The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e87 Insights on Leasing Farmland

Episode Date: July 15, 2016

This ep: I've spliced together the best clips from a couple of webinars about leasing farmland. One was given by me, your host; the other by Blake Hall of Prairie Gold Pastured Meats. The webinars were produced by Farmstart, and can be found here.  Also: The Canadian Organic Grower Magazine co-Editor Amy Kremen returns to talk about the latest issue.   

In this episode of the Ruin of Podcast, you're going to hear some insights and advice about setting up a good farm lease, and then managing the relationship with your landlords, featuring presentations from two different farmers who spoke about the subject for separate webinars this year. Be warned though, listeners, one of them is me. But the other one is this guy. Well, you can guess what happened. We swung the gate open and that cow jumped right out. So she was at large for two weeks, like totally stressing, no insurance. And she, we found her on the Trans-Canada Highway. And luckily a guy got her corralled in his barn and we got her home and shot her and ate her. And she tasted fine. She was very fat. That's Blake Hall from Prairie Gold Pastured Meats. He's been on the show before.

He's a pretty interesting guy. And this is the Ruminant Podcast. That's Blake Hall from Prairie Gold Pastured Meats. He's been on the show before. He's a pretty interesting guy. And this is The Ruminant Podcast. Let's go. This is The Ruminant Podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. The Ruminant is a podcast and blog for gardeners and farmers and for people who care about how their food is produced. At theruminant.ca, you'll find show notes for each episode,

as well as essays, book reviews, and blog posts featuring cool stuff people are doing on their farms. You'll find it all at theruminant.ca, you'll find show notes for each episode, as well as essays, book reviews, and blog posts featuring cool stuff people are doing on their farms. You'll find it all at TheRuminant.ca. Okay, time for the show. Hey folks, it's Jordan. All right, so I told you about a month ago that I was going to take a week off from the podcast and now it's been a month or more than a month and well, yeah, farming happened.

It's been real busy. I'm sending up a new lease down the valley or up the valley for me and it's been taking a lot of my free time. So it's been real hard to get episodes out. I apologize to those who've been wondering what the heck's going on. But of course, if you've been listening long enough, you know that this is pretty normal for me this time of year.

Anyway, there'll be more content coming. I'm not sure if I'm going to get stuff out every week from here on in, but I am going to shoot to have something for you next week, so cross your fingers. All right, so earlier this year an organization called FarmStart, and specifically an employee with FarmStart called Margaret Graves produced a series of land access webinars. I think they had four and each speaker spoke about their experience accessing land via well, various innovative strategies, two of which were more traditional leases. And I gave one of those presentations. So did Blake Hall of Prairie Gold Pastured Meats. He's been on the show

before and we both talked about our experiences leasing land and shared our insights. And for today's episode of the podcast, I have taken clips or snippets from Blake's presentation and mixed them together with snippets from my presentation and wound them together in a way that I hope is easy to consume and a little more appropriate for a podcast form. So I won't say too much more. This could be useful for anyone who's considering leasing land, who is struggling on their current lease to manage their relationship with their landlords, or for people who might consider leasing out their farmland to new or young or just other farmers. Now, in Blake's presentation, he actually references some documents that he shared with the webinar participants. And I know Blake's okay with me sharing those with all of

you. So if you check out the show notes for this episode at theruminant.ca, you will find these template documents that Blake uses on his farm with his landlords. And who knows, maybe they can help you out as well. So I hope you enjoy the episode uh after these uh these webinar clips you're going to hear a quick conversation with amy cremin co-editor of the canadian organic grower magazine she talks about what's in her new issue there's some pretty cool stuff in there so you can check that out at the end of this episode and i hope you enjoy it and i'll talk to you later peace out So we run a herd share program, as you can see on rented land.

Our herd share program, it's how we direct market all of our products. And it's really the way that we were able to kickstart and cash flow. And it's pretty much the same story with every other first generation direct marketer out there. with every other first-generation direct marketer out there. And it's been for sure the only way that we could get into livestock production without a loan. So we run Prairie Gold Pastured Meats. We started it in 2010.

And so we do grass-finished beef. We do pastured pork. That pig is cute. We do some sheep, we have some ewes and lamb on grass in June and we also have 300 laying hens which is the small flock exemption in Alberta. So we're on a farm lease in Peachland, British Columbia in the Okanagan Valley. we're on a farm lease in Peachland, British Columbia in the Okanagan Valley. We started farming here in 2011. We moved on January 1st of 2011 and then our first season of growing here was the spring of that year. So our lease here has actually grown a bit in those five years. We've expanded as we went along. And so just to give you a sense, this is a certified organic farm here

and I grow market veggies. Over time, I've tended to focus more and more on, on sales to restaurants. Um, but I've kind of done a little bit of everything. I still do a tiny, tiny bit of sale into, um, grocery stores and other retail outlets. Uh, I, I, I, I have had a CSA, um, all the way along. It's been larger than it, than it is now. Right now it's at about 35 families. I've had it as high as about 60 families. And I've also done in farmer's markets. Okay. I grew up in town. My grandpa was the last generation on the farm. His dad died when he was 14. The tractor broke down and he took it all apart and he couldn't get it back together again. The tractor broke down and he took it all apart and he couldn't get it back together again. And so he went and joined the seismic crew.

