Profitable Farming and Designing for Farm Success by JEAN-MARTIN FORTIER

I'm here to present my farm and what we do this is going to be the last presentation I give for the next year and I've I've I've gave this presentation about 200 times around the world and so this is kind of a last event for me and I'd like to bring it to you guys at a next level and so I want to know before I start who knows about what I do and what we do on our farm here who really doesn't have a clue about what we do and haven't read my book at all or doesn't know any of that all right just one person okay so I'm gonna pass this along okay this is the book I wrote everything that I know about market gardening and about what we do on our farm is really well detailed here this is a blueprint of how to do things to start a successful small organic farm and I've heard a lot of people who have told me that they've took this book they follow the guidelines and they've made themselves successful after the first year of operation so this works I've seen you know I've done it myself I've seen in elsewhere and I think it has a lot of value if you're interested in starting your own farm so I'm gonna pass this along and so you guys cannot think you can you guys cannot say that you know you came here today and you didn't get any value because the values in the book I'm gonna tell the story a bit about my farm and probably will be finished in 40 minutes or half an hour even I want to open the stage to discussions questions some of the things that you guys are working on and that I can help with and are you guys okay with that because to be honest like entertainment for me as I'm I'm kind of oh I'd like to do something new now I'd like to engage so that's where I'm at so I hope you guys are cool with that and let's so let's start any any questions comments before we go at least one okay thank you all right so that's how many of you guys are growing vegetables for four market right now okay almost half how many are thinking about doing this perhaps in the future who in the room is definitely not going to become a market gardener but is interested in the whole topic okay so only three people okay so we're I'm talking for the right crowd this is great so the basis of pretty much my work and what I've been doing in the last four years is to tell people this pretty simple message that you could have a very successful small farm and you can make a good living farming on small acreage with low capital startups and low overheads and it's just about having a lean farm design and good management practice and those two combined make make it so that it's you know not only hard work will get you there you need to have these these things happen so this is the model that we've pretty much Deval evolved over the time this is how we started you know when I started farming I knew nothing about farming and I tell this story a lot we traveled we went to Mexico worked on fair trade coffee farms we were looking for an alternative lifestyle we were looking for ways to become part of the solution and do something that was hands-on we worked on Fairtrade coffee farms we were in earthships building houses in the desert and that was cool and then we wolf down a small organic farm and the farmer that we were working for was a very positive role model for us and since we knew nothing about farming and since I you know I haven't I wasn't raised on a farm I didn't know that farming was supposed to be drudgery I didn't know that farming was supposed to be you know you make you poor and I didn't know that farmers were not respected because the guy that I was working with he was the hero in that community he was the salad king in Santa Fe he was bringing the best salad mix and people would line up for miles to have his salad mix and I would do the cashbox and I would see that Rashard is you know kicking to 3,000 dollars of cash money each Saturday morning and I was like man that's a lot of cash and he would you know be outside and Abiquiu beautiful area beautiful landscape and then he would go off to Mexico and hang out in the winters and for me that was farming and I was like yeah this is cool and so that's why we got into farming and then we became farm manager on somebody else's farm we did that for a year and a half and we learned that we learned a lot made so many mistakes but we were you know we were paid we had a salary wage that was great and then we came back to Quebec and we started her own little Market Garden on rented land we had a fifth of an acre and we were farming with hand tools we had no tractor lived in a teepee for two years and we were just we were doing it and so we there's been a great you know evolution in our practice now I could say that we're you were pretty good growers but that's how we started not knowing a lot but just being excited about bringing our gardens our friend our freshly harvested vegetables to to market it was as simple as that and for anyone that is starting today it's as simple as that you grow stuff you bring it to market you get cash and hopefully you go to Mexico in the winter okay and and so I remember my wife both of us we've been doing this full-time since we started you know she would roll the seeds by hand and she was quite good at it so that was her job and you know now we have Cedars and we have all of these techniques and even technologies that help us but that's how we start it and I think that's why and how market gardening is so important to the local food movement because if we really want to be serious and you know I think this conference really frames it that way you know we're in it to replace what's happening out there to replace mass reduction I say with production by the mass to replace you know big AG with local act that is localized that is healthy for the soil and for the people who eat the food there needs to be a way for young people to enter agriculture and one of the big problem and you'll hear Joel Salatin talk about that a lot is that most of the veteran season growers they've been building their farms over 30 40 years so their farms have always grown they're bigger and bigger and bigger and then you have young people who are inexperienced and without cash who can't jump make that jump because these farms are too big and when you don't have all that experience it's really daunting to