Nick Zawislak started farming at the age of 22 in 1949, and still enjoys helping his son Terry on the family farm north of Canora near Amsterdam during busy seasons such as harvest, even after celebrating his 90th birthday on Saturday.
Terry said his father is an excellent worker around the farm and still puts in the long hours required at harvest.
The elder Zawislak grew up on a farm near Insinger, and learned all about farming at a young age. By the time he became a teenager, he was doing field work with horses.
Zawislak remembers it took five horses to pull their two-bottom plow, and four horses to pull the 14-foot seed drill.
He recalls in those days, harvest time was very different than it is now.
“The crop was cut with a binder, and then formed into stooks, which were fed into the threshing machine and harvested. It took a crew of about nine or 10 men. In a really good day, a crew could harvest about 40 to 50 acres.”
From 1947 to 1949, Zavislak worked at the iron ore mine in Steep Rock, Ont. as a supplementary source of income. But in 1949, he decided to farm full-time with his brother Max.
Nick bought his first combine, a G4 International (IH) pull-type unit, in 1950. The following year Max bought a 1951 Massey Harris model 26 combine.
They each had about half a section of land, and farmed together until 1955, when Nick decided to end the partnership and farm on his own with his wife Adeline. They were married in 1954.
Nick said that he and Adeline have been married for 63 happy years, and raised a family of five boys. Terry’s brother’s include Bob, Glenn, Dale and Darcy.
Farming has gone through many changes in those years, and Nick has experienced them all. New cropping options came along, including canola in the 1970’s. He included it in his crop rotation, and Terry continued growing it after taking over the farm in 1980.
Their farm size has increased from 640 acres in 1949 to around 2,500 acres of crop land this year. Yields have also increased tremendously, thanks in large part to advances in fertilizer.
On September 6, Nick and Terry were helping their neighbour Dennis Cymbalisty harvest a bumper crop of oats, which looked to be yielding well over 100 bushels per acre, a yield which was all but impossible in the 1940s.
The combines used on the Zavislak farm have gotten larger and newer over the years. Nick appreciates conveniences in today’s combines such as a buzzer which tells him when the hopper is full of grain, and monitors which indicate the moisture content of the grain. Nick and Terry were using a pair of 2188 Case IH units in their neighbour’s oats field, and even they were a little small for the large crop.
They can harvest 150 to 200 acres of crop in a good day with two combines, several times what threshing crews used to do with threshing machines.
The elder Zawislak said one of his favourite things about farming is watching the crops grow, as they start green and then change colour, whether it’s the yellow of canola, or the blue of flax, or the gold of a ripe field of wheat, barley or oats.
But he said it’s the people he’s met that have really made it enjoyable to be a farmer
“We’ve always had good neighbours, and we try to be good neighbours as well. We help each other out whenever it’s needed,” said Zawislak.
Since his son took over the farm, Nick has become involved in other pursuits such as selling vacuum cleaners and driving a school bus on a casual basis, but farming is still by far his favourite. He expects to continue working as a farm hand as long as his health is good.
