Bill Kell discusses farm life in Innisfil. Interviewed by Marj Mossman and Kathryn Schoutsen on 26 June 2016. Full transcript is as follows: Bill: Going back to the farm, I’m out of sequence here. Because we had no electricity, no anything, my father would get up in the morning, go to the barn and feed the horses and milk the cows. And then he would come in with fresh milk. And then if we weren’t going to school we had fresh milk on our porridge for breakfast. Never heard of pasteurizing or anything like that. Brucellosis, undulant fever, was going around then too which was one of things that pasteurizing kills. Yeah it was a bad disease. But then the cows were tied in the barn, locked in the barn. And you had to let them out sometime in the morning. And you went back to the creek to get a drink and then bring them back put them in the barn in the winter. And the creek froze so you started down near the bottom end of the creek and took the axe out and broke the ice for them to drink. And then they’d slop enough so the ice kept getting thicker so you kept working up and you went across about the width of a field by the spring to get water and get ice where you could break it. We had no electric lights. So you’ve seen the old farm lanterns. You had one lantern to do the whole barn. Be awful, awful careful because if it ever got knocked down, by either a human or an animal, the barn would be on fire. Quite a few barns burnt that way. So it was dismally dark, especially when you get into the short days around Christmas. But that’s the way it was and there was lots of child labour. If you were big enough. I used to, not in the morning, but my parents kept telling me how well off I was because some kids had to help with the barn before they went to school. And when I was six I had this one cow we called Strawberry and I hand milked her because she was easy and that was my job. And one day later I made the mistake of saying I got a full pound of milk from that one cow so I had to milk her every day from then on. Well it wasn’t right full, but it was. Don’t ever say anything like that again. *laughs* You learn something every day. Well partly, in war time you couldn’t hire help even if you could pay them. So it was family labour. Old people worked that should have been retired. Not many as old as me because there weren’t many as old as me. One of the milestones in my life was about a month ago, I passed the age where my grandfather, William Kell, died. And he was an old, old, old man and I was worried coming up, but I made it. But that’s, you know, he was 81. Everybody had a mixed farm, or as good as everybody. Horses, we usually had about five; cattle we had milk maybe twelve cows that was more than a lot of our neighbours. Separated the milk. Sold the cream. Fed the skim milk to the pigs or calves. Had a few chickens running around and they ate whatever. You weren’t supposed to have chickens where livestock were because they would bring in TB, but people didn’t. Oh there were some pretty coloured chickens because you liked getting the rooster from different breeds you’d see and so we’d have fifty or a hundred chickens with maybe, you’d fatten up some of them to maybe sell if you could find a market for twenty birds, which was no health control. It’s all organic, but it was just what you did. We never had sheep but a lot of people had sheep. Marj: So you might have a hundred chickens? Bill: Yeah Marj: And you didn’t really feed them, they just fed themselves? Bill: Oh you feed them, but not much. You gave them a little bit of oyster shell. The laying hens because they needed the calcium, you see, to make the egg shells. Marj: And then you would eat the eggs obviously. But would you have too many eggs you would sell them? Bill: Oh whenever the car was going to town you would take some to the grading station and they would grade them A or B or C and if they had been sitting around too long they got graded down, but yeah that’s. Marj: So then would you have say pigs? Bill: Yeah we had more pigs than most people, keep whatever grain we grew. Like I started, when I was a kid, we had a hundred acres, and in 1942 my father bought an extra hundred and twenty-five so we had close to two hundred workable when I was a kid. Then we got up to three hundred. And then the rest of the world took off and I didn’t. Like our, my friend blacksmith Don Bickell said one day, “all my customers are millionaires. Well I deal with farmers and the farmers are all millionaires. Marj: Because of their land? Bill: Because if you own the land that’s gone up in value. I mean now the farms have got so big and when we first got up to three hundred acres we were one of the biggest farms in Innisfil. Biggest eight or ten anyway. And now we are one of the smallest that tries to make a living out of a farm. And everybody else is a slave to the bank except us. But that’s the decision you make. But everybody had, some, a few people sold milk and it was, I’m not sure when they started contracts but you would have a commitment at so many cans of milk. And we sent cream, a truck came from Bradford first and then from Tottenham once a week and picked up our cream and one of our neighbours took it down to Lefroy and put a can of cream on the train to somebody in Toronto, they’d pay a little bit better. And then they could send the clean can back and they were supposed to be disinfected. There were lots of flies. You had a strainer on your pail and you had strainers that take them out before the milk went. Milk got pasteurized, the cream really didn’t, but then we lived. When I was first working up in the north end of the county they had summer milk contracts and they put milk on the train to go to, I’m not sure if it was Bracebridge or Huntsville, to the dairy up there so they had milk for the cottagers. So that only lasted, but you got a bonus for the milk that you send up. But to put it on the train, now the trains don’t even run that stop. Interviewer: For Heaven’s sake. Oh my gosh. Can you think of anything that, all of this nature stuff is interesting Bill, we don’t think about it enough. Bill: I can go on forever. You can edit this bit out. On the 9th of July the Simcoe County Federation of Agriculture is having their 75th anniversary and I will have a small part in the programme because I was president 50 years ago. I’m not that old. I was president 50 years ago and a couple, three years ago, I wrote a little bit of history because if I didn’t nobody else would. So I have been going through the evolution since 1941 to now, the evolutions in agriculture.
