Growing to give
Gerhard Klassen makes sure no one goes hungry
Gerhard Klassen is certain 2018 is the best year he’s ever had as a farmer.
This despite a cold winter virtually decimating his table grape crop, worms eating all but two of the 100 turnips he planted in the spring, and having to seed his tomatoes twice before they took root.
At nearly 80 years old, though, the Virgil grape and vegetable grower has lived the highs and lows of enough seasons to know a banner year.
Klassen has a knack for seeing the proverbial glass as half full, though. And it’s usually filled with green juice — a concoction of Swiss chard, apple, pineapple, kiwi and cantaloupe that he drinks every morning to keep up with his prolific chard crop as much for its health benefits.
“I make the juice and pour it in buckets, put it in the deep freezer, and take it all winter. It’s very healthy,” Klassen said.
He’s so much an optimist, Klassen, who sells his vegetables at the St. Catharines and Niagaraon-the-Lake markets, doesn’t even keep a bank account. He’s certain the universe is looking out for him because at 80, he’s never been hungry a day in his life, he said.
Thirty-two years ago, the lifelong farmer, made a change to his business model to ensure others don’t go hungry, either.
Klassen, who knows the bible cover to cover, sold three of the four acres he was farming at the time. None of his five children had any desire to follow in his footsteps so it was time to downsize.
He kept a dozen rows of sovereign coronation grapes — those seedless blue table grapes currently fixtures at local farm stands — with the intention of selling them to a local wholesaler as he’d always done.
It was 1986 and Klassen was gearing up to harvest a sizeable grape crop when that usual buyer refused to take his fruit. Klassen wasn’t licensed to use pesticides, and the wholesaler didn’t want them if they hadn’t been treated, he recalled.
“The time was there to harvest my grapes,” he said. “The crop was there. I was discouraged. What do I do now?”
So he did what any God-fearing farmer would do.
“I contacted my God. He told me to make use of them and give them to the needy.”
Klassen found group homes to take the fruit, using it in their food programs. He started juicing some of the grapes, too, and making jam, both of which he continues to sell today at his farmers market stands alongside fresh bunches.
He donates the proceeds from those sales to Freedom Village, a veterans’ treatment centre in Buffalo, and Jewish Voice Ministries International humanitarian aid trips to developing countries.
Even with a shortfall in his grape crop this year, Klassen remains determined to help the causes dear to him. He typically sells his vegetables, including to The Diner House 29 in St. Catharines, to pad out his old-age pension. This year, though, he’s sharing some of that bounty.
A group home and women’s shelter he would supply with grapes, grape juice and jam to use in their food programs have received loads of his vegetables, including his prolific chard, instead.
Klassen is pickling for them, too. He also bought a bushel of peaches to make up for his grape jam shortfall. Last weekend, the senior ambled up a 17-step ladder to harvest plums from a tree that looked like it wouldn’t have much to offer, and made 30 litres of peanut butter’s soulmate with the harvest.
Tenacity seems to be in Klassen’s nature. It’s a trait that goes back at least 500 years in his family when his ancestors, German Mennonites, left Germany for Russia to avoid persecution during the Radical Reformation.
His family stayed in Russia for hundreds of years until they were forced to flee the horrors of the Russian Revolution, which ravaged German Mennonite settlements. His parents moved to Ukraine before they were no longer safe there, then to China for two years until Paraguay beckoned.
The South American country lost 70 per cent of its men during the bloody War of the Triple Alliance between 1864 and 1870. It took decades for the country’s population to rebound, and hundreds of thousands of immigrants to help it along.
Mennonites had a reputation for being good farmers and hard workers, and Paraguay wanted them to populate the Gran Chaco region in the west. It was practically a desert and soon after his parents arrived in the late 1920s, the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia broke out over oil in the area.
Years after the three-year war ended in Paraguay’s favour, Klassen would find soldier’s belt buckles, rusty artillery, even the odd human bone while working on his family’s farm.
His parents eventually left for Canada, and Niagara, specifically. Klassen followed in 1976 after spending 16 years farming in Uruguay with his wife Renate.
Their arrival here marked the first time in their lives they had consistent electricity and access to tools other than horses and oxen to work the land.
On a recent wedding anniversary — Renate and Klassen have been together 58 years — she admitted she never liked farming. Klassen took it in stride.
“She knows without farming there’s no food. No, her heart wasn’t in farming, but she married a farmer so what’s she to do?”
Klassen’s heart is nowhere else except in the soil he kept breaking and turning, as if by habit, as we spoke on a sweltering September day.
“My love of it is to see how God created it. You work in it every day and see it grow every day,” Klassen said of his crops. “My enjoyment is to watch it.”
And use the results to help others.
“It’s my privilege to share … with others,” he said.