look at a farm that is organized set up and think that you can do this when you look at a market garden you're like wow this is hand tools this is a garden and I can learn how to do this and then I can bring my stuff to farmers market people can buy it just the same there doesn't need to be all these middleman I don't need I don't need to be part of me have a co-op of anything you can just do it directly and that that's how you'll learn the skills to become a good grower so I'm you know I'm I'm an advocate of farming small-scale and keeping it really small because I've seen from the get-go that that was one way to get young people young and not so young into farming and so that's how we got into it and that's a picture of when we started so that's young me and young my wife I might say my girlfriend or am a blonde which is how we call our sweethearts back home but just for you you know it's all for the record it's the same woman okay so because sometimes I go on and I ran you know I going on a rant and I talk about my girlfriend and my wife and my bone and people like this guy has a lot of he has a lot of traction going for him and so so we started like that and you can really see that this wasn't social media era you know the basket is empty these are all wilted rotten plants but you know we have a smile on our face because you know what we were living the dream we were doing it and we had no one to tell us that this was crazy or impossible or that it couldn't work we we had seen it we had seen the potential of farmers market that are really thriving we had seen you know a whole community of young farmers together working this out and we came back to Quebec really inspired really pumped and it was it was a good time I'm not telling you guys my whole story today because it's redundant and I've you know you can YouTube it you'll you'll find a million places where you can hear it because it's always the same story I had just one life yet but there was there was a couple of key things that happened to us that really kind of like when I look backward now I realize how this was very fundamental for how our farmed evolved and one of the first visit that we made that was very influential for us was to Cuba and I like to talk about that experiment because I think there's a lot of value in what went on for these and there was like a 15 year period in Cuba where the whole island was completely organic when the Soviet Union fell apart you know the Cubans didn't have access to fossil fuel anymore so all of the fertilizers herbicides pesticides these are all petroleum-based products they didn't have access to that and the old tractors were all falling apart and half pieces or fuel to put in the tractor so with vegetable production they came up with these Organo Pony coasts which were raised beds cement contoured of densely planted crops and what was great about that is that you would see acres and acres and acres and acres and acres and acres of these permanent vets in the city outside the city in the countryside it was the same set up and as a young person wanting to do this and you know not farming on large acreage I was looking at this and like wow this is interesting these guys have no tractor but they're farming ten acres of permanent bets and there was a lot of production and so that was for us something that was very influential as I look backward okay that I'm pretty sure now that in Cuba the organic Pony cows are still around you can google it there's probably a lot of international research that was done on these kind of systems and for me they're just another living proof that permanent beds which is really what I'm going to talk about a bit today and the core of what we do on our farm and this concept of bio intensive densely planted crops works because this experiment has been going on for a long time okay any question about the Cuban experiment yes why did they do raised beds well there's two reasons the first one is that and they it's cement contoured so they wanted to retain moisture okay because they're in a tropical climate and the cement was there because these guys had a lot of cement and they needed to put people to work and you know we think it's funny but if you look at social socialist government they often do stuff like that they just put people to work doing whatever so that was I was you know they could have done something they they probably didn't have to do it all with cement but why not we made another trip I know you have another question yep yeah I would use nothing at all you just raise your beds I'll show you how we do it yeah if there's yeah sorry about that if there is another material I would recommend instead of cement to do raised beds well I would recommend not using anything at all because there's a lot of energy and money spent in to making contours for your permanent beds and you actually don't need anything all right so that's that's that anybody do I have a friend here that has water by any chance that doesn't mind if we we made another trip another year and we went to France and so at that time in my life I wasn't really into drinking great wine but I was looking for again I was looking for how to do this and I had studied all these books coming out at California high-yield gardening John Jevon you guys have heard of John Jevon double digging the whole thing and these guys would always refer to the French intensive techniques so the model I was kind of like trying to mimic was traced back to France so I wanted to go there and see for myself what these guys were up to and so yeah we saw a lot of cool stuff but every time we would talk about biointensive which was how it would call this they would say by a wet it's like they had no clue about what we were talking about they would they would bring us to these big glass house operations we would see you know super intensive production but it just wasn't done on an acre 2 acre a direct sell mechanism that what we were looking for didn't really exist and until recently it didn't exist anymore in France so that whole tradition of having super small plots heavily cultivated and with direct sales outlets was absent for at least 20 years and now it's making a comeback ok so that was that was interesting for us one of the take home message we got from our trip to France was how to not overwork the soil very