Or so the story goes. But anyway, that's the last time there was a haul farming in my family. From 2006 until 2009, I knew I had the bug and I was just like working on farms. I was working in town. I was doing a carpentry apprenticeship, but on the weekends I was working on farms, going to the farmer's market, kind of becoming a foodie, going to conferences, localistic management,

reading all kinds of publications, just trying to learn about agriculture. And by the time I finished my carpentry ticket in 2009 I felt like I had a pretty good theoretical knowledge but very little of the hands-on skill that comes with growing up on the farm so I spent a year on the road working at different farms and ranches across Canada and just learning you know how to tie fencing knots how not to roll up an electric fence reel and get it all tangled how to move cattle in a low stress manner what a healthy pasture looks like what an

unhealthy pasture looks like how to pull a calf all kinds of stuff it was all good experience and by the end of that in the spring of 2010 I finally felt like I had the confidence to go out on my own and I had a little bit of money and I went and I bought my first herd of cattle, I split it with a friend in the Algoma district in Northern Ontario. I'm originally from Red Deer but I spent a shift in Ontario and so once I bought those cattle I was kind of starting my my way down the beg, borrow and steal land access plan because as soon as the check cleared and the cattle were mine, I basically became the closest thing to a

nomadic herd in the 21st century as you could be. I owned nothing more than cattle and so it was just flexing that social capital, working on farms so that my cattle can graze and this and that. And along the way there were certainly some hard lessons in communication but persistence and politeness pay off because eventually if you're a tenant farmer it can be very tiresome exhausting and expensive and pays off when you can find yourself in a stable land tenureship arrangement which i'm pleased to report we are finding it joe and jess have

been farming on this property as owners for about 30 years or even more now. Never super, super commercial. I think the most they were ever grossing in revenues was $30,000. But it was still important to them. Both in terms of just it was meaningful to be farming. But they are also just lifelong farmers and very passionate farmers. And by the time we got there, their revenues were even lower. Jess had already pulled out of the farm. She was barely doing any farming.

Joe was also interested in, in semi-retirement. So they, they, they, they liked the idea. We, we figured we could give them the same level of stewardship and care for their land. So it seemed kind of win-win and, uh, it kind of at that point remained to be seen if that was the case. Anyway, so Tamara Ranch is owned by Tom and Margaret Towers. They're 70. They were hoping to retire. They're in the twilight of their career. Tom, his grandfather homesteaded a mile down the road.

So there's very deep Towers roots in our area. And him and his brother farmed together conventionally. They had a feedlot at home. They grew their own crops. They grew their own silage, all their own feed. And in the early 90s, Tom and Margaret could kind of see the writing on the wall that perhaps this get big or get out thing wasn't working for them. And so they split the partnership.

It wasn't acrimonious. It was all good. But essentially, this coincided with Tom and Margaret taking holistic management for the first time and they realized okay maybe the answer lies in less machinery in grazing and focusing on the cattle and the soil and so from the early 90s until now they have been really ramping up the grazing

so that's when the electric fencing started to get developed. That's when the water system started to get developed. But they've got one son and he lives in Vancouver and has a business out there and a family and it's, you know, with no hard feelings. As I said, there's no way I'll come run the farm. And so they're at the twilight of their career. We're in a very fertile black soil region, and every farm around us is grain land.

And so they knew that if they sold out and moved to town, that the first thing that's going to happen is all the trees you see in the picture are going to get bulldozed and then the roundup wagons are going to come trundling down the laneway and all this grass will get sprayed out and there will be a few bumper crops of canola but pretty much within five years their legacy will be undone and when I say legacy I mean deeper topsoil, higher organic matter, rejuvenation of native species, loss of habitat. And this, you know, for them was a big deal. So they actually started courting my wife and I about coming and taking over the management. and taking over the management.

So we actually met because I listed some cattle for sale on Kijiji, and that's how I met Tom and Margaret. They came out, and they were looking at getting a couple of grass cattle that they could sort of step their product quality up with. And they saw what we were doing out on this other rented piece and commuting. I think that's when the gears started turning. The circle you see is the first quarter acre that we started with. So we did a year on that quarter acre. And in exchange, they gave us very, very affordable rent,

just like an incubator farm. And I mean rent for our housing, which was on the farm, but also the land, really affordable. farm. And I mean rent for our housing, which was on the farm, but also the land, really affordable. We started at paying $400 a month for our residents and the land. And then in exchange, we had to be willing to give them a total of 30 hours a week of paid labor. Okay, so not 30 hours each, but 30 hours as a couple, we needed to give to their farm operation um so they were paying us at the time 12 bucks an hour so it was a pretty good deal um we had a quarter acre to start getting our farm business going plus we had some paid labor to uh to help us out since we weren't going to be making

a lot off our farm in the early going so in the winter of 2012, we started meeting. We hired Kelly Sidoruk, who's a certified holistic management educator and comes from kind of a long line of holistic managers, to come down and facilitate a vision planning, goal setting workshop. She was with us for a weekend, and that was huge, just to put us all on the same page. So she'd send us all off on our own, and we'd all write down, okay, in five years, this is what I see the ranch looking like.

