Cousins renew family farm, innovating as they go

Cousins Jordan Siemens and Kyle Hamilton inherited a big decision along with the family farm near Lucky Lake, Saskatchewan. How could they make the operation they had grown up with sustainable for the future they wanted to build?

It all began in the 1950s when their grandparents, Tom and Gladys Hamilton, started the operation about a two-hour drive southwest of Saskatoon. It’s been in the family ever since.

Things have changed over the last seven decades. Now with young families of their own, Hamilton and Siemens had to take a hard look at the business they’d inherited, especially with high machinery prices and input costs. Grain farming had left them with high overhead, significant labour needs, and little room for risk management in a dry part of the province.

Image: Jordan Siemens (left) and Kyle Hamilton (right)

The thought of continuing to operate as he had just didn’t give him joy, Hamilton says. “I did not want to spend my whole life in a high clearance sprayer.”

As they prepared to take on greater responsibility, Hamilton and Siemens worked closely with their parents to plan the transition. The families agreed on a plan that would allow the older generation to retire while the two cousins shaped the business for the future. That led them to shift from grain to irrigated forage, supported by a cow-calf operation.

They sold equipment and reallocated land to irrigation and forage production, primarily alfalfa and grass grown for hay. This took years of phased-in expansion of irrigation, the linchpin of their plan. The final irrigation projects were completed in 2024.

Financing this shift required careful planning. The large scale of the irrigated forage did not fit a standard lending model. That meant the partners had to build projections from the ground up and find a lender willing to work through something unfamiliar.

“There really was not a template for what we were trying to do,” Hamilton says. “We had to come in with our own projections and prove the model could work.”

The model made sense to Farm Credit Canada (FCC). The farmers planned to harvest two to three hay crops per season. The hay would be sold locally, mostly within 80 kilometres of the farm. They would also maintain 300 cow-calf pairs grazing native pasture, adjusting livestock levels as markets changed.

“We wanted a model that could adjust when markets change, not one that forced us into the same decision every year,” Hamilton says.

With support from FCC, Hamilton and Siemens were able to evolve their operation. They expanded irrigation in phases as cash flow and production capacity allowed, prioritizing steady progress over rapid growth.

Now, six years after their clean slate, the operation includes 1,400 irrigated acres dedicated to forage production. That flexibility gives the partners options to adapt to changing markets, and to build a business that works for their growing families, whether by expanding cattle production, focusing on forage sales, or shifting production into other areas.