When 30-year-old Canadian Tyler Heppell swore never to come back to his family farm after enduring what he considered “slave labor” as a teenager, he would never have believed that life would take him straight back to the land.
In February of 2022, Heppell was in the midst of a job search and had received two offers when his dad mentioned there was a position open at the family farm, Heppell Potato Corp., in Cloverdale, British Columbia.
There was no pressure to accept, his father stressed, but Heppell’s acceptance of the job would help guarantee the farm’s future and keep it in the family.
“It was a really hard decision to make,” Heppell said. “Both of the sales jobs I was looking at, they both had on-target earnings of over $200,000 a year.”
The decision involved much thought, discussion with mentors and relatives, and a list of pros and cons.
“I had a really good mentor that said sometimes the best decision that you need to make is the hardest one,” Heppell said.
Acting on that advice, he made his choice. “I decided that I would give it a year; if the year sucked, then I didn’t have to live with my regrets,” he said.
That trial year surpassed his expectations, and he thrived in his new role. He has now been farming full-time for two years.
“I feel like I’m learning way more about business than business school ever taught me, like how to be in leadership and how to manage people,” Heppell said.
A Journey That Led Back Home
Heppell had worked on the farm as a teenager but found seemingly greener pastures when he was away at university.During the summer of 2013, he found a seasonal weed-whacking job for the Township of Langley. “Once I got that job, I was making double as much, and working way fewer hours,” he said.
It didn’t take much more than that for Heppell to say goodbye to the farm and continue working for Langley Township every summer through university.
And when he graduated, returning to the farm “wasn’t even a thought.” He got a stable sales job at a company called Cintas and became a successful professional.
It wasn’t long, though, before he began to feel that he was living without purpose. He missed the satisfaction of a long, hard day’s work. In his own words, he “felt like a number.”
Over the years that Heppell was away, his father split up with his business partner and created a management team charged with executing the farm’s vision.
“He made it very easy for me to come back because I saw I wanted to own it,” Heppell said.
Indeed, the management restructuring certainly must have helped Heppell make his decision during that fateful time in 2022. And it didn’t take long for him to realize he’d made the right decision.
“I felt like my dad really respected my opinion when I came back because I had five years in a very successful business,” he said.
About the Farm
In 1920, Heppell’s great-great-grandfather bought a piece of pristine flat land in Cloverdale, British Columbia, and started a family legacy. In the 1960s, grandfather Ron Heppell and his brother bought the land and continued to farm potatoes in addition to turkeys and cows.
In 1990, Heppell’s father bought the potato portion of the land and grew it to what it is today. Now, during the busiest time of the year, Heppell Potato Corp. ships 200,000 pounds of potatoes a day from its 600 acres.
For decades, much of the farming process consisted of monotonous work. Heavy lifting, potato grading, filling boxes, and cleaning were ingrained into the daily routine. “There were a lot of mind-numbing jobs that you just do for eight hours and turn your brain off,” Heppell said.
Today, the farm employs 40 to 50 people and is equipped with plenty of machines that eliminate the “mind-numbing” work that Heppell so loathed as a young adult.
Looking to the Future
With so many young people moving away from their parents’ family farms, Heppell is creating social media content to promote farming to the next generation. Machine-powered farms with decentralized systems of management, like his own, are his optimistic vision for the future.The fifth-generation farmer is also an advocate for stopping commercial development in agriculture. After the Canadian government put a piece of land leased by Heppell Potato Corp. on a “disposal list,” saying the farm could not use it anymore, the First Nations of Canada began lobbying to lay claim to the land.
Heppell collected 84,000 signatures for a petition against this. “We think [the land] should stay in agriculture, but we also believe that the federal government can provide other ways of economic reconciliation to the First Nations,” he said.
He remains optimistic about its future, believing that it will be returned to his family. And he isn’t the only one. “People in western Canada are very, very passionate about keeping this land in agriculture,” he said.
The fifth-generation farmer is currently working with his family on a plan to grow and preserve Heppell Potato Corp. for the decades ahead. With hard work and ingenuity, it will remain a family farm for generations to come.
