The Rural Voice, 2005-08, Page 22Nick and Joan Whyte are second generation broiler producers with their children already in the business. The inset
shows the early broiler barn Nick Sr. built in the 1940s.
Securing the future
A new generation of the Whgte fafnih is involved
in the broiler business, meaning a farm that has
been in the familb since 1843 will continue
Story and photos by Keith Roulston
Touring the extended Whyte
family farm operation between
Clinton and Seaforth, the sense
of history is everywhere. Nick and
Joan Whyte can recite the history of
each house and each barn.
And there's lots of history to tell.
Nick's family, on his mother's side,
settled this land in 1843. Today his
brother Bill farms the farm he grew
up on while four of Nick and Joan's
children all live within a mile or so
along the road, each on their own
farm, each in the broiler business.
There's no doubt the Whyte
family is prospering today but it
wasn't always so. John McMillan,
Nick and Bill's great-grandfather,
worked from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. every
day for 18 months in a Scottish iron
works to earn enough money to book
passage to Canada. Hard as that life
was; his struggles in the early years
of the wilderness were so much
18 THE RURAL VOICE
worse that he would have gone back
to Scotland if he could have.
He stuck it out, however, and
became one of the province's most
prominent feeders and exporters of
cattle to the U.S. He was elected to
parliament in 1882, relinquishing his
seat in 1883 but then winning
election again in 1887, continuing to
represent the constituency of South
Huron until 1900. He died in 1901.
His youngest son Thomas took
over the family farm and continued
the family tradition of feeding and
exporting cattle to the U.S. and even
back to Scotland where he earned
extra money by returning with
Clydesdale horses. While he didn't
get a lot of education either, he was
an adapter of new ideas,
systematically draining 350 acres
before 1900.
He followed his father into local
and federal politics, representing
South Huron from 1925 until his
sudden death in a farm accident in
1932.
That was one of a string of
tragedies in the MacMillan family
that saw his two older sons die in
1921 and 1931 and his wife die in
1926, leaving his 21 -year-old
daughter Margaret sole heir of the
farming operation.
Margaret had met Wilfred "Nick"
Whyte while she was studying at
Mcdonald Institute at Guelph and
they married, taking over the farm.
For a while they carried on in beef
but Nick Sr.'s interest was in poultry
and so in the early 1940s they built
one of the first "modern" broiler
barns, a four -storey building on the
home farm, near the traditional bank
barn that still had a mixed farming
use. Those barns were captured in an
aerial photo of the farm that still
hangs on the wall of Bill's house.
In 1963 that barn burned and was
replaced with a 360 -foot by 361foot
modern barn and that was recently
replaced with a modern single -story
barn.
In fact, a trip around the various
Whyte farms is like going through a
time -line of broiler building
construction. There are a few old
converted buildings, some two-storey
broiler barns and some single -story
buildings = 12 barns in all spread