The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e.59 Spreading Straw Mulch Efficiently & Mentoring Your Way to Economies of Scale

Episode Date: October 9, 2015

This episode features two segments on hard-won insights from farmers.  My first conversation is with Delaney Zayac of Ice Cap Organics. His intensive growing practices and short season make it hard to maintain sufficient organic matter in his soil. His new approach? Delaney bought a tractor attachment that chops and spreads straw onto his beds and/or pathways. The resulting mulch is good for weed suppression, moisture retention, and. ultimately, for adding organic matter to the soil.  Conversation two is with Andrea Gunner of Rosebank Farms. Government-imposed production limits made it hard for Andrea to exploit economies of scale in her pastured poultry operation. More independant producers in her region could potentially team up to exploit economies of scale together through cooperation, so Andrea began mentoring new farmers near her farm and then cooperating with them on bulk feed purchases and slaughter.

This is the Ruminant Podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. TheRuminant.ca is a website dedicated to sharing good ideas for farmers and gardeners. At The Ruminant, you can find past episodes of this podcast, essays I've written, a few book reviews, and a whole lot of photo-based blog posts, some of which were made by me and some of which were submitted by you. So I hope you'll check it out, TheRuminant.ca. And if you want to get a hold of me, editor at theruminant.ca or at ruminantblog on Twitter. Okay, let's do this show. Hey folks, so for this episode, I have two interviews for you that came as a result of some cold calling I did to different farmers

around British Columbia. The first interview you're going to hear makes a nice complement to last week's segment with Dan Brisbois on the efforts that they've made at his farm to mulch their pathways with landscape fabric. For this segment, we're going to be hearing from Delaney Zayek of Icecap Organics in the Pemberton Valley of British Columbia. And he and his wife invested in a piece of equipment for their tractor that allows them to chop up baled straw and kind of shoot that out off the back of the tractor to very efficiently lay down chopped up straw, either in the pathways or on their beds. And I'll leave it at that because, well, we have a whole interview about that. But it's a pretty cool way to both mulch and ultimately add organic matter to the

soil. The second interview is with Andrea Gunner of Rosebank Farms, which is a pastured poultry farm a little north of me in the northern Okanagan Valley in British Columbia. And Andrea is both a farmer and an agrologist and economist, and she wanted to share an insight she's made in the last few years. She and her partner face production restrictions in British Columbia that limit the amount of poultry they can produce in a single year. So a solution to that, given that the demand is really high and that they have a lot of costs associated with obtaining feed and processing, was to partner with other farmers in the area to form kind of a loosely based cooperative

that has solved some of those challenges. And if that doesn't make sense, it'll make more sense when you hear from Andrea. So this is kind of the type of episode you'll probably be getting from the ruminant here and there over the next little while. It's a little bit easier for me to produce while I'm working on some of the longer form interviews that you're used to hearing here. So I hope you'll like this. I think this is going to be cool as I share episodes like this. This is a big part of what I want the ruminant to be about. I just want to talk to other farmers like you and try and gain some of the insights that my colleagues have made as they go about their own farming. So if you have something worth sharing, some good idea that you tried out in the last year or two that you think other farmers would want to know about, I hope you'll get a hold of me.

Editor at theruminant.ca or you can text me at 250-767-6636 and I can get a hold of you. Or call my Skype number and leave a message. 310-734-8426. So that's about it. I'm a little short on time. Things are a little hectic around here because about two months ago, I got a call from a woman organizing an event as part of the Okanagan Wine Festival. It is a Friday night wine tasting event at which for the first time this year they're going to be also including farmers market stalls. I fought on the phone with this woman for I don't know five minutes. I was pretty insistent that I didn't see the value proposition that I can't imagine that people who

