When it comes to big decisions, like choosing a career path, Sam McPhedran (Agriculture Sciences – Animal Science 2017) speaks from experience when she says, “follow your gut and don’t be afraid to just jump in.”
That’s what she did in 2015 when, having grown up in Calgary with no agricultural background, she decided to pursue an education and subsequent career in the cattle industry.
“I was in Grade 12 [in Central Memorial High School] and my parents said I should go to college or university,” McPhedran recalls. “I wasn’t interested in anything besides animals, so I chose the Agriculture Sciences program at [then-Lethbridge College].”
Since then, McPhedran has transitioned from city girl to cattle administrator at Kolk Farms Ltd., with stints along the way working on a feedlot barn crew, as a brand inspector and as a pen checker. She even launched her own photography business, Emberbees Photography, where she captures stunning shots of the animals, landscapes and people of southern Alberta.
“Sam is a great example of someone who followed what they like to do, and applied it to a career in agriculture,” says Byrne Cook, chair of Lethbridge Polytechnic’s School of Agriculture. “She wasn’t willing to be pigeonholed just because she didn’t have a farm. She’s a natural, and she’s done really, really well.”
While the journey hasn’t been without challenges, McPhedran says it’s thanks to a supportive family, inclusive classmates and encouraging instructors like Cook that she’s living her rural dream.
“People are always confused about how I can live ‘in the middle of nowhere’ after growing up in the heart of Calgary,” she laughs. “I love it.”
While McPhedran’s aspiration to move from the city to the country might seem surprising to some, her younger sister says it wasn’t a shock to anyone who knows her well.
“Growing up, we had a nanny from New Zealand, and she was really into English riding,” says Sarah McPhedran. “She introduced us to horses at a very young age and by elementary school we were both taking riding lessons. Sam always had a natural talent for riding and was really good with horses.”
As the siblings got older, Sarah took up skiing as her preferred recreational activity, but Sam stuck with horses and got involved in show jumping.
“In high school, Sam spent so much time at the barn,” Sarah says. “Her summer jobs were at the barn, and she really liked the people out there, so when she decided she wanted to go into agriculture and move down to Lethbridge, I was not surprised at all.”
Despite being raised in a city of more than 1.6 million people, Sam McPhedran says she had no trouble fitting in with her classmates – most of whom came from farming families. She even jokes that many of them thought she, too, was a farm kid at first.
“I did notice that I needed to study and work harder than my peers because [some of the course content] wasn’t second nature for me,” she says. “I was like, ‘how do you guys just understand?’ But … they grew up with it and I didn’t.”
Still, she says the classes were “totally doable,” adding she really found her groove in the second year when she majored in Animal Science. McPhedran gives credit to the program’s plethora of hands-on experiences and the one-on-one support she received from Cook. “One thing about Sam, is she’d always have questions,” says Cook.
“Oftentimes people will come in and they don’t know something, and they’re scared or shy or embarrassed to ask, but you’d be surprised at the number of people who grew up on farms who also don’t know the answer. Students without a farming background, most of the time, aren’t that far behind the others.”
McPhedran also became a member of the student-run Aggies Club, and says she learned a lot from her classmates by listening to their stories, helping them brand cattle and touring their family farms.
“They helped me understand the basics, which they might have known [firsthand], but at that point I didn’t,” she says. “Being from a big city, I didn’t have that small-town-class feel so it was great for me, and I’ve made amazing friends.”
After graduating in 2017, McPhedran began working at VRP (Van Raay Paskal) Farms near Iron Springs, Alta. where she spent about three years processing cattle as part of the feedlot’s barn crew. Following that, she worked as a brand inspector for the Lethbridge County division of Livestock Identification Services. She inspected all cattle bought or sold at area feedlots, auctions and ranches.
McPhedran started at Kolk Farms Ltd., which is also near Iron Springs, in 2021. In her role as a pen checker (cattle herdsperson), she rode or walked the pens every day to check that the animals were healthy and provided necessary treatment for cattle that needed it. She also inducted new arrivals into the feedlot and shipped outgoing cattle. It’s a job McPhedran willingly jumps back into, should her co-workers need extra help outside of the office.
“My current position as cattle administrator, where I deal with inventory and dispatch of incoming and outgoing cattle, is probably my favourite,” she says, “but I really liked being a pen checker. It’s hard on the body, especially in winter, but I would do it again for sure.”
While Sarah McPhedran, who is working on her PhD in biochemistry and studying cancer immunology at the University of Victoria, doesn’t share her sister’s love of rural life, she says Sam is right where she’s supposed to be.
“She’ll tell me about how she was up at 5 a.m. in minus 40 degrees, and I think, ‘that sounds awful, I would never want to do that,’ but she’s never complained about it, she’s always really liked that stuff,” says Sarah McPhedran. “She thrives in that environment.”
And her co-workers agree.
“Sam brings an element of enthusiasm and creativity to everything she does,” says Megan (Kolk) Van Schothorst, Human Resources and Animal Welfare, Kolk Farms Ltd. “She has a skill for co-ordinating – events, schedules, communications – and for pointing out things in agriculture that I see as normal and day-to-day, but that she sees as an opportunity to photograph and share with others.”
McPhedran says her interest in photography began in 2019.
“A feedlot co-worker was looking for someone to take maternity photos,” McPhedran says. “I borrowed – and never returned – my mom’s Nikon and from there I was hooked!”
McPhedran’s passion behind the camera quickly grew into a business – Emberbees Photography. Ember is for the first dog she and her partner, Garrett Ross, owned together and Bees is for Abby Van Es, a close friend and Agriculture Sciences classmate who passed away suddenly, just two weeks after graduation.
“She was a really awesome friend,” says McPhedran. “She was one of a kind.”
Emberbees Photography specializes in lifestyle and agriculture photography, and McPhedran says she also shoots a handful of summer weddings each year.
“Kolk Farms is very accommodating when it comes to my side hustle, and that’s how I make it work,” she says. “I do get asked quite a bit if I would rather be a full-time photographer … but I’m very invested and happy at my job in the cattle industry. I don’t wish for anything to change.”
That sense of contentment shines through in McPhedran’s personal life as well. She spends her downtime with Ross on their “funny farm” full of horses, cows, dogs, cats and chickens. The quarter section of land just east of Carmangay, Alta., is where Ross grew up. Now, the couple rents the property from his mom.
“When she was able to put her horse on her property, that was her dream – literally her dream come true,” says Sarah McPhedran. “Looking out her window and seeing her horse, that was everything.”
Sam McPhedran says one day, she and Ross would like to turn the quarter section into a working farm, but for now it’s mostly just a “happy place” as they both work full time.
A career, a passion project and a country home with room for horses – it’s the culmination, McPhedran says, of following her love of animals to a formal education in agriculture at Lethbridge Polytechnic.
“You learn a lot just from working, but the program gives you a leg up,” she says. “It’s 100 per cent worth it because it’s not just the education, which is great, but it’s the whole experience and the people you meet. I wouldn’t take it back for a second.”
