WORKING THE RANCH

A Photo Essay by George Webber.

Its official name is the Chinook Ranch, but if you call the 6,000-acre spread the Hughes place, people around Longview will know what you mean.
The land, which is about four miles south of Longview (if you say six kilometres, folks around here might not know what you mean), has been in the Hughes family since 1945. That’s when Jim Hughes Sr. bought it (he added to his holdings in the ’50s when the neighboring Bar U broke up). Jim Sr. was born in 1903 on a Hereford farm in Herefordshire, England and grew up to raise Herefords (sense a pattern here?). He came to Canada in 1928 (family lore says he left England with $2 in his pocket), docked in Halifax and got on a westbound train. Once settled, he and his wife Mary had six children, including Jim Jr., now 65, who is in the process of handing the management reins to his son Stephen, 40.
It was Stephen’s younger sister Janet Pliszka who first invited photographer George Webber out to the family spread. She took a darkroom course from Webber in 2000 and when she got married at the ranch three years later, Webber took the pictures.
The wedding took place August 16, three months after the United States banned beef imports from Canada as a result of mad-cow disease. That made for some tough times at the ranch, “I’m attracted to edgy things,” Webber says. “BSE and the border being closed was the hook for me to go back.” Without this turn of events, Webber would have considered the subject of working cowboys to be “if not a cliché, then certainly which intrigued the photographer. well-done.” Instead, as he discovered when he first went to branding day in June of 2004, he was drawn to document a way of life in southern Alberta that is in peril.
The threat has not really lessened with the 2005 reopening of the U.S. border to cattle 30-months-old and younger. Now the challenge is tied to the falling U.S. greenback and the rising Canadian dollar. “It’s hard to make a profit right now,” says Janet. “It’s worse now than in BSE times.”
It’s just another thing the family has to deal with. One of their responses has been to shift their focus and start selling directly to customers—Janet says the move to eat locally produced food has helped in this regard. To promote its products, the ranch is about to unveil that standard feature of modern marketing, a website (www.chinookranch.com), designed by Janet’s husband, Harold Pliszka.
It’s the least he could do. In an admission that still makes Janet shriek with laughter, she says that Harold is a vegan who, to her knowledge, has never been on a horse. That news went over better than you might think when she brought him home to meet the folks. “My parents are not judgmental,” Janet says.
That same quality worked in Webber’s favour when he started photographing life on the ranch. “I need to achieve that practical thing of getting people bored with me so they just get on with their work,” he says. As his photographs show, there is always plenty of work to be done around the Chinook Ranch. That is never truer than on branding day, one of the longest days of the year and the clearest expression of what life on the ranch is all about. By Bruce Weir.