And I more or less expected everybody to come back and say the same thing. So it was really eye-opening to see how divergent our vision were and so this was good to be having these discussions before any type of arrangement had been reached because it allowed us then take all our divergent visions and craft a holistic goal that melded them all and made us all feel like we had a stake in the project and that it made us feel good so like I said this holistic management common language really gave us a starting point for how to communicate about finances how to communicate about the land management.

And it also introduced a language about the people side of things. Everybody understood from the start that we can't ignore all stakeholders, everybody's vision and goals and buy-in. So I want to point out that when I talk about pros and cons of leasing on a working farm, that's more or less meant to be contrasted to if you were to lease land from someone who wasn't a farmer. So someone with farmland, but who wasn't farming themselves, whether they live on the land or don't live on the land. So just keep that in mind that that's kind of the type of contrast I'm attempting to establish. I mean, presumably on a lot of farms that are working farms, you're just going to have experienced farmers already set up. And so they're going to be able to help you. And let me tell you

three years of apprenticing, we knew a lot, but we still had a lot to learn. And we benefited greatly from Joe and Jess, Joe and Jess's mentorship. And what you'd end up doing, what you end up realizing is you, you just realize what you don't know. You know, like, uh, the, there was a lot about irrigation. I didn't know because the type of irrigation I had dealt with before was, was abnormal, um, compared to most farms. So just on irrigation alone, I learned a lot from, from Joe specifically. Um, um, another, another one that's fantastic, and this was just maybe the particular generosity of Joe and Jess is that, and the timing of us being here was that they gave us access to their own markets because they were, especially in year two, in year two, you know, they pulled back and we took over their veggie gardens. We inherited, for example, one grocery store relationship that at its, at the peak 10 weeks of the season was $500 a week. And at that

time, that was a huge contract for us, um, that we didn't have to establish because it was already done. And that, that took some trust from Joe and Jess that we wouldn't mess up their reputation. Um, and that, and that goes to the next point. So, so they, another potential benefit is that the farm already had an established reputation in next point. So, so they, another potential benefit is that the farm already had an established reputation in the community. Um, it also had organic certification. So we kind of walked, we had to like learn how to participate in that certification, but we kind of walked into that. Um, and, and this was particularly useful for us that, that, um, Joe and Jess let us assume their farm's name even. So we just called herself the same farm

name, which meant we could capitalize to the greatest extent on their farm reputation. And that was really helpful for us. People already knew the name and the community. And it meant that people weren't, they just, a lot of certain customers wouldn't even know the change. And that was, again, for new farmers, that was really valuable. Like I say, it's cheap. Not every situation is going to be cheap, but, but, um, presumably if part of the arrangement is that you're going to give your labor to the

farm, they're going to really value that. Even if they're not paying you a ton for that labor, they will offset it as Joe and Jess did with, um, very, very reasonable access, like to, to maybe housing and certainly farmland. So, uh, when you combine that with the tools and machinery and other infrastructure, it was, it was, um, it just kept things very, very affordable for us as new farmers. Um, this last one I think is so crucial or such a potential benefit of, of leasing on a working farm. And that's that, um, your landlords get it. You know, they, they've been there themselves. They know that, that to the extent a farm even can be profitable which isn't a guaranteed thing uh they know you work really hard for it so it's not like they're going to sit there and maybe seeing some profitability and then

getting like oh yeah like i want some of that i deserve more rent they get it they get you're working hard they get the challenges and that that is um that's worth its weight in gold. So basically here's what we've come up with. When we first got to Tamara Ranch, we worked on a memorandum of agreement. And so we had a memorandum of agreement, and Steel Pony had a memorandum of agreement with the landowner. And that has kind of evolved because we can see more and more enterprises happening on the ranch with more and more stakeholders. And so what we've come up with this year, and this is a document I sent to Margaret this afternoon, and this we actually got a lawyer to write, it's the Farm Services Agreement.

