Andrew McClelland
The Advocate

Sometimes the early childhood memory of being on the farm is enough to set your path in life. And for 20-year-old Travis Larwill, growing up on the family farm in Buckingham, Que., in the Outaouais region was full of such memories.

“I remember sitting in the cab with my grandfather on hot days and hauling grain from the combine,” Larwill recalled.

“I don’t know what it is, but I’ve always wanted to farm. Just hearing my grandfather’s stories and talking with him and my grandmother, seeing my dad farm, made me love it so much. It gave me a passion to want to grow the farm.”

Larwill is the seventh generation of his family to work the land in Buckingham, which is now part of the municipality of Gatineau. His grandfather made the decision to wrap up the family’s dairy operation and focus on cash-cropping when Travis was a toddler, keeping the young aspiring farmer busy with the annual wheat and grain crop.

Larwill is an only child, and that came with a lot of attention from his father and grandparents —and the knowledge that he had to take on his fair share of the workload.

“It was pretty good,” Larwill said, before adding: “and then sometimes you wish you had a brother to spread the work around with!”

Opted to enroll at Mac

When it came time to decide what to do after high school, Larwill knew that he didn’t want to stray too far from the family farm. He wanted to be able to get back on weekends to help his father, Randy Larwill. Macdonald Campus, a “short” 150 kilometres away, seemed like an ideal fit.

“My grandfather had done some agricultural classes, but I’m the first one from my family to go into a university program for farming,” Larwill said. “I always wanted to have more education after high school in agriculture and I had friends who raved about how great Mac was.”

In the fall of 2021, Larwill enrolled in the Farm Management and Technology program. While the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic required that students remained masked at all times, he was able to attend in-person classes and meet members of Quebec’s larger English-speaking farming community.

For many students at FMT, the highlight of the program are the required internships, where students stay for weeks at a time with another farm family across the country. For Larwill, that meant heading to Marquette, Man., about 50 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, where he worked with Jeff and Chris McMillan. It was an eye-opening trip.

Internship opened eyes to possibilities

“I drove out there,” Larwill said. “At first you see a bit of bush in eastern Manitoba and then it just opens up till you see nothing but prairie farmland.”

Larwill’s family farm never had any livestock during his childhood, but seeing a Manitoba dairy, beef and cash-crop operation allowed him to have a hint of what animal tending is like.

“I saw a completely different way of farming,” he said. “Helping with beef and dairy, making feed – it was great to get experience on all those things I had been studying at Mac.”

That experience gave Larwill an idea to diversify his family farm back home: if he started building a small herd of sheep now, it could be a great way to use the family’s vacant dairy barn — and add a new revenue stream to its operations.

“At first, I thought getting into beef would be best,” Larwill said. “But it was too expensive and sheep was an operation you could basically run by hand.”

Larwill had his first lambing season this year. He describes it as a “pretty good start” with all the enthusiasm of a young producer excited to apply the theory he had learned at school on the farm.

“It was definitely a steep learning curve. But any time I was stuck, I could go back to my books and get most of the answers for what I needed to do.”

For Larwill, the family farm, which also includes 650 acres of cash crops, is the obvious place to stay. His father is still working and ready to share his experience.

“With the prices these days, just getting land is so hard if you want to start in agriculture. I made great farm connections with people at Mac, and we have the land here. After that, knowing people is often the best tool we have.”