A look at two of Manitoba’s oldest family farms, still in the same hands after 150 years

Tricia and Rod Harris' stone house, built in 1904 from stone cleared off the property, sits on the Matheson family farm south of Stonewall. Established in 1873, it's one of just eight Manitoba farms recognized for 150-plus years of continuous family ownership. (Submitted: Tricia Harris)

A drive through rural Manitoba passes farm after farm — grain bins catching the light, cattle scattered across pasture, and the occasional yard with old machinery rusting away. Most have changed hands at some point — sold, bought out by a neighbour, or left behind when nobody in the family wanted to take it over.

However, a handful of Manitoba families have held on. Eight Manitoba farms have been recognized by the province for staying in the same family for 150 consecutive years or more, according to a provincial spokesperson.

CTV News spoke with two of those families about their farms’ history and looked at why keeping land in the family may be getting harder to do.

Matheson Family Farm

One of them is the Matheson family farm, south of Stonewall, which has remained in the same family since it was established in 1873.

“(It) is quite amazing, really,” said Tricia Harris, who owns and lives on the farm with her husband Rod. “That it has managed to stay in the family that long, because, as you can tell from the data, it doesn’t happen a lot.”

Tricia, 73, is the fourth generation to hold the land since her great-grandfather, Alexander Matheson, broke ground on it three years after Manitoba became a province — not long after surveyors first mapped out what is now the Rural Municipality of Rockwood.

To understand how the farm came to be, Tricia said you have to go back decades, to the era of the Selkirk Settlement. Also known as the Red River Colony, it was the first European agricultural settlement in Western Canada, with its first group of settlers arriving in 1812.

The colony spanned a vast tract of land, roughly 300,000 square kilometres — granted to Lord Selkirk, a Scottish nobleman, by the Hudson’s Bay Company — centred along the Red and Assiniboine rivers near present-day Winnipeg.

Among those who followed in 1814-15 was Alexander’s father, John “Bushy” Matheson, who arrived as a six-month-old baby with his parents.

“They came and settled along the Red River and farmed there for a number of years,” Tricia said.

She said John “Bushy” grew up in the Red River Settlement and learned multiple languages, including Indigenous languages, Gaelic and French. That multilingualism helped him become a constable there, breaking up disputes and serving warrants.

Tricia said travelling for his job eventually led him to learn of the “good land” in the present-day Stonewall region. In 1873, he moved there with one of his sons, Alexander — then a single man in his 20s — and the two took up adjoining quarter-sections.

Family legend has it that John “Bushy” stumbled onto more than just good land.

“The story is that his dad, John “Bushy,” was just kind of touring around the area on his horse and came across another family that had moved in… and he noticed they had some daughters, so he came home and told [Alexander], ‘I think I met your wife today,’” she said.

“And so, he told his son he better go over there and help them build their house. And he married one of the daughters,” Tricia said. Though how accurate that family tale is, she doesn’t entirely know.

That first year, only 10 acres of Alexander’s section were cleared, and a 1.5-storey log cabin went up. In 1875, Alexander married Catharine — a marriage that would last 65 years and result in five children.

From there, Tricia said the farm passed to Alexander’s youngest son, Willis, in 1917. Electricity reached the property in 1948, and in 1954 the farm passed again, this time to Willis’ niece, Linda, and her husband, Gordon Furness. This was the same year the first tractor arrived. Running water followed later that decade.

Tricia, the daughter of Linda and Gordon, took over ownership with her husband in 1983. She has lived on the farm since she was nine months old, aside from a few years away. Over the generations, the family has raised cattle and grain crops, along with chickens and pigs at various points.

None of the farm’s original buildings remain, Tricia said. However, a stone house built in 1904 by a Scottish stonemason with help from Alexander and his three sons still stands, and it’s where the couple lives today.

“It was built from the stone, the granite stone on the fields as they cleared land and pulled up these great big boulders. They stockpiled them until they had enough to build a two-storey stone house,” she said. “The house was a major accomplishment.”

