The Rural Voice, 1982-07, Page 6ario
PROFILE
Pat Lynch
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If this were a film documentary the
credits would include Wib Jones, Jack
Tanner, Bert Christie and Don Hill.
Most farmers in southwestern Ontario
will recognize the names of any or all of the
last three, but it's unlikely they will have
heard of Wib Jones.
It was Jones, back in the spring and
summer of 1966, who most convinced Pat
Lynch to leave the sweatbox they knew as
Canadian General Electric in Peter-
borough and enrol at the University of
Guelph.
Today, Lynch is the soils and crop
specialist for Perth and Huron Counties,
working out of the Ontario Ministry of
Agriculture and Food offices in Stratford.
This story is about him.
It's hard to guess where Lynch might
now be, or what he might be doing, had it
PG. 8 THE RURAL VOICE/JULY 1982
not been for Jones and a host of others who
have influenced his thinking and his
direction. But it is not at all difficult to
review where he's been.
Lynch is a product of the Peterborougn
area, Otonobee Township to be exact.
Members of his grandparents' family
moved to Ontario from Ireland in the late
1860s and early 1870s.
While they chose Otonobee, some of
their friends and relatives settled in
neighbouring Douro and Ennismore
Townships. Lynch's boyhood memories
unfold around the rivalries among the
townships and the Irish in them. As
Rudyard Kipling observed, "Where there
are Irish there's loving and fighting."
Lynch's parents (his mother was from
near Lindsay) brought together bloodlines
by Dean Robinson
of Counties Cork (in the south of Irelano
and Monaghan (in the north). They also
raised six children. Pat, born in 1946, was
the fourth, but the youngest of three boys.
He equates growing up on the farm with
hard work. And he looks back on it fondly.
"I liked the routine and I liked the
family interaction, even as a teenager,"
he says, "I loved work and 1 enjoyed
working hard. The first animals I was
involved with were the chickens and I
remember cleaning out the brooder house
and putting in the shavings and setting up
the lights. And collecting eggs, you know I
still dream about collecting those eggs,
and about getting pecked by hens trying to
gather them. That's the one saw -off that I
don't like about living in the city. My kids
are going to miss the things I enjoyed as a
kid."
Lynch's dad was thrust into fulltime
farming at the age of eighteen, when his
father died. "Dad had only grade 8 but he
was very intelligent," says Pat. "He could
see things coming. He was the first guy in
the township to have a rubber -wheeled
tractor. His father, too, was an entre-
preneur. He planted apple trees and then
took the apples to the city to sell them. Dad
and a friend, at the other end of the
township. were the first to buy balers,
and then Dad did custom work."
Lynch senior did what he could to
improve his lot, but he was never
enamoured with life as a farmer in eastern
Ontario. He liked to travel and trips
through the rest of this province and into
western Canada left him yearning. When
he would return to his two hundred acres.
Pat remembers him saying, "We're crazy
trying to be farmers on this land. It's hills
and it's stones." It wasn't a good farm,
says Pat, "We had about one hundred
workable acres but of those. seventy-five
were bad with stones. It was nothing like
the land here, nowhere near the potential
of the land in this area."
The Lynch children were exposed to
different aspects of farming because their
dad tried to beat the agricultural odds by
switching livestock and crops. There was
always a beef herd, but the chickens were
replaced by pigs. As is common on many
farms, Pat was given his own lot of pigs, to
feed and care for. With them came
promises of a percentage of the profits. "It