Freeman River Ranches are a grazing partnership of :

    Klaus and Brita Kuelken       and      Peter and Doris Kuelken

         Our ranches are located 7 miles NW of Fort Assiniboine 

                                      on Highway # 33  " The Grizzly Trail "       

                 close to the geographical center of the province
                               of Alberta \ Canada

  We are raising a herd of Plains and Woods-X Bison .  The ranches are managed holistically, and the animals are handled with as little stress as possible. We graze them in rotation and try to stockpile grass in  order to have them graze long into the winter.
  Our aim is to produce grass fed meat that is as natural a product as Native Canadians enjoyed before the world turned modern.

What Happened to Farming ?

I am a farmer, a small time farmer, who had the good fortune of growing up at a time when work on the fields was still done with horses. A time when grain was still cut by hand, and the weeding of the fields, in sometimes backbreaking labor, was done with the hoe. I am not trying to make a pitch for the "good old days" , I am trying to find out when it all happened that farming became a business instead of a lifestyle?  When did it happen that we started to mine the soil instead of trying to keep it healthy?  When did we start to raise farm animals in isolation from the land rather than having them as an integral part of a healthy sustainable farm enterprise?

I grew up in Europe before WW 2 ,and my father operated a small lumberyard which also started to sell chemical fertilizers to farmers in the early thirties. The fertilizers at that time were mostly byproducts of industrial processes, and I remember one especially called "Thomas Meal" , a byproduct of the steel industry containing mostly phosphorous. As an apprentice on farms after the war we still did a lot of work by hand and really appreciated the mechanization which took away the often back breaking labor. But even than there was still lots of room for many people to find work on the farm. The health of the soil and its productivity did depend on a well thought out crop rotation. It took many different types of crops, and also a variety of animals to make farming a sustainable enterprise.

Fertilizer at that time started to be used more frequently, but still in a very well thought out relationship to the crop rotation. Weed control was accomplished partly by rotating crops that needed hand weeding , like potatoes and beets, with grains. But even for grain crops we started to develop a system of mechanical weeding that had potential. At the time when the first herbicides were introduced, I did not know that a new era in farming had arrived. It was like magic. We dusted a field of wheat that was yellow with wild mustard with a substance called U-52 , and in a few days there was a beautiful green field left "and we wondered where the yellow went"!

I think it was then that agriculture was taken over by industry and not only did we forget most of the lessons we learned over hundreds of years but we lost touch with nature because we thought we could MANAGE it.

I went back to this farm in the early 80's and talked to my old boss who, at that time worked on the farm together with his son and one worker. Compared to the days of my apprenticeship when 32 people worked on the place and produced 7 different kinds of crops and had 4 different kinds of animals to care for, the farm was dead. Producing only pigs raised in confinement, and two grain crops, it had just become another business.

Do not think that I am trying to condemn what happened. It was one of mankinds' never ending ploys to make life easier. It was so simple. You put the seed in the ground, fed it the proper amount of fertilizers ,killed everything that could possibly interfere with spray, and voila, weather permitting you reaped immense rewards. It never occurred to us that this could possibly be harmful to the soil, animals, or even us because we were told that it was scientifically proven to be harmless.

Over the last 3 decades I have watched farmers try to understand what is slowly happening to them. They thought it was prices or markets or high interest rates. But I think what really happened was , that outsiders took control of farming and made it into a business. There was money to be made from farming by selling technology to farmers, and now agri-business reaps 17% on their investment while farmers only scrape together 1.9%.

Peasants in third world countries were pushed off the land by the big landowners who wanted to start plantations in order to access first world markets. These peasants now fill the slums of the big cities looking for a means of existence.

Here in Canada farmers have been pushed off the land because they bought into all the new technology which seemed to make life easier but got them into a dependency to outside forces beyond their control. High yields and larger holdings had to compensate for low prices. They were told that farming is a business, and that in a business the bottom line is God. "Bigger is better!"....... "The Economy of Scale!" " We can feed the plants and animals and get rid of anything that interferes !" BECAUSE-- "We have to feed a hungry world !"

But the hungry in this world can not afford to buy our high technology food, and if we would not expect them to sell us their food cheaply( so they can repay their debts to us) they quite easily could feed themselves.

I raise all this question not to blame anybody, we all have been sucked into the paradigm that man can manage nature. However, it is time we take a new look at the source of our food, the land, and the people who work with it.

     If you would like to see our operation, give us a call !!

                                       Peter at : 780-584-2376
                                       Klaus at :780-584-2407