International Year of the Woman Farmer: Sue
Updated: 13 hours ago
Bio
My name is Sue Feddema, and I am co-owner of Round the Bend Farm .
Farming is in my blood, and seems to be what I have done most of my life. I grew up on a dairy farm and always dreamed of both farming and teaching. After earning my teaching degree, I was grateful to combine those two passions here on the farm.
One of my greatest passions, is teaching children where their food comes from and watching the next generation become invested in all thing agriculture
The farm isn’t just my work; it’s my life and our future.
In my spare time, I enjoy spending time with family, reading and being creative and — not surprisingly — I enjoy talking about the farm and dreaming about what’s next.
What does it mean to you to be a woman farmer?
The funny thing is, I don't ever identify myself as a woman farmer. I just identify myself as a farmer, so I don't give it a lot of thought. We farm, we grow food, we educate, and that's what we do. In any of the things I've ever done, it's never been, oh, well, you're a man and I'm a woman. That's not how I grew up. Maybe I had progressive parents. But a woman farmer…it's not something I really think about.
The reason I'm doing these interviews is because I'm legitimately interested in what it means specifically to be of the female persuasion and a farmer, because there are different answers and there are different experiences.
There are lots of different experiences. I grew up on a farm, and there was no differentiation between my brothers and my sisters. We were all farmhands. So that was the start of it. I became a teacher to educate, and now I've combined education and farming. So that people know where their food comes from. I think that's the important thing about farming for us in our situation: making sure the adults and the kids know where their food comes from.
Why is that important to you?
Because without food we're dead. If you don't know where your food comes from, you don't know how to protect the land that is necessary to grow the food. If you don't know where your food comes from, you don't know what it takes to actually produce that food. The 24/7 life that it is. Without locally grown food, are you willing to accept your food coming from different country with very different acceptable farming practices or from a petri dish? I'm not
Why not?
I don't know enough about it. I don't trust the process. That maybe shows my age.
I think that we all have our preferences. I think you're right. I think knowing how we get our food, protecting the land and things like that are important. If we don't, then that's exactly what's going to happen. Whether we like it or not, we're gonna have to get used to it. I think if we want to have options, then it's important that we maintain the land.
Yes. I mean, if you are willing to pave over all the good land for houses and towns and cities, then you also have to be willing to buy food from other countries with different regulations. Because if you don't have the space to grow it yourself you're beholden to the regulations of other countries.
What is a farmer?
In my world, a farmer is someone who produces food. It's not always just working the land, it's also animal husbandry. It would be agriculture and animal husbandry. A farmer is someone who produces food. That is what I grew up with. That is how I define a farmer.
Now, there are many roles in farming, both physical and mental. I feel that if you are doing the administrative side of it, you are just as much a farmer as the person who is doing the actual physical work. There is a lot of paperwork in farming, practical things like deciding what to do with the fields, year by year, so crop rotation. Knowing the regulations of the marketing boards, the region and municipality . There's a lot of regulations for educating people. I do copious amounts of paperwork. So yeah, farming is many things.
But you would say primarily a farmer is someone who grows or tends to food production of some kind.
Yeah, that to me is a farmer and, if you have a half acre in your backyard, and you are growing food to sustain your family, you are a farmer. In previous times, farming was your main source of income. That's not the way it works now. A farmer often has another source of income because you simply don't make enough at farming to sustain it. I know a lot of chicken and turkey farmers who have off-farm jobs, full-time off-farm jobs, because that's the way they can make it work. I know vegetable farmers that have off-farm jobs in order to keep themselves financially sustainable. We grow food, but we also do school tours because the growing of actual vegetables doesn't pay the mortgage.
When did that happen for you guys? When did you realize that?
