WEYBURN — A sister, a brother and a brother-in-law are Saskatchewan’s Outstanding Young Farmers for 2023.
Sarah Leguee, her brother Jake, and their sister Amber’s husband, Erik Nikolejsin, received the honour at Canada’s Farm Show last week.
They will compete against other regional honorees in Montreal in November for national recognition.
The family farms about 15,000 acres between Weyburn and Fillmore. Although three were honoured, Jake Leguee said everyone has a role, including parents, Russ and Sharon, his wife, Stephanie, and Amber.
Grandparents Don and Elsie Leguee began the farm in 1956 and Russ and Sharon took over in the late 1970s. The farm grew nearly 700 percent and switched to minimum tillage during that time. The cattle were phased out as well.
Jake and Sarah returned to the farm in the early 2010s, and Erik joined in 2017.
“We grow canola, durum, wheat, lentils, peas and flax,” said Jake. “Our vision is to create an enduring business.”
He said creating the right expectations and good governance are important to a team management style.
He returned to the farm in 2010 after graduating from the University of Saskatchewan with an agronomy degree. He worked full-time while farming because those first few years were extremely wet and tough financially. But he also said his father emphasized how important it was to learn to work for someone else.
Leguee is vice-chair of SaskWheat, chair of the Canadian Wheat Research Coalition and a member of the Global Farmer Network. He also writes a blog, A Year in the Life of a Farmer, to try to bridge the gap between farmers and consumers.
“Consumers are interested but don’t understand what we’re doing. That’s a really dangerous thing for us in agriculture,” he said.
Jake and Stephanie have three boys aged seven, five and two.
Sarah is the vice-president of grain logistics and Erik is vice-president of operations.
“All of us seed, spray, truck, combine, whatever needs to be done, but my focus is setting up loads and moving grain and making sure that all that is kept track of because it’s really easy to think when you haul six loads that day that two weeks from now you’re going to remember what bin you took it from,” she said.
She returned to the farm in 2012 after going to Olds College and then working at South Country Equipment for a few years.
“My parents said you work off the farm if you want to farm, which I was not excited about,” she said. “That was probably one of the best experiences, between the coworkers and customers and industry people that I met.”
She is deputy reeve in the Rural Municipality of Wellington, the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan representative there, and a volunteer firefighter in Fillmore.
Nikolejsin spent years also working with John Deere and in the oilfield until joining the farm in 2017. He is involved in minor sports like baseball and curling in Weyburn.
His role on the farm is vice-president of operations.
“I take care of all the day-to-day stuff,” he said, including managing full and part-time employees.
The Nikolejsins also have young children.
Jake said the potential for a fourth generation to take over is part of what drives Leguee Farms.
“Our vision is to grow an enduring business for the fourth generation on our farm,” he said. “One thing that’s really amazing about agriculture that we need to tell as a story to everyone that we can is that we have the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of our grandparents to create a future for our children, and that is what drives this business.”
The farm’s mission statement is to build a farm that supports their families, soils, communities and the industry to create a bright future for all.
Incremental progress and continuous improvement are key, he added.
This year’s crop is a little late because of the heavy April snow and they are cautiously optimistic about production this fall.
Russ and Beth Wildfong from Craik were the other couple nominated this year. In addition to farming about 10,000 acres, they have a new business called Wildfong Concaves and manufacture parts for combines using Canadian raw steel.