are shelling out $65 to attend a wine tasting event on a Friday night are going to be all that interested in buying produce. She insisted that I'm incorrect and that I'd be able to sell a lot of produce. Also that it would be a great opportunity to promote my farm. So anyway, that's an extra market to go to attend this week. And we are trying to be, well, make the best of what will probably be a bad situation by doing some value added stuff. We're going to make little cups of basically carrot sticks and some icicle radishes. They'll sit in a little transparent cup with a little dollop of like a parsley drizzle or dip at the bottom of the cup. And we'll sell those for two bucks and, uh, you know, a little bit of value added action

for these people who are really just there to taste wine. And maybe they can walk around, um, and eat radishes and parsley drizzle. But anyway, uh, it's just made things really busy here. So this is kind of a throw together episode i hope i think it's pretty good though i'm really grateful to andrea and to delaney for getting on the phone with me so thanks to both of them and we're going to start with my interview with delaney okay everybody talk to you at the end okay i'm delaney zayac and my wife and i own and operate ice cap organics uh we're a five acre vegetable farm in the Pemberton Valley.

We sell all our veggies at farmer's markets in Vancouver and a local CSA. Yeah, and we've been in business six years now. Yeah, totally. Well, we've always struggled to increase our organic matter on our farm because we we do about five acres of veggies and we we have about five acres so we're not hopping our veggie plot all over the place and building cover crop organic matter through cover crop all the time so so we're pretty much planting every part of our field every year and we just find it hard to to get the organic matter um the same or or to build it can i can i can i interrupt and just kind of yeah clarify a bit so i imagine then part of the problem is you're probably getting on lots of the beds more than one crop a year and it's not leaving you a lot

of time to plant a cover crop and actually have that grow out uh exactly okay yeah i think i think a lot of us with small farms face that problem. Yeah, and just with the weather too, right? Like sometimes you'll pull your crop in and you'll want to put a cover crop down, but it'll just rain for like the entire month of October, and then you just won't get anything in, and then things freeze up, and then you just have bare ground for a long time. So, I mean, this year it's been pretty good because we've had such a sunny, nice end of summer and into fall. So we've had lots of time to cover crop.

But anyways, even with a little cover crop here and there, we still are planting several crops per bed per year. So the soil is getting tilled a lot. And we're always fighting to get organic matter up. So we did a lot of research and reading and poking around. And we figured that mulching with straw might be a good idea. So after talking to a few other farmers and reading a bit of a few, I don't know, testimonials online and whatnot, we decided to jump in and we bought a bale chopper,

like a straw blower bale chopper, which was a bit of an investment, but it's just been amazing. We've been able to blow hundreds of bales of straw onto our five acres and where we have used it correctly and put a lot of straw down. It's been really good for weed suppression and moisture retention. And now as the straw is breaking down and i've tilled those beds in i'm seeing a lot of of good organic matter building up in there so that's been my biggest favorite improvement on the farm okay well i'm really interested to ask you a few follow-up questions so let's start with the piece of equipment that you bought is this a tracker

tractor mounted piece like a pto driven piece yeah yeah it goes on the three-point hitch and it's pto driven um and uh basically it can only use square bales not round bales so it's kind of a smaller farm sort of tool um and you just uh you you feed the bale in and it spins the bale around on a bunch of knives that are also spinning and then there's a huge fan that blows the chopped straw out either a spout or you can put a really like an 8 or 10 inch hose on it so it chops the straw up into about two inch pieces and blows them out in in sort of a controllable direction like it kind of goes everywhere but you can control where it goes. Right.

And then so the concept is just that you're breaking the straw down into much smaller pieces so that it breaks down. There's more surface area so that it breaks down more quickly. Yeah. So that, I mean, in terms of organic matter alone, you could probably get away with just throwing a bunch of straw in your field. But in terms of weed suppression, it's much much better to have chopped straw than just uh flakes of straw bales yeah and also just the the labor time like if you

work it out over five or ten years or so if you're gonna be doing several acres of mulching um you pay the machine off in no time uh just from for how fast like it blows a bale of straw in like a minute and a half or two minutes or something. Okay. So can you be a bit more specific about how you use the machine, including the timing, what time of year you're using it, and where you're putting that straw? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so we just planted some of our garlic,

