BOBCAYGEN — There’s nothing ordinary about Lloyd Wicks or his family. His mother and father, Mary and Delmar, started a mixed farm in the early 50s but being as poor as church mice rented cows in 1959 with the option to buy and started shipping milk.

"The only way to afford the cows was to rent them," Lloyd said.

When Lloyd was only 18-years-old, his father died leaving enough good cows for the foundation for three Master Breeder shields.

"My mother was a very good cow judge," he says. And she was forward thinking. But so was his father. The farm, Grasshill Farm Ltd, began to register cows as soon as the Wicks’ family owned them.

The genes of five of the cows in the initially rented herd figure prominently in their best cows today, a half century later. Like most breeders, he believes modern cows should have good udders, feet and legs and strength and power are more important than style.

Those early cows, when his parents were starting out, needed a strong constitution and the ability to withstand stress and still be productive. An ideal dairy cow, he believes, is one that produces 100,000 lbs. or more over her life time of lactations, not one that blazes through two or three lactations and fizzles out. In this regard, three cows in the herd stand out:

Wicks has never been orthodox. When he was voted to the board of Dairy Farmers of Ontario (DFO) five years ago, he shipped his cows to other farms to be milked.

Today the home farm raises calves and houses bred heifers, but the 120 milking cows are housed and milked at four separate locations: three of them in Ontario and one in Saskatchewan.

"We don’t milk cows at home, we milk goats," he says. The goal is to build a flock between 350 and 500.

He crops about 750 acres and he’s certified organic but not for the animals. He switched to organic crops when prices for crops were low. At that time, he had bought a new farm that hadn’t been tilled for 30 years. It was no extra work to get the restored fields certified organic. He grew mainly wheat and hay, but also buckwheat, corn silage and grain corn.

During his years on the DFO board he fought for better marketing. Was he successful? "That is never a one-person achievement," he says, adding that the board is more cognizant of marketing than it has been in the past.

He credits his family with the support he has been given over the years: Daughters Shawna, in Louisiana, a PhD., Holly who worked with the mating and manages a nearby equestrian operation, and Emily who has come home to manage the farm while Lloyd works at developing export markets. Son Matthew is finishing an accounting course and works with his father on the farm. Lloyd’s wife, Barbara, focuses on goat genetics and record-keeping.

He says the Master Breeder Award should never be a goal, but a reward for a job well done.