(soft country music plays) ♪ Farmer is the man ♪ ♪ Farmer is the man ♪ ♪ Farmer is the man ♪ - Mm, good.

(harmonica plays happy tune) - [Paulette] Well, Shane is a very active, ambitious guy.

- [Nicole] Shane doesn't have an off switch.

It's always go, go, go a hundred different ideas at once.

- [Friend] So the first time I met Shane, I talked to you on the phone.

He kind of caught me off guard because he talks so fast.

Okay, so this guy's certainly excited.

He's certainly got a lot of passion.

(door opens and shuts) - We're sitting in the milking parlor.

We have eight, eight, it's called a double eight.

It used to take about an hour to do 80 cows.

I enjoyed it.

I started working here...

I think I was in grade three.

And it was different coming from Toronto, but I liked it 'cause it was hands on.

I used to sit right there when I was a little kid.

I'd sit right here.

So we'd milk and I'd always sit right here.

I think nowadays with farming, it is very competitive, very, very competitive to the point where now we're using other businesses to farm.

We like it's very, me not coming from a background of farming, I'm not coming from, my dad farms or my family farms.

So it's all on me.

You got to make as much as you can off one acre and that's how you're getting paid.

You're getting paid per acre, right?

And the beans are only worth so much.

Corn's only worth so much and same as wheat.

And doing sweet corn, you can make a lot more money per acre.

It's a lot more labor intensive, but you have to do a lot less acres.

So you actually do really well.

And I think I have a great location being on the highway.

- When Shane mentioned his idea of starting a little plot of sweet corn, I thought it was a great idea.

He needed to diversify as well.

And we had a good fertile patch of soil there that would do great.

(cars speed past on highway) The cash crop farming is high volume commodity.

He just sells it to a grain elevator and then they sell it overseas or wherever it goes.

The sweet corn is a lot more concentrated.

It's a small area and it's directly to the consumer, which is actually really enjoyable.

It's fun to meet people and actually talk to them about what you're growing.

- So last year we had vegetables.

We had about an acre, maybe 1.3 acres of sweet corn over on the top of the hill.

So it worked out really well.

I was really happy with it to, again, making more money per acre.

(truck speeds by) And I like it 'cause we have the great highway to sell the products on.

Just the sweet corn itself made the big dough.

So we're going to start off with right here with the starter sweet corn.

This will be the early sweet corn that's ready to harvest, pretty much.

And then on the other side of these barns, there's nine acres we're going to start off with here and over there.

So we have pretty much about 10 acres of sweet corn.

I want to try that with also doing my regular farming, right?

Just to diversify and have extra cash coming in.

If I could make a couple grand off one acre instead of leaving it in weeds the way it is, it's more productivity, right?

Yeah.

And it keeps me farming, right?

That's the number one goal, right?

I want to farm, right?

I didn't want to do nothing else.

Like when I was done high school, I didn't want to, I was going to go to school for a mechanic or maybe work at Stoko where my stepdad worked, I didn't want to do any of that stuff.

I was like, "Screw that."

I'd rather just do this.

- He came to me about when he was 15 and he said, "Mom, I know what I want to do in life."

I said, you do?

He said, yes.

"What do you want to do, Shane?"

"I don't want to go to college."

I said, "What you want to do?"

"I want to be a farmer."

I said "A farmer?

Are you sure?"

- I just think the whole aspect of just working with your hands and seeing the beans come on the ground, running machinery and every day is something different.

I hate going to work in the same every day.

I can't do it.

You won't see me there long.

(laughs) - He went to school now to learn how to, do the planting, how to mix the chemical.

And he passes it and I help him to buy his first tractor.

- We do the snow because with the farming, after the end of the year farming, if you made 80 grand let's say, and you went through $10,000 a month in bills and you got to live and groceries and stuff, you'd be through 50, $60,000 by spring and you'd only have 30 grand or 40 grand left.

So I supplement all my tractors that I have and I put 'em on snow contracts in the city.

And I've been doing that for about 10 years now.

And it's very good extra money.

But what I started doing in the last five years now, I started branching out and advertising myself to do some, getting some of the sites myself to make more money per site, which means I can get more money per vehicle.

And the end result is I have more money in with less work.

Fill time.

So I started last night at 12 o'clock and we went to Hamilton, we filled up here, filled the fuel up, filled the salt up, got the blades on, we head to Hamilton and there was maybe a centimeter on the ground, just enough to maybe grab with the front plows on the trucks, but not enough to plow with the tractors.

