Dalbey Farms, The Pallesen Family

    One of the many interesting stories in the history of Western Canada is how some areas were settled by groups of pioneers connected by their background and faith.
    Barry Pallesen can trace his mother Rita’s family’s presence in the area south of Drumheller to a group of Danish immigrants who came to Canada in the late 1920s. Somehow they survived the brutal conditions of the 1930s.
    “My grandpa used to say after a harvest, ‘At least you got your seed back,’ “ recalls Barry.
Barry’s father, Olav, followed his dream of becoming a farmer and came out from Denmark after the Second World War to join an uncle in the area.
    The Pallesen family farm’s name, Dalbey Farms, is a combination of two places names in the area – Beynon and Dalum and Dalbey farms is the 2013 BMO Farm Family of the Year for Wheatland County.

The Pallesen Family was recognized as the BMO Farm family for Wheatland County.

    Olav and Rita still live on the farm and help out when needed; Olav was on the combine every day of the 2012 harvest. Barry and his wife Pauline are the farm’s main operators right now, but Barry says his daughter    Kirsten, a student at Olds College, makes an increasingly large contribution.
    “She hasn’t run away yet,” he quips. “It looks as if she’s going to continue with it, and that’s wonderful. When you see that your child wants to continue with things, it makes what you’re doing seem more rewarding.”
    The couple’s other daughter, Jenny, is a math major at the University of Lethbridge and is always ready to help out when she is needed.
    Dalbey Farms is a mixed enterprise, with a 140-pair cow-calf operation and 4,000 acres of wheat and canola. The cropland is continuously cropped and no-till. There are also about 1,500 acres, both rented and owned, that support the herd.
    “I’d rather have cows than the wheat, even though there’s way more money in the grain,” Barry admits. “The cows have personality. A lump of wheat doesn’t look at you. You can’t scratch wheat under the chin. But,” he adds, “wheat does just stay there all winter without being fed, too.”
    The Pallesen cattle are bred from either Black Angus or Charolais bulls.
    “It’s not a purebred place,” Barry says. “They’re all red, white faced cattle.”
    Knowing that what you do helps to feed the world is a pretty satisfying feeling, adds Barry.
    “The challenge of raising these cattle and doing this fieldwork is absolutely huge, but, man, is it rewarding at the end of the year when it’s all come together,” he says. “There’s no better business than agriculture right now.”
    Every generation of the Pallesen family has, and continues to, be active in their church and community. “Everybody does their part,” Barry says. “If you see that from a young age, then it would seem abnormal if you didn’t do it, too.”
    For Barry, the success of the Pallesen family farm can’t be attributed to anyone person’s efforts.
    “It’s a generational thing,” he remarks. “Just because, right now, I’m the decision maker doesn’t put me at the head of anything. It’s just my turn. The transition among all the generations has been good, and everyone gets along. We all have the same goal. It’s not about making money. It’s about doing a good job and being satisfied with what you’ve done.”

The Russell Family
    Dryland farming is the norm, rather than the exception, in most of Alberta. It must have been something of a shock to Mark Wilson, who came from the relatively lush farmland around Hagersville, Ont., when he homesteaded the area just north of Drumheller in 1910.
     Actually, according to Wilson’s grandson Craig Russell, the well-regarded carpenter from Ontario didn’t really want to farm at all. It was Mark’s son, also named Craig, who drove the family’s acquisition of their first farm.
    “This whole area has no well water; Craig Russell says. “It must have been horrendous, especially in the early days.”
    A coulee near the farm has a small spring, so the early settlers made a road down to it.
    “They dragged barrels down and hauled water up. They dug dugouts and built little dams.”
    In his youth, says Craig, he can remember how “you got a truck and put a tank in the back and went to Drumheller." 
    Today, water comes to the farm via a pipeline from the Drumheller water system.
    Craig Russell is the nephew of Craig Wilson and his son Calvin is now beginning the process of taking over the farm. The family operation is called 5G Farms, because Calvin’s children will be the fifth generation on the land, and the Russells are the 2013 BMO Farm Family of the Year for Starland County.

The Russell family was recognized as a BMO farm Family for Starland County at the Calgary Stampede.

 Calvin’s years of mechanical experience in the oilfields will be very useful, Craig says, considering the highly sophisticated equipment that today’s farming requires. Much of the farm features heavy soil. So heavy, in fact, that the first Craig (Wilson) complained that it couldn’t be broken with horses, and that only steam engines had enough power to pull a plow through it.
    Mind you, it was a piece of the farm with much lighter soil that drove the family’s change from summer fallowing to continuous cropping.
    “It was just blowing away on us. It was frustrating. We couldn’t get a crop off it; Craig Russell remembers. “We started cropping and cropping on it and it started to get better and better. Today it’s one of the better pieces of property that we have.”
    It took more than a new theory of tilling and seeding to make the changes happen.
    “That’s the advantage of having the better equipment. Those old discs they used to have, they had to have it pretty black to be able to seed through the trash. Today, we’re lucky. We can seed through a lot of trash and that trash is mulch that keeps the soil moist.”
    Of the 3,500 acres (about half of it owned) that the Russells farm, about 1,000 acres are in canola, 1,000 are in barley, and the rest is split between flax and wheat.