and we'll be finished planting our garlic in the next week or so. And I will take the tractor down each bed it'll the tractor will straddle each bed of garlic and uh we'll just coat the whole garlic area with with straw so walkways included uh so there'll be like a foot or so of straw covering the entire area that the garlic's planted in then in the the spring, that garlic will be well covered, so it'll hold the weeds down and keep the moisture in. And we'll probably have to go through and make sure each of the garlic are poking out through the straw, but usually it works pretty well. They poke out on their own. So that's sort of the fall application. But then in

the spring, we're using it on a lot of other crops too like squash brassicas even beds that we use like a biotello or a plastic mulch we'll use the mulch on the bed top and then the straw in the walkways pretty much anything we we transplant we would consider using straw with and then direct seed stuff not so much now did you have any concerns delaney i i mean a very common concern i think or that would arise from with anyone hearing this is did you have concerns about um i mean a common criticism or concern about about uh living mulches that are really high in carbon is that they're going to tie up soil nitrogen and other nutrients as as microorganisms are breaking it down did you have that concern and have you seen that

be a problem yeah yeah uh i've i read a bit about that and i i don't think it will be a problem i think that we we keep our soil um nutrient levels high enough sort of amending with lots of compost and whatnot i don't i don't think it'll be a problem i think it'll probably in the long run it'll be good one concern was weed seeds if you get straw with weeds or if you or if just you get hay that has viable seed heads already it could be a real nightmare obviously that wouldn't be what you want and then the other thing is a lot of people said to watch out for like you're sort of creating a home for slugs and and bulls and mice and that sort of thing so that hasn't been a problem as of yet but

it could be this machine so you bought it for for a regular tractor. Can you share the brand and the price? Yeah, they go for about five grand and they're Harper Goosen is the manufacturer. And it goes on the three point hitch and it lifts up. It doesn't have its own wheels or anything like that. I had to order it from, well, Harper Goosen is an American manufacturer, and there's an outfit in Surrey that distributes them, I guess. Right. Yeah, and they have a bunch of different sizes. They have some that are trailers with their own motors that are a lot more money, but this one was the, yeah. It sounds like you need a second operator,

someone driving and someone operating the machine and pointing the hose or whatever yeah if if you're using the hose then you definitely need a second operator but if you're using the spout there's like a directional spout that you can sort of turn from the tractor seat so it's not so bad if if you're if you're not being really particular about where the straw goes and if if you're just kind of liberally putting it everywhere, then you could just do it by yourself. But if you're being particular, like say you've got a squash bed planted and you want to go in and blow mulch right up to the squash, then you would have someone operating the hose, basically.

And you could actually fill a bed in, except for where the actual squash plant is with it. If someone's operating hose it's accurate enough to do that and now i have to assume delaney that you have um in in deciding whether to invest in this equipment i have to assume that in the past to meet this challenge you were you were trying you were bringing in compost um and applying compost so so could you talk a bit about that and then talk about the cost comparison of bringing in compost versus straw um we will still continue to bring lots of compost in um but but hopefully over the long term not as much so uh we've also used manure and tried to compost it ourselves

and try to get more organic matter that way but we found that manure was really inconsistent in terms of fertility and there was also a lot of seed in it so we've moved to more compost um that's made by a professional compost maker that we're lucky enough to have here like 20 minutes from our farm um and they they're certified organic and good to go and they use um food waste and and uh municipal um trimmings basically for my taping and that stuff is amazing it's just such a wonderful amendment uh veggies just love it and it it's mild enough that you can put lots on and and build your organic matter and and not overpower the nutrient balances in the soil um so so yeah even even with this straw i i still i think for what we're doing for growing lots of vegetables intensively um i would still use i would still

amend with compost right but then you're you're just seeing an added benefit in also doing the mulch just for more organic matter ultimately but also for weed suppression yeah yeah and i mean the organic matter is something that i can't really put enough um compost on to really get there like i can buy say just to put a number a thousand dollars gives me you know a couple hundred bales of straw um and i don't think i would even come close to that amount of organic matter in that amount of compost in $1,000 worth of compost. So it's sort of like it's a better bang for my buck in terms of the organic matter and then also the added benefit of the weed suppression

and the moisture retention. I think I really, once the straw is wetted down, I really feel like it's keeping moisture in there. And there's wonderful things going on in the layer in between the mineral soil and the straw. There's a lot of good on there. So are you, by the way, are you irrigating mostly drip? Like is there, are you laying down drip and then putting this mulch over top? Or are you overhead watering in some places on these crops?