So we had to salt everything, tidy up everything.

So yeah, I haven't slept in two days.

It's okay though, I feel good.

- [Nicole] When we get those long snowstorms, he'll be out for three days straight and he won't come home and sleep, and he'll just sleep in his truck.

So, and then he'll like, call me to stay awake and I'm like, "This is not sustainable.

You can't keep this up."

Like it's one thing when you're 25 and you have a bunch of friends that are able to do that kind of contract work, but not anymore.

- [Shane] I'm tired of snow.

This year has been hard on everybody.

It's probably the worst one we had.

A lot of breakdowns, too many 20 centimeter snowfalls.

Price of fuel is starting to get too expensive.

I've been thinking about sweet corn the last couple months.

I got a lot of surprises this year.

I got some different new varieties I'm trying out.

Yeah, I'm going to do a lot more.

I'm going to probably do double what I did last year and yeah, I'm excited.

I'm excited for some sweet corn.

We actually bought all the corn seeds, already all bought.

Everything's pretty much all bought.

We just waiting for the winter to go away.

Salt wrecks the hands, got to always have gloves, - Salt wrecks everything.

- Yeah, it does.

Got my trusty pail.

Everything's super expensive.

(machine whirs) And it's inflated, but hopefully it'll come back down.

But for me anyways, I'm not crazy worried but I am keeping it, just keeping an eye on it and watching it.

So yeah.

The sidewalks are very particular.

That's where all the lawsuits come from and I'm the owner and yeah, I got guys that could do it, but this is one of my high traffic sites.

If I do it, I know that I did it right and that I'm happy with it and that there's any issues, I'm the only one to blame.

But I am excited.

I am excited.

(violin plays country song) Yeah, I keep going over there, but the door's always locked.

I'm like, man, I kind of want to sit in it before I buy this thing.

It's 70 grand.

So.

(laughs) But it looks nice.

- [Paulette] You finish work and Nicole was somewhere around that area too, but she drove.

So they were driving back to her parents.

For some reason, the cops followed Shane from River Road all the way down to King Street and called for backup, make such a big thing at the parents' house, yelling after him.

"Where do you get this money from buying this?"

He has this Ford truck, "Do you sell drugs or whatever?"

Give the kid really a hard time.

Very hard time.

He was about 18.

- I've had issues driving down the road with my box drill, 15 feet wide, taking the shoulder and the road 'cause it's 15 feet wide.

I've been pulled over, harassed, I don't know, I don't know why.

I don't know if they're pissed off at me.

And, it really bothered me, pissed me off a lot 'cause I see all the other bigger farmers going down the road doing the same thing.

- I mean, I always said to him, listen, just tell them, you're not the only farmer that farms, there's a lot of farmers and where are they going to drive the tractors?

Of course it's on the road.

So tell him not to give you any hard time, because he is discriminating you.

Like where should you drive the tractor?

You know?

So sometimes he get really frustrated and I said, "Just keep your head on your shoulder."

- I swear to God, I was running down the road on a Monday with a box truck.

I was planting the field and on a Tuesday I was going back down the same road, Highway 6 with a hay wagon.

He pulled me over again.

Same cop, same guy like, and I don't know what it was, I guess I was on the road holding up traffic and, sorry, I'm just going to the neighbor farm to get hay bales.

- Like a casual, casual racism that I didn't see before.

And it actually, I didn't notice it until we had Willow.

And then I noticed people making comments about Willow.

So I actually thought he was making too big a deal of things until I had Willow.

And then I became sensitive to it as well.

- And I've had one instance when I was coming out of, Cayuga there and it was midnight and I don't know if maybe the cop wasn't, he didn't understand tractors maybe, but he pulled me over.

It was two in the morning I was planting winter wheat and I finished the field going home and asked me, he didn't know if the tractor was hot or something, and asked if I had insurance or, and I'm like, "man," or ownership for it.

I'm like, "No, it's a tractor.

It doesn't have that."

I said, he's like, "Oh, I never seen you around here before."

I said, "Well I am around here, so..." We have our awkward run-ins, we've had that.

(upbeat country music) I dunno, it sounds stupid I guess, but I like seeing the beans come out of the ground and I like seeing corn pop up in rows.

And I think it's cool when they're small and I think it's cool at the end of the year how high they can get.

Like, it's like, you see the corn and it's like, "Oh, it's just this big.

And then when you go to harvest it's 12, 10, eight feet tall, right?

(upbeat country music)