And so it's kind of a generic document that outlines all these things you see on the slide. If I think we'll have time, I'd like to work through them really quickly. It's pretty generic, it's one size fits all. The farm service agreement can be written for us, it can be written for a market gardener or a chicken farmer or a commercial kitchen or someone who wants to do a folk festival or start a disc golf course this would encompass all those different enterprises and this would be the agreement between the landowner and the tenant okay there are some drawbacks that i want to i want to talk about um and uh i want to say that they became, they have become more prominent with each

year we're here, which makes sense if you think about it. Um, but I already mentioned the first one. Um, part of the deal, part of the, part of the price of admission to this situation was that we, we needed to provide some labor. And even once we renegotiated and reduced the labor down to 10 hours, I got to tell you, if you start a farm business, if you haven't already, um, you, you get, it's, it's, it's your passion. It's what you really want to do. And so even at 10 to 15 hours a week, which is kind of what we provide through the main season. Um, those are 10 to 15 hours. I'd much rather be on my own business, improving my own business, making my own business thrive. But that, you know, it's part of, it's part of, I couldn't, I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have been able to do what I've done

here without that, that part of the deal. Another for us, my landlords are farmers and they live here on the property where I farm and, and I work for them. And what it means is that, even though I couldn't imagine more flexible understanding landlords, they still have opinions and they're, they, they just, every single, anytime they're out on the farm, they're going to see things that I've done and they may have opinions and they may want to share them. And so Vanessa and I both at times really feel like in a fishbowl and that's not always fun. It's not, it's not always, at times really feel like in a fishbowl and that's not always fun. It's not, it's not always,

you know, I, sometimes I just like, sometimes you don't want to have to walk around the farm knowing that if the landlord see you, they're probably going to want to talk to you. Sometimes you don't want to deal with that, but it's, it's part of the reality of this type of arrangement. Uh, occasionally I'm locked on the farm. Uh, there are two horses here on the farm. That means twice a day, the horses need to be tended to. Um, this is much less of an issue if, um, if there are no animals, but even on a, on a purely plant-based farm, um, you know, we, another, another benefit, another thing that sweetens the deal for the landlords is if you, by being here, can let them get away for extended periods of time. And that's a huge benefit to a farm owner because many farm owners who don't have that, they're stuck on the farm more than they want to be. That's just part of the give and take. I don't find it that bad, but it's another thing to think about is that, you know, you may have some

obligations that keep you around the farm at times a day or times a year that you'd really rather not be there or not have to be there. And listen, if you farm where your landlords live and they're farmers or not, but if where you're farming is on a lease where the landlords live, and sorry, I should say, particularly if there is more farming going on on the same property and they're your bosses, let me tell you, there's going to be constant communication. And I mean, for the busiest two or three months in the summer, some days I'm on the phone eight times with them during the day. And it can be very difficult because sometimes I don't want to answer that phone, but I answer the phone because it's just part of the reality of farming in a context like this. But, um, that is, it is a drawback. There's just some days I don't, I don't,

I don't want to deal with eight separate calls. And we've, we've tried to like improve that and say, Hey, can you write down your stuff so that it's only twice a day, but that's not very practical in practice. So it's sometimes eight calls a day. Um, and that's, that's another slight drawback. By now we were far enough in our, down our path to realize that this communication piece is the piece that's going to make or break an arrangement. All the good intention in the world, all the money in the world won't make a partnership succeed. we were lucky to have the common framework of holistic management to work with. We build in communication so we have kind of set things like every Monday morning I go

for coffee with Tom and Margaret. It doesn't seem like much but during the growing season that's when I'm keeping them up to date with what's happening on the ranch, what the plan is for the upcoming week when I might need Tom's help he still wants to be involved he's enjoying a semi-retired agrarian lifestyle he loves getting on his horse and working cattle he's an awesome stockman like we work cattle well together so that's a plus and then we might talk about any upcoming issues

and in the winter this is when we might just be brainstorming for this upcoming season and then once a month the whole project gets together so us, Field to Fork and Steel Pony with Tamara Ranch

and we kind of have a whole farm meeting and so this is where we might plan for a field day or collaborating on the grazing in the market garden or any other way that we can do a whole farm project check in regularly I referenced this earlier I wasn't just I really mean it that when I find myself having conversations in my head, it's time to phone Joe and Jess and say, hey, can we meet for coffee tomorrow and have a check-in. Check-ins have diffused so many potential problems on the farm. And often we check in and what do we find out? One or more, both parties has been making assumptions

that aren't even true. And that's another reason to not make assumptions is because often your assumptions are misplaced. Often your assumptions get wrapped up in your own biased perspective or your own ego. And so check-ins, man, like in the early going, have them too much. The worst part of having too many check-ins

is you drink too much coffee and you develop like a caffeine problem, but that's not so bad. Another thing I'm going to mention a little bit is you really need to be, um, intellectually honest with yourself. Um, you know, you, you, you need to be able to recognize things like, am I a bad communicator? And if you know you are, and you're probably not going to improve that much, uh, this is not the situation for you the situation for you is probably to find a piece of land where the landlords don't live there and you're you you you aren't as you're not in that fishbowl i suppose uh and then a note on housing like i said we live on the ranch and i could see how in some arrangements you'd want to

