For 10 years, Anna Haupt and her husband, Mark McCutcheon, ran a butcher shop.
“Because we had first-hand contact with so many of our customers, through the store and various farmers’ markets that we attended, I really became aware of just how large the information gap between farm and consumer was,” Haupt said. Wanting to lessen that gap, she “began sharing about farming on social media.”
It was a topic Haupt was familiar with, as she’s “been involved in agriculture all my life.” She and McCutcheon had both grown up on farms, and she had gone to the University of Guelph to get her degree in Agricultural Science.
“After we were married, we started out at my husband’s family dairy farm, but due to a number of siblings and his father not yet ready to talk about succession, we actually ended up leaving the farm there,” she said.
While running the butcher shop, she would hear thoughts from consumers around food and the agriculture industry.
“It (became) really obvious in a hurry, just how important it (was) that we share what we are doing on the farm and why,” she said. “There is so much noise from so many really poor sources of information in regard to food and farming, and the consumer doesn’t have the first-hand experience or background that it takes to wade through that information.”
CANFIELD—Anna Haupt and Mark McCutcheon purchased their dairy farm in early summer of 2019. They milk about 50 cows, and have around 360 workable acres of land, approximately half of which is used to grow feed for the cattle, and the other half is cash crops: corn, beans, wheat, and alfalfa. —Submitted photos. 
According to 2021 numbers from Statistics Canada, about 1.6% of Canada’s total population are farm operators (“people responsible for the management decisions in operating a farm”).
“That is tiny,” Haupt said, noting that with past generations, even someone who hadn’t grown up on a farm would often know farmers personally, “so there was some sort of a connection there. That isn’t the case anymore. The vast majority of the population has never set foot in a field, seen a cow, or visited a farm.”
Haupt and her husband’s hearts were always still in farming, so eventually the couple “reached a point where we really felt something was missing for us and we began to explore options and run numbers on trying to get back into farming.”
They sold the store and their properties, purchasing their farm near Canfield – an ongoing dairy operation – in early summer of 2019.
With fans inquiring if Haupt would continue on social media, she started “a page for the dairy farm and now I post about our daily life and happenings.”
It’s a busy operation. The family – including four children, ranging in age from 4 to 16 – milks about 50 cows in a new freestall barn with a single Lely robot and raises all their calves and youngstock.
“I also have a small, high-quality herd of Boer meat goats, which I raise mainly for the purposes of selling breeding stock,” Haupt said.
With about 360 workable acres of land, about half is used to grow feed for the cattle, and the other half is cash crops: corn, beans, wheat, and alfalfa.
“We do all of our own field work with the exception of combining. Myself (and) my husband both work on the farm full time. We do not have any employees but our kids, especially the two oldest girls, do a lot of work on the farm as well.”
McCutcheon Farms is a round-the-clock, every-day commitment, like any other farm. While it’s always busy, Haupt makes it a priority to regularly post online about their operation, explaining their processes and the reasons for them.
“If we don’t make an effort to connect with consumers, how can we ever expect them to understand what we do?”
Haupt said it’s important work, noting that consumers – regardless of how much knowledge they have about agriculture – “are ultimately the ones who will decide a lot about how we can do our job” through their purchasing choices, the government officials they vote for, and the policies, regulations, laws, etc. that they support.
“My social media page is one very small thing that I feel I can do to make a little bit of a difference. To help make us relatable, to show what we do on a daily basis, and to communicate that a lot of what we care about as farmers are the same things that consumers care about.”
For instance, she noted environmental sustainability is a vital topic that has been the subject of a lot of ongoing research; she guessed that many consumers are unaware of “how many shifts and changes in practices and outlooks have taken place already because of that research.”
“As farmers, we work on the land every single day, we work in nature every single day; changes in climate impact us first in very real ways,” she added.
Haupt said part of the challenge with getting messaging about the agricultural sector out to the general public is that those within the industry – including farmers themselves – can sometimes be disseminating information in a way that is conflicting or confusing.
“We live in a quick information world, where a lot of people are hooked on black and white and fast tidbits of information,” Haupt said. “But with what we do, there is no black and white, and so it can be hard to explain and share that with people sometimes.”
While there are ups and downs working in agriculture, Haupt believes in the end, “I really love what we are doing for a living…. It’s a daily challenge, and every day is different, but overall working with dairy cows is absolutely so rewarding. Every step you take to improve the care you give the animals, you can tangibly see the rewards and that is such a great feeling…. I think the whole family, really, has grown to really love this farm and our work here.”
“For both Mark and myself, I think we can truly say that farming is in our blood and it’s what we have always loved and wanted to do.”
