Andrew McClelland
The Advocate

You could say that from an early age, Andrew Dirven had his priorities straight when it came to farming.

“One day I came home from school and saw that my family was harvesting,” the 21-year-old grain producer recalls. “So I ran inside and told my father that I did all my homework on the bus — which I definitely hadn’t done — just so I could ride in the tractor with my grandfather. I loved every second of sitting in that tractor, until the next morning when I actually had to do my homework on the bus!”

From that young age, Dirven realized that his third-generation family farm in Bainsville, Ont., was something special. And there weren’t many other careers he considered pursuing.

“It was an amazing childhood growing up on the farm,” Dirven said. “I was always fascinated with tractors and combines. And that fascination is still with me. Working alongside my family as a child developed a special bond. Being passionate farmers brought us together.”

The story of the Dirvens’ farm begins in 1977, when Andrew’s grandparents, Peter and Betty Dirven, decided to sell their farm in The Netherlands and relocate to Canada. It wasn’t long before their son, Nick, took an interest in the family business and started a multi-generational grain and cash cropping operation.

Today, the family — along with lots of help from Andrew — produces corn, soybeans and wheat under the name Spendrew Farms.

Located a mere seven kilometres from the Quebec border, it wasn’t difficult for Driven to realize that Macdonald Campus in Ste. Anne de Bellevue was a great, nearby place to receive an agriculture education.

“Mainly, I wanted to go there just because of my passion for agriculture. But after I started, I realized networking was just as important,” he explained.

“Over my three years at Mac, I met a lot of people with the same interests as me, and a lot of those people have become my closest friends.”

Dirven enrolled in the Farm Management and Technology (FMT) program in the fall of 2021, discovering the finer points of soil science, cash cropping and agricultural economics.

“Cash cropping is a very dependant industry on the markets. Our grain prices fluctuate depending on supply and demand around the world,” he said. “There isn’t a lot of security or guarantee to what prices we’ll receive. Although our farm works hard on marketing by making futures contracts, setting targets and other marketing strategies, it still puts a lot of dependency on what’s going on globally.”

That’s what gave Dirven the thought of diversifying. Instead of relying on grain prices to determine the revenue of Spendrew Farms, there was money to be made providing services instead of just selling commodities.

“Since 2023, we’ve been offering custom harvesting and custom spraying,” Dirven said, referring to two tasks he has taken on himself. “I believe in the importance of diversification, having alternative income sources to allow our farm to have more security.” 

With initiatives like those, Dirven is definitely working more than full time on the family farm. Along with spraying and harvesting, equipment maintenance is also his duty at Spendrew. He knows that one day, he’ll be able to take over management of the whole farm — and is more than grateful for the fact that he was born into a family farm so he could pursue his dream.

“I wish for my future generation and other future members in the agriculture industry to have the same opportunities as I had,” Dirven said. “Opportunities to purchase land will be the biggest challenge for young farmers. With land being an appreciating asset, it’ll continue to be more expensive for the next generation. Not only will receiving approval for a mortgage to purchase the land be a challenge, but as well as being able to cash flow the payments.”

That’s part of the reason that family — and family farming — play such an enormous role in Dirven’s life and journey in the industry. For him, family working together is a strength that has to be experienced to be understood.

“Just growing up and watching my family work hard day and night together — to either complete harvest, or try to get the last field planted before the rain, or whatever the task might have been — it’s a level of passion that most people wouldn’t understand unless they lived it.”