see how other farmers were surviving this different year. As we traveled up the Quebec side of the Ottawa River and down the Ontario side, we stopped into one of the oldest trading posts in Canada at the end of the road in Quebec unless you take a side track through Ontario and get back into Quebec miles later. The end of the road in Quebec is at Fort William. The Pontiac hotel is built on the edge of the Ottawa River beside a mile long sandy beach where the Algonquins used to land more than 200 years ago in fur laden canoes to trade the furs for tools that the white man made.

Originally started by the Hudson Bay Company, it passed through many hands such as The Northwest Company, McCool, and eventually by the Miller family. More than 125 years ago when the fur trade began to slack off and lumber camps dotted the forests just north and east of the Fort stocking supplies for the camps became income. Soon a large farm was added to grow hay, grain, meat and vegetables for the camps.

As many farmers settled the area, they too needed supplies and had produce to sell. A small church was constructed close by and a graveyard was provided for the use of the natives. For the last 100 years it has been a tourist destination originally by steam boat and then by car and many, many boats. Friday night fiddle music has been a tradition for so long that no one remembers when it started. The hotel used to have 60 rooms to stay in but now pontoon and house boats are a more frequent way for patrons to arrive and even stay in.

COVID-19 has also demanded change from the old hotel. To continue business in these trying times a huge deck was added to relax, eat, drink and dance on since so many safety restrictions make it almost impossible to crowd the old hotel like other years. Music on the porch replaced the inside entertainment. Although the famous kitchen is still preparing food, the huge deck is now the dining room. The bar still supplies cool drinks but you sit on the patio and watch the sunset to enjoy them.

When we left the old hotel and tried to let our brains absorb all the changes that they had adapted to we began to observe some of the changes that farmers had to adapt to as well. Where there once were pastures full of milk cows, now you see acres of soybeans. Where horses used to pull wagons loaded with loose hay to store in barn lofts, now we see round bales wrapped in white plastic or large open front sheds piled tight with dry round bales. Some things don’t change though. Some farms have barns already piled full of large round bales and their fields green and full of the next cut of hay, already a foot high. Beside that farm is another with a few thin cows walking over a brown pasture eaten down till you can see the bare ground showing through.

We observed fields of corn so dry that the three feet high drought-stunted crop would only be good for salvage as poor corn silage instead of an abundant crop of grain corn. Because of shortage of feed some farmers will have to critically select which superior animals they keep and which ones not as productive to get rid of before fall or winter. Even in these dry times, it is obvious that farms with a big manure pile beside the barn seemed to have less feed than those whose manure had already been spread.

We clearly observed that the fields in Pontiac were greener, with higher corn and beans, and had greener lawns than our neighbours on the Ontario side of the valley. This is not because Pontiac farmers are all better than our Ontario neighbours but because we received more precipitation throughout the growing season.

Our forefathers have witnessed changes throughout time and the successful ones accepted and adapted to the needed changes.

An old friend of mine once told me, “No matter what the government does to your profession, the best will survive!”

Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations. gladcrest@gmail.com

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