When we bought this farm, so that's 40 years ago. We were in chickens. Chickens didn't make enough money. We couldn't expand our barns to get more quota because we were too close to the village of Kettleby, and the township wouldn't allow us to do that. I was a teacher so I stayed a teacher. Brian actually got an off-farm job when we were first married because we needed to make the mortgage payments. Then we switched to turkeys. That didn't pay the bills either. Then we started retailing off the farm. That’s when things started to come together. We raised turkeys and school tours and field crops. And the farm ran us. We didn't run the farm. Now we're trying to take back control and run the farm. Now, we run the farm, the farm doesn’t run us.
What's the hardest part about taking back control?
Learning to say no!
“We have our hours.” “You can't come before or after our hours.” “No, I won't answer the phone at 6 o'clock in the morning or 10 o'clock at night.” “No, we will take our days off. And do something for us personally. On holidays.”
We are taking back control of our life and running the farm more as a business. It's taken us many years to get there, many, many years. I mean, we're older farmers trying to figure out what to do at this stage of the game. It’s probably just as tough as when we first started.
And what got you into farming when you first started?
What got me into farming? I grew up in it! My mom and dad were farmers. I always said I was going to marry a farmer.
What kind of farm were you raised on?
Dairy.
My dad did not look at us as sons and daughters, he looked at us as arm strong labour. So, before you went to school, you did barn chores. When you came home from school, you did barn chores. In the summer, you hayed, you strawed, you did chores, and it didn't matter whether you were a girl or a boy, you were all farm help. Which is probably why I don't think of myself as a farmer, because, honestly, I couldn't drive a straight line if you tried. But! I could stack a wagon of hay or straw as well as my brothers could, but they never let me drive the tractor because I knocked a few people off the wagon, going around corners.
It takes all kinds! A farmer isn't just one part of the job, right? A farmer can do different parts of the job. So you are a farmer, you're just a farmer who knocks people over.
Yeah, I don't know if you know what stooking is. OK, so when you're baling hay and you don't have a wagon available and it's gonna rain and you want to get that cut hay off the field. So what you do is you do have a stooker, which puts 3 bales on the bottom, then 2 bales, and 1 bale on top to make a triangle so that the water will shed off of it. The person standing behind the baler on the stooker is doing that, and then they press a button with their foot, and then that stack slides off, and you start again.
I knocked my dad off like 4 times. I then became the stooker, not the driver.
How old were you when you did this?
0h, 15 or 16. Now I could milk a cow like nobody's business, so hey, there you go.
What kind of farm did Brian grow up on?
His dad actually started in tobacco. From tobacco, they went to chickens.
So I take it they went from tobacco to chickens because tobacco wasn't profitable anymore
In the beginning, the tobacco companies told the farmers that tobacco wasn't bad for you, and they got a lot of the farmers hooked on tobacco. If you just smoke tobacco…well, it's the chemicals that are in the cigarettes now that are the problem. It was a quota system as well, and they stopped handing out quota, and so Brian's dad sold the land and moved into the marsh as a retirement. Then they bought a chicken farm which was supposed to be less work.
And I take it it wasn't.
Well, it's a different kind of work. It's so many weeks in, so many weeks out, clean, disinfect, so many weeks in, so many weeks out. My dad was a dairy farmer, and he got told in his 50s that if he went into apple orchards, it would be retirement. Not really.
The land that you are on, is this your family, his family, did you buy your own land?
Brian (before we were married) and his dad bought this land because they had received more chicken quota and needed a barn to grow it in. And there was a chicken barn here. So, then we bought out Brian's dad. Initially, as young farmers, we couldn't get a mortgage. The banks said, hey, you know what, if you can get a mortgage somewhere else we'll think about you. Yeah, it's not easy getting in.
In your experience, has it always been difficult to get into farming
Unless you have parents who are farmers and do succession planning because the kids want to get into it, then it's still hard, but you have land. You have a future coming towards you. We still had a massive mortgage, we were still on our own as an independent farmer with no family backing. It's very hard, especially if you want to be in York Region - it's expensive.
