Acadian ancestral farm

I’m Paul-Émile Soucy. I live in Saint-Basile New Brunswick, this is northern New Brunswick, the Madawaska County which we sometime call the Republic of Madawaska. We’re located at the border between New Brunswick and the State of Maine; the Saint-John River makes the border. I think I have to count this back again, but I think it's the 7th generation, it’s the only farm that’s been in the family since the land here in the Madawaska County were granted back in 1785, so it’s been in the same family ever since transferred from generation to generation and in my case right now I have two of my sons that are interested in the farm, so there probably will be another transfer. The farm like I was saying, it’s a mixed farm operation mainly like we have livestock, on the farm I’m trying to use or make the best use of all the resources that I have, so there’s quite a few acres of pastureland so we have sheep that use the pasture in the summertime and we have a stake on other flatlands to feed the stock or the sheep in the wintertime. In rotation with the potatoes that I grow for the local market we grow some cereal, grain, mainly oat and some barley that we use to feed the sheep with, so that makes a rotation; so we can use the manure from the flock and turn that under, plough it and it fertilizes the ground so in the capacity of the barn right now is about 200 sheep, this what I have. So it uses the pasture, uses the farmland, the crops, the hay that we harvest enough hay for the sheep for the flock and some cereal. We also have a woodlot that we harvest wood from. Through the operation, back a few years ago, about 10-20 years ago now the sawmill, the portable sawmill, I add value to some of the wood product of the logs that I have like cedar mainly and some other species that we can add value to it with the sawmill. Just the sheep is not enough, just the potato is not enough but a mixture of, this diversification of the farm we survive. Evolution, I’d say mechanization probably but then we have to go back a few years like 15 years ago. I know it’s my father that bought the first tractor on the farm here, it was horses back then and but of course those tractors have gone now and I had to buy new tractors and new equipment, mechanization today there’s a lot more mechanization that there used back a few years ago. Also I have, to mention electricity, I mean we don’t talk about electricity today but 60 years ago electricity was the things back then today you know, but it’s there today. So of course fertilizer happened in that time also and pesticides that came in being used on farming operations today.

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Acadian ancestral farm