build that into your rental agreement. We rent the house and the yard site but we keep that whole arrangement separate from our scope of work and our farm services agreement. We basically live here as if we were just tenants who drove to work every day in town. And then we've got another whole rental agreement, but it's pretty similar to any standard housing rental lease that you would sign with, you know, how you use your yard. I guess my only thing with this housing thing is if you want to live on the farm, regardless of if you want to live on the farm,

regardless of if you're farming or not, then I'd say maybe have a separate arrangement for the housing from your farming enterprise. But if the only reason you're there is because of your farming enterprise, then I don't think there's anything wrong with building that into your farm service agreement, you know, under the term section, you can say, uh, I, a five-year automatic renewing lease that includes the house on whatever piece of the land. Be impeccable with your word. Be honest. That one's pretty straightforward. One thing that comes up a lot in these arrangements is like, you screw up, One thing that comes up a lot in these arrangements is like you screw up. You screw up.

You just, you know, you break something. If you break something, I've broken lots of things of Joe and Jess's. Tell them. Don't hide it. You know that impulse, the immediate impulse is like I can hide this. I can bury this freaking tool in the soil and no one will ever know the better. Don't do that. Just, you have to be honest with your landlords and it may, it hurts in the, in the, in the telling of a screw up, but it really helps in

the long run. Okay. Just a quick story about the importance of insurance. Very first summer, very first time taking a cow to the butcher shop because she was a little bit hairy. I hired my neighbor with a horse trailer, which didn't have a slide gate. It had a swing gate. So when we backed up to the butcher shop, you have to stop like eight feet away, swing the gate open, and then back up the rest of the way. Well, you can guess what happened. We swung the gate open, and that cow jumped right out. So she was at large for two weeks, like totally stressing, no insurance. And we found her on the Trans-Canada Highway, and luckily a guy got her corralled in his barn,

and we got her home and shot her and ate her. And she tasted fine. She was very fat. But I really feel like we dodged a bullet there. If something had happened on that highway with the cow and I'd been on the hook, that would have really sucked, as I'm sure you can all imagine. Or direct marketers often have field days or invite their customers out. I would just hate for something to happen. It also really allowed

me to sleep comfortably when i was living in town renting land a half hour away because some of that fence was pretty rough and i just you never know what can happen if there's a storm and they bust through the corner and they're all out on the road and it just is like so much peace of mind don't take things personally. You're going to run into tension on the farm because you're sharing resources, but you're also, in our case, we're employees. And it is very, very easy to take things personally, to take criticism personally.

And it's not even like it's criticism. As our employers, Joe and Jess have to pass on information. Like this needs to be done this hasn't been done yet whatever it is i mean anyone who's been an employee knows it is very easy to take that kind of those comments and like take them personally the key is to recognize when you're taking things personally and then tell yourself i am taking this personally i'm letting my ego get in the way um so, so I mean, it just as simple as like Joe, Joe needing to point out like, Oh, we're getting a little behind with weed whacking

in the orchard. Um, that can, I'm just a neurotic guy and that can just set me off into like walking around, stumbling around the farm, talking to my, or not talking to myself, talking to Joe in my head. I'm like, yeah, but you didn't realize I've been over here. I've been weed whacking. Look man, I'm, I'm overworked right now. It now. It's April. It's the busiest time of year. The grass is growing like crazy. I can't. God, man, that's just so unfair. But he's not making it about me. He's just saying a fact. He's not saying you're not doing the weed whacking properly. He's saying the weeds need to be whacked. And I just wanted, I noticed it. So just so you know, really, really important because you take things personally and then egos get involved and you get into fights and whatever.

We're really good at that on this farm. Like I say, I'm not good always at avoiding it completely, but I'm good at, I'm intellectually honest about it. I recognize it when it's happening. And as an aside, when you start to notice yourself in these relationships, having conversations with your landlord in your head when you're in the shower or when you're walking around the farm, that's a really good indicator it's time for a check-in. One of the questions I had, Blake, was have you ever wished for a lease longer than five years or does the kind of rolling nature of the lease kind of take care of that for you? Yeah, I would love a lifetime

lease at Tamara Ranch, but these types of things are earned and it's a lot to jump into something like that right off the bat. I don't know of any examples like that where you can just meet somebody and hit it off and them give you a lifetime lease of the place. I'm not saying that doesn't exist. But landowners, renting in a way, there's power to the renter too, the tenant has sway in the relationship and so as much as the landowner is feeling out the tenant, the tenant has sway in the relationship and so as much as the landowner is feeling

out the tenant, the tenant also feels out the landowner. If they feel like they're going to, the landowner doesn't have their interest in mind or whatever, it's nice to have a short term at the start maybe. I can see for market gardeners that that's a bit of a tough deal like if you're breaking virgin land and trying to get your weed pressure under control like especially in an organic system you need at least that five-year lease right off the bat. But the nature of our current

