Growing up on a farm is a unique experience. To be able to say: "I spent my afternoons in the fields with my brother and my father, I napped in a tractor and built treehouse villages with my brother... and you, what about your childhood?" is something I don't hear every day. Then you grow up and realize that, in fact, if you spent so much time in the fields, it was also because your father worked 7 days a week, and sometimes that was the only way to see him. Don't get me wrong, I think there are worse things for a child than spending their childhood outdoors, but you still end up wondering if this is really the job you want to do when you grow up.
Like most young people, I wanted to pursue several professions during my adolescence. From veterinarian to architect, to lawyer, I never wanted to be a farmer. It went without saying that the family business would go to my brother, who learned to drive tractors before cars and was already handy. In short, in my opinion, farming was for those who wanted to work outdoors with their hands. And honestly, I didn't see myself wearing work clothes and smelling like the farm for the rest of my life. I liked school, nice clothes, and the big city. I wanted to be a businesswoman.
So I started studying accounting and management, and I was going to work as a manager in a large company. But, to help my father, I started doing the farm's bookkeeping, which was still manual at the time. To save time, I began a transition to accounting software. I didn't know it yet, but I had just signed my lifetime employment contract, because not only would my father not know how to use it, but even less how to analyze it to find the information he needed.
In fact, without realizing it, by computerizing and thus optimizing the bookkeeping, I had just found my added value to the family business.
I won't be the first to raise my hand to walk the mountain at the sugar bush or help a cow give birth, but analyzing numbers and working on a strategy that would ensure the growth and sustainability of the business, that speaks to me. It would be a lie to say that working in the family business and finding your place there is easy, but doing it within a complementary team, like my brother and I, supported by our parents, is the most beautiful gift they could have given us.
Unconsciously, our afternoons on the farm shaped us into the next generation we are today and forged two entrepreneurs who, on paper, are completely opposite, but who, in the field, have never been closer.
Abigaëlle