But the farm’s history hasn’t been without hardship. In 1875, Tricia said detailed farm records kept by Alexander over his 44 years of farming show grasshoppers “completely destroyed” the crop.

She also said the adjoining quarter-section was lost after Willis Matheson couldn’t cover the land’s taxes while paying for his wife’s cancer treatment during the Great Depression.

“So, the farm was reduced in half,” she said.

And in 1965, Tricia said the stone house was “completely gutted” by fire, prompting her parents to rebuild the interior.

Despite the setbacks, the farm has endured, and in 2023, Tricia said about 70 relatives gathered there to celebrate 150 years of it being worked by one family. Among those in attendance was her mother Linda, then 104, who was able to make it to the special occasion.

“It was a great cousins’ reunion at that time,” Tricia said.

The couple, who also worked full time off the farm as teachers, completely retired from farming last year when they sold the last of their cattle.

As for how the farm has stayed in the family so long, Tricia said no one before her ever insisted that the next generation take it over and it’s not a pressure she and Rod are putting on their own four children, all of whom live in Winnipeg.

Still, the land continues to be farmed by a Matheson descendant — one of Tricia’s cousin’s sons, 41, who is the fifth generation to work it. The couple also looks after his cattle on the farm during the summer months.

“He lives just down the road on his own farm,” Tricia said, “which happens to be another Matheson homestead as well.”

Munro Family Farm

Another farm the province recognizes as having stayed in the same family for over 150 years is the Munro family farm, which was established even earlier in 1872. The quarter-section is located just west of Portage la Prairie.

Clarke Munro, 71, and his sister Carol Kruck, 68, are the great-great-grandchildren of Rupert and Allison Munro, the couple who homesteaded the land. Both Clarke and Carol grew up on that farm.

According to Carol, Rupert and Allison were born in Scotland before immigrating and marrying in Clinton, Ont., about 175 kilometres west of Toronto. The couple went on to raise nine children and came to Manitoba in 1870.

Between the family, Clarke said they homesteaded over 1,100 acres at the time in the area. He said he never heard exactly why the family chose to head west.

“I’m just guessing maybe it was the allure of new land,” Clarke said.

The family’s history carries its share of loss, too. Carol recalled that her grandfather was one of three children and the only member of his immediate family to survive tuberculosis, after his parents and siblings all died of the disease.

Clarke said his father, Allan, bought the quarter-section in 1944 from the widow of his great-uncle — one of Rupert and Allison’s sons — shortly after his great-uncle’s death. Allan then moved there from the neighbouring quarter-section, where he’d been living with his own parents, Rupert Allan and Catherine.

The land is now registered in Clarke’s name, alongside his wife Noreen, though he says he moved off the property in his early 20s when he got married. He said his 45-year-old son moved onto the farm over two decades ago, where he farms and lives with his wife and two kids.

“If my grandsons farm, I guess they’ll be the seventh generation,” Clarke said.

“I really think they will be the seventh generation,” added Carol, who lives on an adjacent quarter-section which has also long been in the family.

Clarke said none of the original structures from the 1870s remain on the property, though the farm’s log house, which he was told was original, was still standing when he was a child. He said it was removed several decades ago.

Livestock has been part of the farm’s operation for most of its history. Clarke said the farm has generally kept horses and cattle, aside from a 20 to 30-year stretch without them, and that his grandsons — active in 4-H — even have a few cows and calves of their own. The farm has also raised chickens and ducks over the years.

The family was planning a 150th anniversary celebration in 2022, but Clarke said a shed fire shortly before derailed those plans. The family is now aiming for the next milestone instead.

“We’re going to try to do something for the 155th. That’s the plan right now,” Clarke said.

As for why the farm has stayed in the family for so long, Carol credited their father Allan with handling the succession.

“My dad was a very, very fair person, and Clarke farmed with him as a teenager, and I was a non-farming sibling, but he was gracious,” said Carol, a retired accountant. “I feel he was very ahead of his time. Farm succession is a very problematic thing today, but dad made it so easy. He was very fair. It’s not even, but it’s fair, because Clarke is the farmer in the family.”