arrangement I'm quite satisfied with. Automatic five-year lease that's self-renewing is great. And currently we're in the process of buying our house and then the acreage right around it, that is affordable, not all the farmland and so I think if we own a little piece of Tamera Ranch then that will even help galvanize our tenancy indefinitely. One thing I haven't talked about is the next generation, our landowners are 70 and we have been developing a good relationship with their son because inevitably the farm will end up in his name and we've brought him in and really get him to understand the nature of the Tamara Ranch project,

what we bring to the management of the place's tenants and why it's in his best interest to keep us around as well. And so that relationship will continue and it's kind of fun because his son and our son are up there exactly one year apart. And so it's kind of neat to see them play together and to think, you know, maybe in 50 years, they'll be having beer together and, you know, talking about the management of the ranch. put as much as you can in writing. Um, I'm going to talk about this in a little bit, but like, don't rely on good faith and good nature and all the rest. Writing never hurts. It takes a little bit of time and it, it, it, it just matches up expectations and it provides a reference when you start to have disagreements. Um, it doesn't need to be a, I don't mean in every single case, it's something a lawyer's looking at. It's at. It can sometimes be a piece of paper that outlines expectations. Everyone looks at it, sign off on it. It'll avoid all kinds of problems.

This is just to echo, I guess, what Margaret said about getting in and writing. I totally agree with that. I've had the handshake deals in the past, and they're fine. It's all good to trust your neighbor and trust your partner. But getting it in writing, in my opinion, is more about the process than the final document. Whenever we get something in writing, our main goal is to put it in a

drawer and never have to pull it out again but going through and writing it it has the dialogue that needs to happen while everybody's feeling good about building in all your contingencies gave causes rate of pay I'll go into greater detail like I said but it really is critical and there's ways of doing it where you're not imposing yourself on a new relationship or

on new land owners like I understand if you're coming to a new farm and I'm this enthusiastic young farmer with all this initiative and I can't wait to transform your farm. That can be intimidating for the older generation, especially if you're coming waving this big paper document,

but there are ways of having that dialogue. I don't know if that makes sense. Don't make assumptions. It's a quick way to create resentment and tension and all the rest. My example I thought of is a really simple one, but it's actually, in its simplicity, it illustrates just how important it is. It's probably obvious to everyone that you shouldn't make assumptions like, oh, my friend needs a tractor down the road. I'm going to lend out Joe's tractor without asking him. Okay, that's an idiot assumption to make on my part. Um, not most people wouldn't do that. If you're

going to, if you're, if you're prone to making those kinds of assumptions, yeah, this is not a good situation for you, but it's even the little ones because remember the, you're not by, by being on a lease on a working farm with your landlords living there, you're not, you're not just tenant. You're not just like, I should have said this earlier. The really interesting thing is you're not just landlord and tenant, your neighbors, your legitimate neighbors, your friends. Um, it's a mentor protege relationship. Like it's a very complex relationship. And so there's all these ways that your assumptions can contribute to degrading those relationships. And so the really easy example is like,

Vanessa was doing her academic program in Vancouver for off and on over the years. And, uh, she was living in a house in Vancouver with a fireplace and her, she and her roommates were really excited about the fireplace. And we have tons of firewood on the farm. Um, and they needed some firewood and the best firewood we have on the farm is, is some, it was some really well cured fur. And so I literally figured, oh, I'm going to grab two, two pieces of fur, uh, to take down to the coast and chop and do a bunch of kindling because fur just is great kindling. Um, and then I, that was the kind of assumption I thought it was safe to make. And then I checked in with Joe just because I bumped into him. I'm like, oh, Joe, I took a couple of pieces. It was Joe's fur. And there, you know, there was, there was, um, there were, he probably had 60 pieces of fur ready to go nice and cured. Um, and I, I saw him bristle and I realized like,

he's, he's a very generous man and he was, he probably instantly would have said yes, but he just didn't like that. I just assumed I could take his fur wood. Um, and those, those little micro examples, that's what you're, you have to really think about when you're trying to work along, like just live happily on a farm together. So very, very important. So I say persistence because if you're trying to eke out a living as a first generation farmer in Canada these days, you got to be persistent. first-generation farmer in Canada these days, you've got to be persistent, whether it's working off-farm full-time and then working on-farm full-time just to work towards that goal or sacrificing quality of life so that you can be on-farm.

Anyway, I'm sure you all have your own testimonials. And then just trying to be positive and polite and, like, help your neighbor out. I sort of felt like whenever I moved to a new neighborhood, I just flopped myself on the neighborhood. And it wasn't because I'm a super outgoing extrovert, but it's because I, like, legitimately needed the help of my neighbors. And so just be polite when you're asking for things and try to help out when you can reciprocate it's kind of self-evident stuff

nothing that your parents didn't teach you i'm sure um do what you say you're gonna do it's kind of an extension of be honest uh it goes a long way in these relationships uh building up trust and credibility happens really quick if you just follow through on what you say don't be flaky i had a question from and it was about finding the right landowner who does understand your vision um you know obviously having heard you speak it this couldn't have been built alongside a landowner who had a different ethic. But have you worked with landowners who are not as well aligned? Would that ever have worked in this sense? Yeah, I have worked with landowners who aren't, that honestly just don't care at all, they're

just happy to have their land rented out to get paid. In our case it worked okay because we pretty much had freedom of the place, they weren't, they didn't care about us, they didn't really care what we did. They didn't want us to have pigs or anything. They said, no, this is just for cattle. To build something long-term like this, I think, would have been a challenge. I did get a three-year lease out of them. So perhaps, you know, they wanted me to stay there.