Both. Definitely both. We do a mix on our farm. Like some crops we find do better with drip. Some crops where I want to inject like fish emulsion or just different kinds of amendments, liquid amendments, then I'll use drip if I'm doing that. But I prefer to use overhead because then I don't have to deal with the drip after the season's done. Because inevitably with drip, you either have to find a way to roll it up and bring it in, and then you try to reuse it the next year,

or you just throw it all out, which just doesn't feel right. It sucks, yeah. So we try to reuse our drip year after year, but inevitably it gets plugged up and some of it just gets lots of holes and gets damaged so yeah we use drip sparingly and then we use overhead i think that's partly because we have sort of a endless aquifer under our valley here that we farm in we don't it's not surface water pemberton is more of a place where we're flooding and having too much water rather than running out of water. So I know drip's a lot more efficient. But I mean, it depends what, as you say, what region you're in. You're in a region where there isn't quite that pressure

to conserve. But the one reason I ask is, so then it sounds like you've done some overhead watering under this system and that's fine. In terms of the mulch getting wet from above and everything that that hasn't caused any problems for you yeah well you gotta you gotta water more it actually did kind of catch me by surprise i thought i was watering enough at first um then i realized mostly i was just saturating the straw and it wasn't getting down into the zone of the plants so once i figured that out then i got the straw nice and wet and then the water starts dripping right so once you get the soil watered it's gonna it's it's not gonna evaporate anywhere near as quickly because of the straw but you do have to water more when you're watering yeah yeah

okay that's exactly it you gotta water like crazy at first get it all really wet and then i find it it's really noticeable like you can peel the straw back and it's nice moist soil whereas a bed right beside it that doesn't have the straw will be just dried right out. Boy, when I think of anyone who grows garlic on any kind of scale, so let's say an acre of garlic a year and above, who are still spreading straw out by hand, that's got to be a real labor savings, that machine that you've purchased. Oh, it's huge for that. I think we're not that big of a garlic farm like we do maybe like a sixth of an acre or something yeah that's yeah still but it's still even just garlic alone it still feels like it's a good idea but i think

if you're doing a half an acre or an acre of garlic holy man get get a straggler it'll just save you so much money in terms of labor and your mulch will be so much more effective when it's chopped up really small like that so this and then i we can wind down pretty quick here uh delaney but this this machine is developed for square bales of i guess straw and hay it's not gonna it's not a chipper that you're gonna you can you can choose your source material correct only straw hay it's got to be a bal bail material like that and only square bales but there is round bail choppers out there um i didn't even consider them because it's just not even in my scale of operation but i know other people do do do it yeah okay well no this is this was great this is

so awesome delaney thank you um thank you so much for for sharing yeah my pleasure that's that's great i'd love for more people to know about this and use it because I'd like to hear more and more stories about it. I think mulching is just such a crucial way that we can build soil quality. And as organic farmers that are kind of struggling with smaller chunks of land, it's one of the best tools we have, right? Yeah. Cool. Thanks. Great.

All right. we have right so yeah cool thanks great all right so for this next segment i talked to andrea gutner who faced some challenges that she thought could be solved by partnering with other farmers on the production of pastured poultry here's andrea yes so the farm we started farming this piece of property in 1993 or 94. We bought it in 92 and it is a piece of glacial pill. It's kind of got interesting topography, which is what we liked. We basically bought the most land we could afford that we thought was also saleable that we could make into something and sell it for more money than we paid for it, which is true because by trying a number of different crop and livestock combinations, what we've settled on as the thing that makes us a reasonable amount of money

with a reasonable amount of labor is pastured poultry, so we do chickens and turkeys. On probably about half of the nine acres that we have, so some of the property is treed, and we like running the animals under the trees in the heat of the summer. In the spring, the whole farm is green, and so what we do is we run them on the hillsides on the top, because there's hardly any, or there was hardly any soil on those hillsides.