The siblings also emphasized that they have no intention to pressure the next generation to keep working the quarter section or carry on the farming tradition.

“I think it would be great, but I’m not putting pressure on them. It’s whatever they want to do,” Clarke said.

“I don’t think they need any pressure,” Carol said. “They want it.”

When asked what it feels like to know their family runs one of the province’s oldest family farms, both siblings landed on the same word: proud.

“I’m so proud of my brother and his children, and my dad, and everyone that has done this. It’s great,” Carol said.

CTV News also reached out to several other family farms recognized by the province that were established in the early 1870s for their story but did not hear back by the deadline.

The Manitoba Family Farm Recognition Program, run by the province’s agricultural department, recognizes family farms that have remained in continuous ownership by direct descendants of the original owner for 100, 125 or 150 consecutive years.

As of mid-July, a provincial spokesperson said 1,923 farms have received recognition under the program’s centennial milestone, and 165 have been recognized for reaching 125 years. Those are all-time figures, the spokesperson added, meaning some of the farms could have since been sold out of the family.

The changing economics of keeping a farm in the family

While families like the Mathesons and Munros have kept their land for generations, one industry advocate says the path to passing down a farm today looks different than it once did.

Colin Hornby, general manager of Keystone Agricultural Producers, said it’s difficult to say definitively whether multi-generational farms are becoming rarer in Manitoba, but he’s noticed a shift towards consolidation.

“What we’re seeing is perhaps what used to be a few family farms within the same family have now become one larger operation,” Hornby said. He added that consolidation lets families split costs and take advantage of economies of scale, such as sharing equipment or buying inputs in bulk for better prices.

Hornby said the total number of farms in Manitoba has substantially diminished over the years, even as the average farm size has grown.

According to Statistics Canada, Manitoba counted just over 29,400 farms in 1981. By the 2021 census, four decades later, that number had more than halved to roughly 14,500. Meanwhile, over that same period, Statistics Canada says the average farm size in the province grew from 639 acres to 1,177 acres—an increase of more than 84 per cent.

Despite the trend towards consolidation, Hornby said Manitoba still has one of the higher rates of young farmers in Canada. He said many young people leave the farm temporarily, for school or work, before eventually returning. The bigger obstacle, he said, is affordability.

“I think one of the challenges…with young producers is the cost of land and being able to afford taking over the farm,” Hornby said. “That’s one of those big pressures where they may want to do it, but it’s not financially feasible for them.”

Manitoba has the highest proportion of farm operators under the age of 35 of any province at 11.5 per cent, according to data from the 2021 census.

Hornby said rising costs extend well beyond land prices — equipment, inputs, and expenses across the board have all gone up, while the prices farmers get for their crops don’t always keep pace.

“And the other component is global trade uncertainty and market uncertainty,” Hornby said, citing the impact of tensions around the Strait of Hormuz on fertilizer prices.

“We saw fertilizer prices spiked up significantly, but crop prices did not follow. So, there was that squeeze on prices.”

Hornby also flagged succession planning as an area where families “in many instances wait too long to get started on” and encouraged farmers to consult accountants or succession planning professionals to take advantage of available tax strategies.

“Making sure that we’re ensuring that continuity in farm operations is super important.”

Manitoba’s oldest family farm on record

Just how far back does that continuity go? Provincial data shows only two farms recognized under the program were established earlier than 1872, when the Munro family farm was founded.

According to the province, the oldest family farm on record under the Manitoba Family Farm Recognition Program was established in 1870 — the only recognized farm dating back to that year. It last requested recognition under the program in 2024.

Families can apply for recognition at any time after reaching the 100, 125, or 150-year milestone, a spokesperson said, provided the farm meets the eligibility requirements and has supporting documents to prove ownership.

Where that farm is located, and the family’s story behind it, is hard to say. The family chose not to give permission to share their information on the application form, the provincial spokesperson said. That’s also the case for the farm established in 1871, the second-oldest on record.

As for whether an even older family farm is still out there, being worked by the same family, it’s possible. The spokesperson notes that participation in the recognition program is voluntary.