But I tell you, having that common vision really fleshes out the whole thing if you can talk that same language with your landowner it really gives you kind of that sense of security which there's enough stress and farming and tenant farmer being a surf sucks tenant farmers have kind of had a bad rap for a long time. And so if you can have that sense of security, I think that's worth a lot. Choose your battles. Learn to let things go. And it's hard to do. And you don't have to be awesome at it right away.

But you really need to recognize you can't get your way in every regard. You have to go buy your own piece of land if that's what you want. And Joe and Jess can't have their way if they, if they want to have us here to provide labor to them. And so you just need to, you need to learn and finesse when a certain issue is worth bringing it up. And when you just have to accept, like, I don't need to, to raise this one. I don't, I don't need to sit down with Joe and Jess and tell them that eight calls a day is too much overall. I'd rather save the discussion for something that's more important to me. I can handle eight calls a day, even though I would love if it was down to four. Okay. Grass is great. Thank you everybody. I hope that was informative. Uh, for sure. Look at the documents that Margaret will be sending you

or if you've downloaded them already. This is probably the formula we're going to work with for the foreseeable future. All right, so that concludes that segment on leasing land. If you liked what you heard, you can hear the full presentations that Blake and I each gave separately over at farmstart.ca. Farmstart was the organization that produced a series of webinars on helping farmers gain access to land in different ways. There are more webinars in the series. So if you head to farmstart.ca and look for their webinars, you can find those ones as well as all kinds of other webinars that Farmstart has produced,

as well as other real kick-ass resources for for new and aspiring farmers thanks a lot to margaret graves at farm start who produced those webinars for farm start and yeah go check out farm start how many times can i say farm start i don't know anyway it's a good organization go check it out, farmstart.ca. So every once in a while, I'm joined by the co-editor of the Canadian Organic Grower magazine, Amy Kremen, when she wants to tell us about all the great content in a new issue. The summer issue just hit stands recently. I'm pretty sure it's available now online and at select bookstores and other magazine stands in Canada. And Amy joined me recently to tell me what we can expect

from the newest issue. Here we go. Amy Carmen, thanks a lot for joining me again. Thanks for having me, Jordan. Why don't you tell me two or three pieces that we might talk about in this conversation okay we have a three-part piece on comb cut so comb cuts is huge it's a it's a a big interest especially in grain growing regions but you know for anybody growing grains anywhere in canada it's a swedish machine that's been designed to basically cut down weeds in the crop. And so it's pretty new. It's been around for like nine years, and Canada had its first machine just last year. But now this year, there's probably about 10 machines operating in Canada. And what's really cool about it is basically you can go in once the crop is already up,

and you can cut down branched weeds in anything that's like a grass type or if your weeds are growing up above your crop you can raise footers to cut off the seed heads that are growing above your crop and then they just drop down and decompose inside the rows so it's this kind of new innovative you know organic you know compatible uh weed management system that you know would allow you to reduce the amount of cultivation you need to do. So we have a three-part piece. One is from the company, well it's from somebody who works with the company in Sweden and interviewing the original farmer who came up with the idea for the machine, plus two pieces from Canadian farmers

who have and are using the comb cut currently and sort of what they've noticed about using it and their suggestions and why they're excited about it. Are they excited? I mean, is there an initial kind of reaction or response that it's going to be a good tool? One of them is so excited that he and his wife have formed a company

to become a distributor for the machine because they think it's going to be awesome. And the other one, the other farmer who's using it said, you know, he's tried a lot of different things and, you know, obviously this is an investment, he said, but basically, you know, if this machine prevents you from having to plow down even one crop, you know, in five years or two crops in five years that you would have lost because of, you know, not having control of your weeds weeds you'll basically over the cost of the lifetime of this machine you know as it depreciates you're gonna more than get the value of the machine back is this a machine off the front of the tractor or the or the rear must be you can use it you can use it either way oh really you can use it either way and then one of the farmers you know he's

combining it so like he's going to be running, I think he's running it off the front, but then he's putting, like, humic acid off the back, you know, a sprayer off the back. So basically in one operation you can combine, you know, different, you know, you can do lots of different, you can do more than one thing when you're out there with your tractor. So weed management and fertility management at the same time. It's pretty cool. So if you imagine if you have you know if you've got anywhere upwards of 500 acres somewhere from 500 to 5 000 acres right and you know i don't

i don't know off the top of my head grain prices but i know that for some of these grains for some you know for some for some organic grains right now with the prices of the commanding if you don't have to if you're not going to plow down that crop because you were able to have great weed pressure, uh, weed, sorry, weed management, um, yeah, no, it's going to pay for that machine will pay for itself. It's just, it's one tool of many, but it's a new tool. So that's why it's, it's, it looks like, you know, it's effective and exciting because it gives you even more, gives you more flexibility, more control, more options, and you can cultivate less. Yeah, and it just seems like a tool that will be really exciting and useful for current organic grain farmers.