What's the most expensive part of farming in York region?
The land. If you were a young farmer wanting to buy land, and then you still have to build buildings depending on what kind of farming you want to do. Land is expensive. That's the expensive part, as well as the infrastructure. It does depend a bit on what kind of farming you're doing.
Do you think the farming industry, the agricultural industry, is designed to favour men? In your experience you weren't treated as a woman or a girl growing up on the farm, you were just one of the farm hands, but in your experience, have you seen the agricultural industry favour men?
I don't think it's really designed to favour men. I think historically it was a man's job. They had the physical strength and physique for the hard manual labour. If you think in pioneer days, both men and women worked outside in order to survive. When children came along, often the woman was then able to be in the house and take care of things that way.
Does the media think it's a man's world? For sure it does. Do people who've been farming for many years think it's a man's world? Yes, because it was a man's world. That was traditionally where men were. Now, you look at the equipment that is out there, the combines and the tractors are all built with childcare seats and are easy for both genders to run.
Often, when you go to dealerships, they tend to want to talk to the guy instead of the woman. That's traditionally who has been making the decisions and who they can talk to about horsepower and everything else, but that is changing as women get into agriculture. .
But women are learning more and more, they're just as competent. My mom, she milked the cows, she unloaded wagons of hay and straw when it was needed because the weather was turning. She tended probably over 1 acre of vegetable gardens, canned and preserved food, did the cooking and household chores. My dad didn't help in the house because there were a lot of things that he did outside. There was a true division of labour. It's interesting because I know a lot of people who think of farming as a man's world. But I know a lot of women in farming. They can hold their own.
You alluded earlier to the fact that you don't identify, or that you struggle to identify as a woman farmer. Do you identify yourself as a farmer?
That's interesting. I always used to identify myself as a teacher. Because that's what I did. Now, I do farm work and I teach. Am I a farmer? Yes, we farm together, but it is a joint effort. Am I a teacher? Yes. And Brian helps in that respect too, so we do that together too. It is a joint effort. If someone asked, what are you and what do you do? Would I call myself a farmer? I am a teacher farmer, maybe? I don't know. I've never defined myself that way. It's what we do. It is definitely who we are, but I hope I'm more than the sum of my parts. I hope I'm more than just a teacher, just a farmer. I hope there's more to me than that, because in our age bracket, if you don't have other things that you can define yourself by, when you stop farming and stop teaching, then who are you? I'm certainly not a housewife. Oh my gosh, I can't even say it without laughing.
In 2023, there was a survey from Farm Management Canada that many women struggle with identifying themselves as farmers. Now, why do you think this could be?
Because traditionally, farming was a man's job. The public out there think of it as a man's job. When you say that you're a farmer, you often get laughed at. Oh, no, you're not, your husband does that, and I'm like, Would you like to see me drive a tractor?
I don't know if it's cultural, I don't know if it's media, but people just don't think of women as farmers. When you answer, they'll come on the yard and want to talk about something, and I'll look at them and go. Yeah? What do you wanna know? You know I can answer most of your questions. It is the disrespect they give when you say that you can. That's when I get sarcastic. Because I'm like really dude? It's 2026, get with the program.
What do you wish that these people and the broader public as a whole wish they understood more about what it means to be a woman involved in agriculture and farming? You've identified some stressful things, what do you wish that more people understood?
That it can be a man's or a woman's job, that it is both mentally and physically difficult 24/7 for both men and women. If you're out farming the fields, the weather is what's in control. You can't come to me in May and say there were 4 warm days, where is the sweet corn? The ground is still frozen! I wish in today's world people knew more about where their food actually comes from. If that were the case, there would be more respect for the people who grow it. We wouldn't be taken advantage of. It's assumed that as our costs are rising, we will still produce food. Farmers have always been able to produce food. And we do it with tighter and tighter margins, but people don't see that. We do it with consistently unpredictable weather, and people don't get that. People need to know where their food comes from in order to actually be able to eat.