As I said, it's glacial till, and by running poultry, chickens and turkeys, in an intensive rotational grazing system. We rotate them with horses. It is building topsoil at a discernible rate. It's actually kind of a miracle because it's also getting rid of a lot of the sort of toxic, noxious weeds that we have just by improving the soil tilt and fertility so that's something that we've learned over the past 20 years or so the thing that has shifted for us in the last couple of years and has been such a um not maybe a complete revelation, but such an inspiration, is that we've partnered with younger farmers.

So because we have got a limited land base and because the Chicken Marketing Board restricts non-quota holders to 2,000 birds a year, and because my husband and I want to continue to eat well, when we're in our senior years, we've been able to connect with and mentor a number of, I would say, new farmers. They're not all young, but the farmers that have come forward, people who've come forward who want to get into farming, who want to do something in an ecologically sensitive, healthy way, have sort of come under our wing, and so we're mentoring a number of farms. I'm trying to think, one, two, three, four, five at current count,

who use our system of production, our feed, because we've got our own feed mill in partnership with one of the young farmers, and because we've got a processing facility as well. And so that has been really like a, it's been a revelation and it's been an inspiration to work with people who are committed to the same kind of need and desire for constant innovation, for making sure that we're paying attention to the details and questioning what we're doing and finding ways of making it better. And as a farmer who's been doing this for 20-odd years, working with new farmers has been, it's just been

like such an energy boost to find like-minded people. We've got tons of customers that appreciate what we're doing, but to find other producers who want to emulate what we've been doing and take it beyond is just really exciting. It's so amazing. So, Andrea, if I could interrupt then, I just want to kind of unpack a few of the things you said. You mentioned that you have faced a limit of 2,000 birds a year because of marketing regulations in British Columbia.

So it sounds like you had extra capacity on the farm and that I think it sounds like what you're implying is that by, by taking on new farmers and mentoring them, they can have their own business on your farm and therefore they have their own quota. And effectively it's helping raise the, the, the number of birds that can be raised on the farm each year.

Do I have that right? No, it's actually slightly different than that. So they take on, they apply for a permit from the Chicken Marketing Board, and they are raising birds under our management guidance, but on their own farm, but using our system, how we've evolved a day range system. And so what we're doing is we're putting more land into production and we are rehabilitating more land, not just our own farm, which it's quite an amazing what it looked like

before and what it looks like now, but doing that on other land as well. Some of that land has been well managed over the past couple of decades decades but some of it has been really really badly degraded and so those farms are seeing the same kind of response from the land to having intensive rotational grazing from poultry on it as ours has had so we're actually we're improving the landscape okay so andrea it's clear to me talking to you that one big benefit for you, as you've basically articulated, is that it's just really meaningful for you to both mentor younger farmers and to share your knowledge in a way that helps improve marginal land around you. But what about, I mean, my first question was about how your business has

changed in a positive way. Like, could you talk about the tangible benefits to your business of deciding to mentor younger or new farmers in this way? We had decided to do that because we were at a production capacity level that we had market beyond what our mandated production capacity was. And then with the change in organic feed prices and the availability, because there's been so much consolidation in the feed industry, it was harder and harder to get good quality organic grain at a reasonable price that we could still sell our products. We have great customers that are really supportive, but everybody has a food budget. And our philosophy is to try and make the best quality food available at reasonable prices,

not to price gouge anybody. And so by having some partnerships and collaborations, because we had more market than we have production capacity for, that also meant that we could partner and establish a feed mill, which would be milling organic grain and actually work with local organic grain producers to grow for us. So we buy a lot from the local area, as well as from Saskatchewan and Alberta. But being part of that rebuilding the traditional multifaceted economy, the other part of that is none of this works without processing. And we had gone into a partnership in 2012 with three other farms in establishing a licensed mobile poultry processing facility. That unfortunately came kind of to an end over last winter when all of those other farmers wanted to sell their shares in the unit and then turn down our offer to buy it. So we were stuck without processing.

