Margaret Cheal has been a farm girl all her life.

Born and raised in North Hatley, Cheal grew up on her father’s dairy farm and later moved into beef production with her husband, Arthur. Together they ran a 150 acre farm and had approximately 30 to 35 cows. In addition, Cheal worked off the farm as an elementary school school teacher until she retired in 1990 from both farming and teaching. But retirement hasn’t slowed her down one bit!

She is now a member of the Board of Directors of the Quebec Farmers’ Association (QFA), the secretary of the QFA’s local Ayer’s Cliff branch, the secretary of Ayer’s Cliff UPA English mini-sector, and she is a volunteer at the local library and at the cemetery.

Cheal explains that even though she is not farming anymore, their lifestyle hasn’t really changed. “We still do farm things even if we don’t have the animals,” says Cheal. They rent out their pastures to other farmers, do sugaring in the spring and have a very large garden. Country living and the family life in the country is what drew her to agriculture in the first place and she is sticking to it. “I still live on a farm so I don’t have to miss it,” she laughs.

“My husband was involved with the QFA before me, but I have been involved for 15 years for sure,” she says as she thinks back to her beginnings with the organization.

Things have changed.

Although the Ayer’s Cliff branch continues to meet regularly almost once a month the challenges they face are not the same. “I find that with all the modern ways of presenting agricultures, we find it very hard to get young farmers to come to meetings. They just look up information on the Internet.”

Other changes that Cheal has noted in recent years in the Eastern Townships agricultural scene is the growing number of Christmas tree farms taking over former farms.