93-year-old farmer climbing back into the cab

When the land thaws, Carl Slonowski can’t imagine quitting

When I was introduced to Carl Slonowski, he was in his farmyard near St. Paul, adjusting the tines on his cultivator before heading out into the field. He was a bit slow to get up—he said his knees ached a little when he straightened them. 

And why wouldn’t they? Now almost 94 years old, Carl and his knees have been working hard since he first broke his father’s land in Manitoba in 1943.

That year they broke about 55 acres of the quarter-section farm. Most of the quarter was bush, so it had to be cleared before it could be plowed. And there’s no shortage of rocks to be picked out of the land around Dauphin.

On 23 acres they used a John Deere tractor while Carl and his dad led a four-horse team on 12 acres more. Carl, who drove the team, remembers his hands were blood-blistered after the job was done.

“The horses were trained to pull,” he said. “When you hit a rock, you have to stop. But the horses don’t know you hit a rock behind them.”

Despite growing up on the farm, Carl hasn’t been farming all his life. He has worked on rail gangs, tearing up the old light rail between Dauphin and Swan River, and replacing it with heavy rail. Between other jobs he would cut pulpwood. He worked in the oilfields of southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and underground in the hard-rock mines with Sherritt-Gordon in Lynn Lake, Manitoba.

He came to Alberta in 1967.

Obviously the farming business has changed a lot since 1943. What appeals to Carl the most is still the honest physical work and the fresh air. Someone with a massive farm of thousands of acres may be a business owner, he says, but unless he’s on the tractor he isn’t farming.

“Same as Ford manufacturing vehicles. They’re real big. If nobody shows up to work, how big are they going to be? In three days’ time they’d fold up,” he said.

“Same with farming. I don’t call that a farmer that sits in the office and dictates. Get your hands dirty and some dust in your eyes. That’s a farmer.”

Carl doesn’t run the entire operation anymore. “I still make small decisions,” he said. And he doesn’t do all the work anymore either—he seeds, works, and harvests about 60 acres, enough to keep him involved and busy during the growing season. In the course of the season, he’ll log about 500 acres worth of tractor time.

It keeps him young. The thought of retirement doesn’t appeal to him in the least. Even spending a winter indoors makes him antsy to get out—that’s why he’s preparing the machinery and getting onto the land as soon as the ground is thawed. 

“I feel better when I’m outside more,” he said.