A woman in agriculture - they need to understand that we work just as hard. Mentally and physically. How many times do you get a statement “Oh, you're just the wife.” That's the part that in today's day and age, it flabbergasts me that they don't respect the fact that women can do the job. I shovel just like anybody else, I climb a ladder and sucker in greenhouses. I can drive a tractor. I can plant seeds and harvest. That's our kind of farming and I can do it.
Give women more respect.
And appreciation
Amen to that. Women need a lot more appreciation and respect in this world.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of cultures who do not give any respect to women whatsoever. That is disturbing as well because we should be moving forward, not backwards.
We're seeing a resurgence of the disrespect towards women in North American culture specifically. It's a nightmare.
Exactly. They feel that they can say and do whatever they want because it's being mirrored at the top. I have daughters. I don't want them to have this kind of world. You know my one daughter is an engineer. She goes into many situations where she is completely disrespected as a woman in engineering until she starts pointing out the things that they've done wrong and she's got the final say. Then they're like, oh shoot, like they try to flirt and stuff like that, and then they realize, oh crap, she actually knows what she's talking about and she's going to shut us down. She's not going to do the final sign off because we didn't do the job right and we can't snow her because she actually knows what she's talking about. Yeah, it’s sad in today's day and age that is happening.
I couldn't agree more. Especially as more and more women are choosing to educate themselves and to pursue careers. I think it's a wonderful thing that’s happening. Men and women need to stop being so precious about it.
I look at gender roles that encourage people to expect that women clean and cook and everything else. When my sons got married, my daughters-in-law came to me and said, thank you. I'm like, thank you, what? Thank you that you didn't define roles as male and female, that they are willing to take care of kids. They can cook and clean and do their laundry, and they do not feel that there are women's roles and men's roles.
I thank my parents for that because that was something they didn't define either. That was pretty progressive. I'm glad that my daughter who's married has a partner who also doesn't define roles they work together as a team. And that's what you want.
Now, is there any advice that you would give a younger version of yourself or a young woman entering the agriculture and farming industry?
Ask questions of people who know. Don't try to reinvent the wheel thinking you can do it all by yourself. Ask the people that know, whether they are male or female. Ask lots of questions. Listen to what they say. Then use the parts that work for you. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Trust me, even at our age, we still make mistakes, but mistakes are there so you can learn from them, not to beat yourself up. There's no right way
You and Brian make mistakes. I don't believe it.
God, we make mistakes.
Many, and when you get advice from other people, you don't have to like it. There's not always a “right way” to do some things. Sometimes it's just the right way that works for you, and that might be completely different than how it works for someone else. To be a farmer is to be an independent person. So be an independent person, but lean on the strength of the people who came before you and the people who know what they're doing. This year, Brian sugared the greenhouses. Because an old marsh farmer told him 40 years ago that the microbes in the soil need energy. So before we planted the 3rd and 4th round into the greenhouses, we put sugar down, and some guys use molasses, and it gives the microbes in the soil the energy they need, so you can keep producing food. It's an old school method. And it works. That's wild. Every year, we do something different, we learn something new, and that's what young people need to know too. There is no right or wrong way. It's only what works for you.
Now, is there any different advice you'd give to an immigrant woman or an immigrant person coming into farming or wanting to get into the agricultural industry?
Find people who you can ask the questions to. We've had people come onto the yard, and basically, Brian stands there for an hour or I'll stand there and they just say, we just wanna ask some questions. Is that OK? We're like, yes! Yes, we'd be happy to help you.
So you're not alone.
We are a community of independent people, but we are all willing to help each other.
It's amazing. And my final question, and I think we've answered this in, in bits and pieces around, but why is farming important?
For us, it's because we all need to eat. Farming is the production of food, but it is so much more. There are so many other jobs that are related to farming. It helps the economy go.