And the whole rebuilding the infrastructure of the economy doesn't work if you don't have a way to get, as Steve said, you can't sell you-pluck chickens. You can sell you-pick blueberries, but you cannot sell you-pluck chickens. So going into, because we've got some experience behind us with working with some of these farmers, going into a partnership with them on building a new processing facility seemed like a good idea and actually has been an excellent idea because we've built a really great facility.

Oh, so this isn't the mobile unit. This is not just like repurposed, the repurposed mobile unit. This is a new one. We've built a new one. Wow. Okay. So, so just having, so, so, I mean, just to summarize, you were in a situation where you were at your limit for what you were legally allowed to produce the, the, the demand for your product or, or related products exceeded supply. Uh, you had, um, I assume, I mean, to, to, to build that processing facility just on the strength of your own production numbers couldn't be done. And plus, you face challenging economics in terms of purchasing feed and high-quality feed,

all of which is somewhat improved when you start partnering with other farmers. And it sounds like trading your mentorship and support for what they're bringing to the table, which is solving some of the problems I just mentioned. It's really interesting. It's bringing the economies of scale, but spreading them out rather than concentrating them all within our control. It's spreading out that control. And the really, like I said, the really inspiring part of that

is finding people that have taken what we've learned and are constantly bringing new ideas and new research, new innovation into it. And then all of us sort of sharing what we find in our own productive practices. And because Stephen and I go around on a rotation of visiting all these other farms, and so we're acting as our own extension agents as well. Wow and so I don't want to put you on the spot but can you think of an example of of an insight you gained from one of these newer farmers in terms of the fresh ideas or perspective they brought or is that kind of hard to do on the spot? There are some things that we have that are still under development. So looking at protein sources, for instance, in the seed mill, certainly the system of brooding the chicks and how we're doing that, we've gone to a different brooder type

and know that the best way to do it would have been to put in ground heating for the chicks when they're in the brooder. We haven't done that, but one of our mentored farms has done that, and it has reduced their mortality at the chick stage and improved their improved their final weights and their feed to weight gain ratio oh right on great great example so that's that's been a really good one we've adapted that somehow we weren't able to completely restructure our existing barns, unfortunately.

But certainly passing that on to other farmers that are coming within our mentorship program. The importance of treating the birds properly in that brooder stage can't be overemphasized. So, okay. So, look, I don't want to take up too much more of your time, Andrew, but I was wondering if we could just finish by with me asking you just to share some insight about finding the people to work with. Because understandably, there's a lot of people who perhaps think they want to farm and farm, say, pasture poultry, but they're not ultimately the right people because they were unrealistic

versus the people that are going to be in it for the long haul um do you have any advice for people in your position or advice for the young or new farmer looking to find someone like you i think for people in our position a lot of what i believe jordan is actually about attitude the without that attitude of of being committed to constant innovation and constant improvement, it's not going to work. But then the other part, of course, is having the resources. So that's kind of an easy one to set out. If you have those criteria, when we meet with somebody, if they don't have

the attitude, it doesn't matter what resources they're bringing to bear. And if they do have the attitude, we can make the resources work. The resources are secondary, they're important, but they are really not as important as the attitude. So it's pretty easy to tell, given that criteria, it's pretty easy to tell within the first half hour whether there's going to be another meeting or another discussion I actually need you to elaborate have you met someone

if we think of someone who you just decided didn't have the right attitude what did that look like? what were they giving off that caused you concern? there are probably three farmers that we've met with that haven't been a good fit. And in all cases, their expectations were not realistic for how much work or how much resources need to be involved to do this well. need to be involved to do this well.

