MOUNT BRYDGES, Ont. -- The John Deere tractor towers over three men standing in its shadow. But Easton Cowan practically pushes the other two men out of the way to hop confidently up into the driver's seat.
Cowan is barely seated before he cheekily lays on the horn, rattling a crowd of birds off a nearby tree.
"My favourite part," Cowan said, winking.
Cowan can kid around because, well, the 19-year-old Toronto Maple Leafs prospect is still a kid in many ways.
With swift teaching from his father, Chris, Cowan learned to operate complex tractors before he ever sat behind the wheel of a car. The ancient stereotype of Canadian hockey players being raised on farms has died off. More and more NHL players come from monied metropolitan centres, spending downtime (and their parents' cash) in private hockey schools.
In that way, Cowan is a throwback.
His relentless drive was honed over long hours on the family farm, Chimo Farms Ltd. That upbringing turned him into an all-effort winger and one of the most-anticipated Leafs prospects in nearly a decade, with serious shades of former Maple Leafs captain Wendel Clark in his game.
Now, Cowan's chances of making the team are a pressing training-camp storyline. The rookie welcomes the challenges because he's been hardened by the sprawling farm where he came of age.
Stare in one direction at Chimo Farms and there are hundreds of acres of corn. Look the other way and you'll be hit in the face by hundreds more acres of soybeans. A pint-sized Cowan once tried to get lost in those soybean plants.
I'm encouraged to yank a few stalks out of the ground, just weeks away from harvest.
"Eh, that's five bucks right there," Cowan says sharply, before taking a jab at how expensive life around him has become.
Cowan is no longer a young boy, but is verging on a man who understands the world around him. He used to consistently be one of the smallest players on his minor-league teams.
"A twig," he calls himself, without a hint of a smile.
Cowan had natural skill, but his lack of size was exacerbated when he moved up to play with older teams. He developed an innate hockey IQ. But Cowan would still need to get bigger. Cowan now brags that after this summer he grew to 5-foot-11 1/2 and weighs in at 184 pounds, one pound short of his goal. What happened?
You hear that word ad nauseam when you spend a day with Cowan on his farm. He is accustomed to it because he grew up with it. While his young toddler friends were playing with toy tractors, Cowan watched his father get behind the wheel of the real thing just as the sun was peeking up over the corn.
Cowan was 8 years old when Chris first approached him about lending a hand around the farm. His summer days of work began between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m.
"I would always tell my friends I was off for the day, no biking around, couldn't hang out," Cowan said. "But I liked it because it helped my dad."
At first, duties included cutting dozens of acres of grass on a riding mower, rolling bags of peas or lugging anything else that needed to be lugged. Farm tasks weren't exactly fun. But Cowan developed something not every NHL hopeful has: Unyielding commitment.
"I didn't want him to be a farmer. It's more about learning what it takes to wake up in the morning, go to a job and have responsibility," Chris Cowan said.
The spring, summer and autumn of 2020 were transformative seasons for Cowan, then 15. He was weighing options: the OHL or NCAA. Like so many young players, the COVID-19 pandemic prevented Cowan from hitting the ice at all that season.
Cowan was faced with a choice.
"I knew a bunch of guys I'd be competing against were probably getting better, so..." he said, holding his arms up as if the outcome was obvious. It was time for Cowan to lean into that drive he saw in his father.
Just over two weeks into the start of the pandemic, Cowan designed his own shooting and workout routine.
"I still have to keep working hard, and understand that the work's not done," Cowan said. "The work never stops."
His mornings would look the same: After an early start, he'd log a few hours lifting weights on a flat-roof section of their home. He'd then rip open a door to one of the family's garages. Early during the pandemic, Cowan bought himself tiles and constructed a shooting area inside the garage. He'd try to improve his explosiveness on rollerblades, before firing hundreds of shots a day at a beat-up net, using one puck in particular: one with the old Leafs logo used from 1970 to 1982.
"I've always been a guy that, if I wake up and I don't work out, I just feel...weird. It feels like I haven't accomplished anything," Cowan said.
There were days when Cowan's parents wanted him to take his foot off the gas.
"It was all within himself. We never once told him to do the work," Chris Cowan said.
But Cowan wouldn't stop.
Come mid-morning, Cowan would trade hockey gloves for work gloves and report for duty. With wheat in the ground that summer and harvest on the horizon, Cowan began a new, and difficult job: Driving one of the farm's tractors and pulling the gigantic grain carts behind it. Chris Cowan said it took only a few days of instruction for his teenage son to understand how to operate the grain cart. In doing so, Cowan would have to utilize efficiency and focus to stay in line with his family's combine to ensure none of the family's harvest was wasted.
"It's a big responsibility in harvest mode," Chris said. "You need to have someone in the grain cart because it keeps the combine moving. And you have to keep that combine moving because you only get so many good daylight hours."