But from my limited anecdotal experience, there's a good percentage of conventional farmers whose sole barrier in their heads for not converting to organic is weed control. And it just seems like this is the kind of tool that could ultimately, if it works as it is advertised, could convert a lot of people who are perhaps on the verge of converting to organic. Yeah, absolutely. And I know that's something we're thinking about a lot in our coverage right now is when we write for the canadian organic grower we put stuff in the canadian organic grower the idea is to put pieces out there um that aren't preaching to the choir but that are talking about look these are practices that are going to be that are up to date of total interest to the currently for organic farming

community but that are also accessible ideas that would be useful for conventional folks who are organic curious or who are trying to reduce their inputs. And so it seems like a win-win for everybody to kind of put that kind of material out there. Finally able to satisfy some of this organic curiosity, hey? Right. So that's a new machine called the Comb cut out of sweden that you've got covered in three different pieces in the magazine uh what else what else is in this uh summer issue that is just hitting newsstands okay so we've also got um we've also got a number uh it's kind

of a grains heavy issue actually so we've got um actually. So we've got some agronomic considerations for growing organic hemp, and we have a really nice piece from Ian Cushion as a profile of Moose Creek Organic Farm, sort of a kind of a traditional farm profile of Moose Creek Organic Farm where Ian is a highly diversified, pretty large, pretty large scale organic grain grower and alfalfa as well. He, and he grows many kinds of grains and always has every year. He's got at least seven or eight different things going and sort of off the top of his head, he can kind of run by sort of like, what are the sort of main production constraints and considerations a farmer might want to have when they're thinking about getting in two different kinds of diversified cropping systems and the advantages thereof.

Great. So anything else you want to talk about from the issue? Well, I can talk about the cover issue, the cover story, which I guess I could say in passing, we have a kind of a section, we've got a book review and an article and another article that all kind of look at energy use and carbon farming. So we're sort of stepping back and looking at sort of big sort of climate and carbon kind of questions, but bringing it down to earth and personalizing it. We've got our cover story, which is a really beautiful and inspiring piece that's focused on the farm of Ventrepont-Roulant based in Montreal. And it is a piece that talks about this nonprofit organization's effort to, you know, they've been for years

delivering meals to people who are shut in by bike, and they've been trying to get that food as locally as possible. But a few years ago, they started their own farm, and it's been a runaway success. So they now have a CSA. They offer limited income shares, which are subsidized in part by full income-paying shareholders in the CSA. Their farm is putting out tons of produce. They have many hundreds of interns or volunteers, rather, come to their farm every summer. And so this piece is kind of a perspective piece on how do you make the connections between the urban and rural communities? How do you train hundreds of young people who are interested in functioning sustainable food systems?

of young people who are interested in functioning sustainable food systems. How do you reach the people who are low income to get the best quality food to their houses, into their lives, into their lifestyles? And how could this be scaled or transferred to other Canadian cities? And so you look at the land dynamic. Who has contributed the land for this project? What do they get out of it, and it's this beautiful sort of very integrated community piece showing, you know, a vibrant, healthy, exciting food system in action. So we're really excited to have that piece included in this issue. Sounds like this farm is kind of doing what Jean Chrétien might describe as an organic farming community for the rest of us.

You got it. That's a Canadian health care debate reference, Amy. I don't know if you picked up on that. Okay, Amy Kremen, where can people pick up a copy of the magazine or get access to these articles? You can go to the COG website where you can subscribe. You can also go to the TCOG website, which is at magazine.cog.ca, and just follow the links to how to support, and you can get to a subscribe link there.

You can also start to look around, and if you see the TCOG magazine, we're now a part of Magazines Canada. And we have been, Magazines Canada is placing us in different stores all over Canada. Amy Kraman, thanks a lot for joining me to talk about the latest issue of TCOG. Absolutely. My pleasure, Jordan. All right. So that's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it, folks. And hopefully I'll be talking to you in a week's time. I'm pretty sure that's it for this episode i hope you enjoyed it folks and hopefully i'll be talking to you in a week's time i'm pretty sure that's gonna happen until then and i guess well i don't

eat your vegetables trying to give me the screw but if we bury ourselves in the woods in the country We're no closer, we never have laundry We'll owe nothing to this world of thieves Live life like it was meant to be Ah, don't fret, honey, I've got a plan 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 own nothing to this world of thieves and live life like it was meant to be world of peace and live life like it was meant to be me 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. on our 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. Bye.