Happy trails

At the retirement party for her colleague, John Heard, Manitoba Agriculture soil management specialist Marla Riekman has a recurring memory.

“One of the phrases that I often fear hearing is, ‘Hey, Marla,'” she said jokingly.

“John is a man of great ideas, especially when it comes to extension work, something he’s so passionate about. He ends up having these brilliant ideas of ways to connect with people.”

Those great ideas often meant more work for Riekman.

“‘Hey, Marla would usually be followed with, ‘I just had a great idea for something you should do’.”

Heard, a soil fertility specialist with Manitoba Agriculture, is now a few weeks into his retirement after nearly three decades with the provincial ag department. His last day on the job was April 28.

Heard grew up on a family farm in southern Ontario that is now managed by his sister. His interest in soil science developed during the reduced-tillage movement in the 1980s.

“Actually, I wasn’t interested in soils at the beginning. I was a crops guy,” Heard said. “I went back to school in the 1980s, and the reduced tillage movement was the rage at the time, which was a combination of both crops and soils.”

The early years of that decade saw him graduate from the University of Guelph and start work with farmers in southern Ontario. He spent two years with the Ontario agriculture department.

“I got to work on a really neat project with them in an area with a leading and instrumental farmer named Don Law, who really led the conservation charge,” Heard said. “We had a group of about 12 farmers that were experimenting with zero-till corn, and I got to help lead that project.”

It had positive results, and the zero-till experiments produced very good yields.

“I thought, ‘there must be something to this,'” Heard recalled. “So I went to study it further at Purdue University in Indiana.”

That next bout of post-secondary education gave him a master’s in tillage research, after which he returned to extension work in southern Ontario. A few years later, he got the opportunity to lead a research program in Thunder Bay.

“Then I just kept moving further west,” he said. “I came to Manitoba because I wanted to be where the action was. I wanted to be where agriculture was king.

“I know [the] term is overused right now, but they were the rock stars in the ’90s when I came over, and a bunch of them still are, so that’s why I wanted to be a part of that team.”

That was in May 1996, when he began his position at Manitoba Agriculture.

When Heard brought his family to look for a house in Carman, Man., he got his first taste of life on a floodplain. They drove through water at Dominion City. It had his family scratching their heads.

“They wondered what kind of swamp they were moving to,” Heard said. “But then we found out that, yeah, every three or five years, you’re going to have water outside of the river’s bank.”

Since then, Heard has made a name for himself as a talented extension specialist.

“He’s always very energetic, especially when it comes to the area of extension,” Riekman said. “John is able to take scientific information and dry research and really drill it down into something that an agronomist or a farmer can use, making it simple and practical. It’s a real credit to John. Not everybody has those types of skills.”

For Heard, the process of reducing complex scientific data into an understandable and useful tool is what the job is all about.

“Sometimes people lose sight of that but extension is the bridge between research and action.”

Heard doesn’t think he’s alone in that ability. He said he’s surrounded by people who do the job just as well as he does. He also rejects the notion that he will be hard to replace.

“I don’t care about that. We’ve always had turnover at our office. It’s a challenge when you have good people get hired away, but we’ve been able to re-staff with good people.”

However, there’s no denying that Heard has left a mark with the department.

In 2014, he won the International Certified Crop Advisor of the Year award from the American Society of Agronomy.

In the wake of the award, Heard’s friend and former University of Manitoba soil scientist, Don Flaten, described him as “energetic, enthusiastic, smart, knowledgeable, reliable, practical, innovative, effective, efficient — he’s got all those characteristics, but he does have one flaw, and that is he’s modest.”

As if to echo that, when asked what he’s proud of about his career, his answer is about his colleagues rather than himself.

“One thing I’m proud of is that so many staff at our office are not only qualified in what they do, but that they have become certified crop advisors themselves,” he said. “I don’t take credit for that, but I’m a cheerleader for it.”

Riekman recalled one instance when she saw Heard’s ego being bruised.

“John, in the last few years, has gotten into making soil monoliths,” she said. A soil monolith is a column of soil taken from a pit and glued vertically to wooden backing to display its traits at different depths.

A few years ago, Heard decided to enter one of his creations in a crafts competition at the Carman Fair.

“I guess it was a woodworking category, but I’m not really sure if there was a category for glued soil on wood as a craft area,” she said.

Heard also convinced Riekman to enter some of the soil jewelry she had made. Heard’s monoliths didn’t place.

“He was very disappointed that the judges didn’t fully understand his art form,” said Riekman, who won second place for her entry. During his office retirement party, Riekman presented Heard with some of that jewelry.

“So at least he had something award-winning to remember us by,” she joked. “We’ve had some great times together, not just all work-related.”

Heard said he is looking forward to spending more time with his family and friends now that he’s retired.

“I have a small farm that keeps me busier than I should be,” he said. “I just finished boiling down maple syrup this week, and now I’ve got to get my sweet corn patch ready to plant and grow.”

He also wants to finish his Soil Safari project. As he travels to different provinces and states in North America, Heard has found farmers and agronomists to talk about their region’s official soils. Those go on his Soil Safari map.

Manitoba’s provincial soil is Newdale clay loam. Heard was in Hawaii in March, and he hopes to get to the Pacific Northwest this summer to check off his final three U.S. states: Oregon, Washington and Idaho.

“As I drive to conferences, it would get me off the interstate…[to] meet some interesting farmers and learn something about farming in the area. I’ve got a very impressive display.”

The pandemic created technological challenges for Heard in terms of his work.

“As an extension person, a person who is supposed to explain things and help with tech transfer, I wasn’t really cut from the cloth to do all the virtual stuff we did,” he noted.

Riekman says that checks out. Often the “Hey, Marla” refrain would be followed not by a brilliant idea but by a computer technology question.

“John is not always that technologically inclined,” she said. “Every time something would fall apart, I would have to run over and fix something for him. If it wasn’t me, it was another colleague. I’m sure his wife, Mary, will be doing all of his tech management at home now.”

— Don Norman is a reporter for the Manitoba Co-operator in Winnipeg. A version of this article originally appeared in the May 18, 2023 Co-operator (page 18).