Farmer/Rancher, Jenner, AB, 2021

Farmer/Rancher, Jenner, AB

Kendra doesn’t spend much time reflecting on what it is that brought her back to ranching: “I'm kind of one of those people is, I think your identity is whatever you want it to be? So I mean, there are so many, there's so many things that could happen.”

She grew up just a short horse ride away from the ranch that she now owns and operates with her husband, Willy. In many ways, Kendra has returned to her roots and has taken up, yet again, much of the work that formed her very first job.

“Right from the time we were a little kids. I mean, we had chores, we had jobs, we, we did fencing, we, my parents didn't have quads at time we when I was at home, we had horses. So we started riding at a very early age, we helped check cows, we moved cattle like, you know, in our teenage years, as soon as we were big enough to run a tractor, we were doing baling and swathing and, you know, dad always, we kept track of our hours and he would pay us I think it's pays like five bucks an hour or something like that… Just all the normal, the normal stuff. I guess it was paid work”

 The rhythms of ranching life are familiar in some ways, and stranger in others. Kendra and her husband, Willy, bought Crooked Tree Ranch from Willy’s former employers. Crooked Tree does more farming that Kendra’s family ranch, has more equipment, and is rapidly growing, diversifying. Ranch work is increasingly reliant on technology, and is gravitating away from the traditional form the industry took when Kendra was a young girl. Although she never expected to end up back at the ranch, it’s not an unwelcome move.

“You think you might, you think you might not. It's a tough one. Because when you're 18? I mean, you're like, Yeah, I don't want to do this, I'm moving to the city. But then you're there for long enough and you're like, jeez, but you get used to it.”

 Kendra left home at 18 to attend the University of Lethbridge, loosely planning on taking up a career in accounting. She realized, quite quickly, that this wasn’t her path. “I liked bookkeeping, but I hated accounting. The thing I hated about accounting was how grey of an area, there's never a right answer to any rule. And that just drove me up the wall.” Kendra stuck with it though, and even opted to add finance as a major so that she wouldn’t feel stuck to one path. During university she also began working with a financial planning company, and realized that personal finance was something she had a natural gift for. After graduating, Kendra moved on to work at Scotiabank, handling house loans.

As Kendra settled into the city and a new career, she found love for what was, at first, a hobby and then turned into a lucrative side hustle.

“I started with Scotiabank. And then within a couple years is when the boom hit. So I ended up that kind of started my second career because I was working at the bank doing loans. So I understood how loans and rental properties work. So then I started, I took the equity of my original house, and then I start buying houses. So what I would do is like, my little house that I bought was structurally sound, because I didn't know enough about structure and electrical and playing around that way. But I could do cosmetic, so I bought the house and structurally sound just cosmetically needed work. So then I worked on that one until it was all nice and pretty. And then I rented it out. And then I bought another one that was a dump. I moved in there. And then I fixed that up. And then that's what I’d do every six months to a year.”

Kendra began making connections and had soon built up a network of people who would work on her houses. She also partnered briefly with her sister to buy and renovate a rental property in a larger city. Redoing the houses while working for the bank was exhausting, and Kendra felt a bit overwhelmed interviewing prospective tenants, reworking cosmetic issues, and having to move once or twice a year. On the other hand, this was work that she really enjoyed, which is apparent when Kendra talks, animated, about redoing her daughters bedroom. There was a disconnect and a small disappointment here that she was never truly able to enjoy the result of her labour; “I never got to live in one of my finished houses ever. I just kept going into a new dump.”

 While working in Brooks, Kendra would make frequent trips to Jenner to visit her parents’ ranch. “When I lived away, I always did come back to visit because when- I just needed a break from everything. Like this is my solitude, right, and I, I couldn't stay away for like two three months. Like I came back every couple, every couple weekends or three weekends or something I came, you know, I came back. I just needed, if Mum and Dad had something going on or, I just need a break. I always thought of it that way. I just needed the break.”

 It was during these visits that she met Willy and, soon after, she was moving out permanently. They married shortly after their engagement, moved in together and, quite quickly, Kendra became busy with ranch work full-time and a growing family…