Farming can be greenhouses. Farming can be urban farms that are doing it in sea containers. With fish. That's farming too. I look at what Fresh Heads does and it’s amazing and it’s farming too. So it takes many different forms, but it all is providing food for people.
Nice. Now, before we sign off, is there anything that you'd like to add? Anything, any questions that you feel I should have asked that I didn't ask?
No, I tend to ramble. I think for York Farm Fresh, whether you are male or female, we are there to support you. We are all in it together in different ways, but we all understand. It's a changing world, and we're hoping that we can still all continue to farm for many years to come.
We're looking at our farm, and we hear people say, I hope you never leave. Are you kidding me? Like, Brian's closing in on 70.
It's hard these days because like you said earlier, it's harder and harder for anybody to get into farming. Then the people who are currently farmers, not all of their kids are picking up the family work. It's not good or bad, it just is what it is, right? In a culture and in a society where we value the ability to write your own destiny, I don't think it's a bad thing. But it is tricky because when a farm goes up for sale, the land is expensive. It gets bought because it's great for farming, but a lot of farmland is also great for everything.
Well, all around us, the land has been bought up by contractors many, many years ago. They didn't look to the future for farming, they looked to the future for land that could be built up. It's a sadness to us that the best growing land in Ontario is being put under houses because it is also the easiest to grow houses on. If you take away our farmland, where are we gonna get our food? We have to eat, all of us. It's like giving away our water. You give away our water, what are you going to drink?
So you give away the water. The people who buy it are gonna sell it back to you.
Yeah, but in plastic bottles, thank you. I know everybody wants convenience and everybody wants things fast, but in our day and age, we have seen a turn around in the economy. It is going to be tougher for younger people than it was for us. In terms of the cost of everything, in terms of how much money they're making and what they have to pay and what the end result is; there are many people now who I think will never be able to own a home. They will always have to rent because they simply can't afford it.
We're trying to get out of that predicament, but it's not easy.
No, no, it's not unless you go far, far away. Who wants to do that? Not if your family and your relations and your everything is close by.
We know many people who, well into their 80s, rented their entire life because they never could afford a home. That's tough.
Especially when you get sold the Canadian or the American dream, which is a house with a white picket fence, and 2.5 kids and all that nonsense.
That's a personal choice. But if you really wanted to have a place to live that you could call your own, that should be a dream that you can realize.
OK, I have one final question. Do you have hope for the future of farming? And if so, what is giving you that hope?
That's a tough one. ‘Cause I know a lot of farmers are in our age bracket, and I know a lot of them don't have succession planning in place because there is no one in their family who wants to take over. It is a tough way of life. I do know other ones that have succession planning in place and the younger generation is coming in. So that gives me hope that will continue. As long as people appreciate eating, I think that there will be farms, and there will be people farming.
But I think it will be different from what we've seen in the past. It won't be the small family farm, it will be a much bigger acreage. It would not be factory farming, I wouldn't say that, but definitely bigger equipment, bigger acreage. A lot of it's going to robotics now. So less hired help.
I think of what we're seeing now is what they saw when the threshing machine came in. Before the threshing machine, hundreds of men and women went into the fields to harvest the wheat. It was a job. They would work from farm to farm to farm. Then the threshing machine came in, and it put those hundreds of men out of work. Things have to change.
I look at farming now, and I see the robotics that are coming in, the laser weeders, the drones that spray, the GPS, the self-driving tractors. My nephew put in a robotic milker. He took over his dad's milk and his dad's dairy. So there will be farming and it will look different. Is there a future in farming? I hope to God there is, because we all have to eat. It is hard to watch the old guys, in their 80s, still farming. We just had a friend die. He was in his 80s. He was still farming. Now thankfully his sons and now his grandsons are taking over. So that was already in place. But he was still in his 80s, farming, actively farming. It does seem to be a job that some people never quit.
We all have to hope that there is a future.
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