As Cowan took the reins of the combine himself in sweltering heat and continued to pick up other tasks around the farm, he changed. The jobs in front of him were never easy. Quitting early for the day would have been easy. So, too, would have been bolting to be with friends. How often can a teenager be free of school?
The farm helped Cowan grow in more ways than one.
"You can be tough in different ways," Cowan said. "People talk about hockey being physical, but having a good mental game is huge. With farming, there are going to be times when equipment breaks down and my dad is going to have to improvise. You've just got to stay in the moment and then keep going. And on the ice, I have to be just as relentless. Keep going. Even when the puck is bouncing on me, I've got to keep working hard. And I've always believed that when you work hard, good things will come."
Cowan was first visited by London Knights president and head coach Dale Hunter and general manager Mark Hunter that summer. Cowan's grandparents had Knights season tickets and he grew up cheering for them. The Hunters, who work on a nearby farm in the offseason, and the Cowans immediately struck a rapport.
At the heart of their appreciation for Cowan, besides his playmaking ability, was the tenacity he was developing. They saw a young boy covered in sweat unafraid of the grind. And they pitched a path forward they insisted Cowan wouldn't get at an American college.
Less than three years later, Cowan was standing on a stage in Nashville. He was a surprise first-round Leafs pick at the 2023 NHL Draft.
The questions came hard and fast: Who was this kid? For a team that rarely uses first-round picks, shouldn't they be opting for a well-known prospect? The Athletic's Corey Pronman and Scott Wheeler both ranked Cowan in the low 90s in their prospect rankings. The most notable aspect of his game was his work rate and not high-end skills. While Cowan's game and production improved late in his draft season, there were questions about whether his high IQ and energy game could survive in the NHL as a smallish winger.
The questions about his future he received in his Twitter mentions made him delete the app for two days. Afterward, he openly questioned himself. Why was he being so dramatic?
"I wish I'd never deleted it," Cowan said, shaking his head. "If people don't like me, I'm going to use it to motivate me."
Motivation is never in short supply for Cowan.
That much was evident after his draft year as Cowan added more tools. Once a prospect with question marks assigned by the uninitiated, Cowan's game garnered more eyeballs. Many people might have eaten their words once his work rate became evident. Cowan pushed the Knights to an OHL championship with 1.78 points-per-game and won OHL Most Outstanding Player and OHL playoffs MVP along the way.
Cowan became the Leafs' most vaunted prospect. At the Leafs' request, he reported to Toronto well ahead of schedule in August to begin preparing for training camp at the Leafs' facility. For now, he is living alone in his agent's Etobicoke home.
Cowan's not afraid to use words like "rat" and "pest" with ease while describing what he believes he's capable of. As he does, Cowan points to the couch he would sit at with near-religious fervour to watch Leafs games as a child. The Leaf he wanted to emulate? Nazem Kadri. Cowan's eyes light up when recalling meeting the fellow former Knight for the first time at Kadri's charity golf tournament this summer.
"You can see it on the ice: He plays with jam," Cowan said. "He's not going to let anyone boss him around."
As Cowan has evolved, conversations with people close to him helped him realize he needed even more of Kadri in his game: More sandpaper. More tenacity.
More, essentially, of what he brought to the farm every day: Just hard friggin' work, bud.
That no-nonsense attitude shaped by days equally free of nonsense on the farm is entrenched in Cowan. As Cowan grows more comfortable with the cameras around him in Toronto, fans should expect to hear a player speak his mind free of pretense. That's the farm talking.
Cowan sits straight up in his chair when asked about the added pressures that come with playing in Toronto. Heightened media attention? His social media accounts popping off with every mistake he makes?
"I like it," he said, practically snarling out his response.
Ahead of training camp, forward spots on the Leafs opening-night roster are limited. Cowan believes he can outwork his competition to grab it. Doing so would give the Leafs an energetic bottom-six option on the cheap. If there's a player built for north-south, high-energy Craig Berube hockey, it's Cowan. He's ready to do as he's told for the new Leafs coach. Cowan watched closely as his friend and fellow Leaf prospect Fraser Minten earned an NHL tryout out of Leafs camp as a rookie last season.
Cracking the Leafs just to start the season is what Cowan is shooting for, at minimum, this season.
"From there, it's on me," Cowan said.
As he acknowledges this, Cowan quickly darts up unannounced out of his chair. He begins pacing around his kitchen. His parents, Chris and Heather, shoot each other a knowing gaze. It's getting late in the afternoon. Cowan had dropped no shortage of hints during a tour of his farm that -- no matter how many questions a prying reporter might have -- he was planning on working out more later in the day.
Cowan is done talking. There is always more to be done on the farm. Any more questions about his future will have to wait until training camp.
That's when Cowan's efforts to achieve his Maple Leafs dream and begin a long NHL career -- his ultimate goal -- will truly begin.