And it mostly comes down to what their dynamics are, what other things they've got on, whether their land is suitable. But really, it's the attitude of wanting to do the best job they can. If it's somebody who's just looking to get farm status and is looking to kind of identify anything that will help them get out of that, that's not necessarily the best fit. Right. But somebody who's got land that could be improved, and when they come and see our place,

our neighboring land is exactly the same land as ours is, but they haven't been doing this system for the past 20 years. And so people who come to visit our place look at it and we say, okay, that's what it looks like if we hadn't done any of this. This is what it looks like because we have. And so the system is that we go and visit the farmers that think that they would like to do this, and then they come and look at our place.

And between those two conversations, you can pretty much tell if it's going to go any further or not. Right. Okay. Does that answer your question? Yeah, sure. No, great. Thank you. This last one is really a quick one.

Approximately how many of these relationships have you formed so far uh we've got five we've had one farm drop out of the program okay and it didn't work for them because they were in a mixed um mixed farming situation and under the organic rules having the log stock um in the way they were managing it didn't work. There were limitations because of the organic system and also because of the management system. And so I was just curious, are any of those people who are leasing land or are these all landowners?

Those are all people who are landowners. Those are all people who are land owners. Two of them are now running their own. They've got enough volume of their own market. Basically, by us contracting for everything they produced, they had the confidence to produce a little bit more and a little bit more until they were able to say, I think I've got enough market and I'll sell you a quarter of what I'm going to produce, but I've got enough market for three quarters of it. So we've had two farmers who are actually refining and developing their own businesses, but still continue to use our processing and our feed and our method. So that, again, has been really, really great within a fairly short period of time, like within a year or two, been able to develop their own market. If a young couple came to you with the right attitude, but that they wanted to base their model on leasing land in your area, would that be a deal-breaker breaker or do you think that's feasible

in terms of what you know about pastured poultry and improving the land over time? That would be feasible. Yeah, I wouldn't have objections to that. Okay, well, Andrea, just before I say goodbye, I mean, you've told us about your farm. You're also an agricultural consultant. Do you want to just mention anything about that? It's up to you. I guess that's one of the things that has made this as successful is that I am an economist, and I do work with other farmers that are not in this sector,

but other farmers in just analyzing their business structure and what they could do better. And that definitely has helped in looking at our own program and our own... I know the realities of where you can save money and where you can make money and how good business decisions really affect the outcome in a very tangible way. money and how good business decisions really affect the outcome in a very tangible way. So that has been helpful because I have been an agricultural economist and consultant for over 20 years. I've seen a lot of different operations and some of them don't look profitable on the surface, but they can be profitable. And so it's a matter of having kind of an open mind when you're going through the operation, when you're looking at the field scope

and then sitting down and actually looking at their books. That's been very helpful to have that perspective and be able to bring that and share it with the people that we're working with. So how do people find you? that and share it with the people that we're working with. So how do people find you? Our farm website is www.rosebankfarms.ca. And they can find you that way. Okay.

Yep. Well, Andrea Gunner, thank you so much for sharing your insights with my listeners. Thank you, Jordan. Thanks for the opportunity. My pleasure. All right. That's all for this week, folks. I hope you enjoyed it. I should be back with you next week.

And until then, happy farming. I'll let Vanessa take us out, and then I will let a 1990s Zellers commercial take us out. To make our final escape All we'll need is each other a hundred dollars And maybe a roll of duct tape And we'll run right outside of the city's reaches We'll live off chestnuts, spring water and peaches We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves And live life like it was meant to be

Because why would we live in a place that don't want us? A place that is trying to bleed us dry. We could be happy with life in the country. With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands. skin and the dirt on our hands. I've been doing a lot of thinking, some real soul searching, and here's my final resolve. I don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong So we'll run right out into the wilds and graces We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces And live next door to the birds and the bees And live life like it was meant to be Hey Canada, your store's got it all.

Take a look, check it out. Well, if the most for your money is what you're looking for. We got the law, no prices. Only at your store every day Because the lowest price is the law Every day