate the future of plowing matches themselves.“It’s a form of art, almost - a disappearing art,” she said. These days, more and more farmers are going no-till. “It’s better for the soil and prevents erosion,” she explained. Each modern plowing match held isn’t just a display of useful technical skill - it’s becoming an artistic expression of a distinct era in the history of agriculture. Natalie also believes that the future of farming has always been about the transfer of knowledge between generations - and what better place for that than a plowing match?
Her advice for young farmers looking to learn is simple. “Be open for comments and advice. You can learn a lot from the older people who’ve done it already for years - they have the most knowledge about how things work. And that’s true with everything, I find.”
It may be this local family’s farm that is about to be populated with a cast of hundreds, but the Vermues want to make sure that credit goes where credit is due. “We’re hosting it, but the compliments go to the whole organization - the Huron County Plowmen’s Association (HCPA). They have the experience, and they have the knowledge, and we try to accommodate.”
The HCPA first decided to offer the hosting gig to this family farm for practical reasons - their fields are suitably situated to accommodate a plowing match. But HCPA President Steve Hallahan quickly realized that they really lucked out when they landed the Vermues as their host family. “We have hosts that’re just gung-ho. We’ve got to put on a good show, because they’re so excited to host it!”