influential for us the French when you go to France they don't have the luxury of putting land and leaving it fallow they have limited amount of land and they need to cultivate most of it and pretty much it's under it's under production for the whole year and so they educated us about the tools to use and not to use and so the rotor tiller and I think I'll talk about this later on is is is a big no-no if you want to be building your soil over time and so they were talking about arrows and other kind of tool and we learned heaps about that from the French so these are that kind of do thin to two things that influence our model very much the scale of non tractors set up working on a permanent bed that we had seen in Cuba and different tools that could speed up how you go about doing that but without overworking the soil after two years on rented land thank you for the water we bought this rabbit house and that was our dream home we were at night you know we knew that aha we don't want thirty acres with a river stream and a mountain view we'd like this flat piece of land with a rabbit house on it that was our dream and we don't really it wasn't but that's all that we could afford and that we had been living in a teepee for two years so for us this was much better water wouldn't get in and I don't know if you guys understand how Quebec works or how would how it feels like today it's about probably minus nine at the farm so it's really cold and so this building was a big upgrade for us and it's been it's been quite an adventure to transform this into a homestead and a farm and a house but what was really the you know the impactful event here is that we bought about it was a ten acre lot it had a 7 acre woodlot and it had a three acre Prairie in the middle of which was this rabbit coop and that has been a reality ever since we've had a serious land constraint we had about two acres to manage and her goal when we started the farm our intention was really clear we wanted to build a house on that site we wanted to both of us wanted to work full-time as market gardeners doing this so we needed the farm to be able to support us financially to be able to do it and so pretty much that's been the you know what the parameters that are around us and the constraint that we had was serious land limitation and that I can tell you was the best thing ever that's the best constraint you can have land constraint because when you're doing 40 different crops for a market when you're growing 40 different crops for a market and there's a lot of things to manage now I could do a two days workshop with you guys about all of the management practices for all of our crops and it's just there's a lot of things happening there's a lot of moving parts and the smaller the farm is the better it is because you can get to manage it easier and simpler and so that land constraint learn to thought us a lot these are pictures of how we transformed the farm and now it's a pretty cool home and I always like to to show this picture because you know conventional agriculture is slowly dying because of these big farms they're hard to you know they're hard to replace there's no there's a serious lack of farmers out there but there's a lot of buildings that are that could be reclaimed recycled we purposed and so there's a lot of I think opportunities if you look at these buildings not from the dream of having the perfect farm but as you know this could do and then you know over time you can make this into something that's lovely and so from the get-go when we bought the farm the permanent bed was core to what we wanted to do and that explained one of the reason why we we didn't go with a tractor setup first of all we didn't have room you know tractors they take a lot of space when they turn at the end of the row we didn't have that those hedge ways couldn't be left with only grass we wanted to cultivate every square feet on the farm and since we were working on a permanent bed setup we were thinking you know tractors are really good if you're plowing if you're disking if you're healing if you're shaping soil but if you don't do that and you just have a permanent that setup and you cultivate the surface you don't actually need a big heavy earth-moving machine you only need to have surface cultivation done by different tools like a walk-behind tractor or even a hand a hand hoe so that's core of the core of our farm setup the permanent beds and I'm pretty sure now for you guys this is not new okay this is like yeah de ja vu but when I started I knew no one that was farming on a permanent bed set up and I couldn't just go visit a farm and say oh how are you guys doing this and so that was a novelty and that's really I think the way to go about farming especially if you're doing vegetables like no-till permanent beds it saves you a lot of pass with the tractors our beds are thirty inch our alleyways are 18 inch technical detail but you know because you're standardizing new things that these details will set the stage for all the Machine the equipment and the overall layout and working experience so our beds are 30 inch and and our pathways 18 and you can see on the picture why our beds are not 12-inch okay is that you know because I joke about this a lot but when you'll be hiring people for your farm then I don't think you want to discriminate them on the size of their butt so it's already pretty tight so twelve inch gives you room to maneuver gives you room to enter with a wheel barrel and the reason why all of our beds are 30 inches firstly because most of the tools that we use on the farm are standardized to 30-inch bed width or 15 to do the work in to pass okay so and then a question is always asked is why are these tools standardized to 30-inch well because of this guy Eliot Coleman everybody knows Eliot Coleman he wrote you know the new organic grower that was the first book I read about how to how to farm for vet you know how to grow vegetables I think until recently it was really by far the best book out there on the matter and I hang out a lot with Eliot and I can tell you this is this is a this is a great human being and so grateful that this guy has paved the way for us because he was researching all of these things 30-inch beds importing tools from Europe creating new ones with Johnny's selected seeds and you know I read his book probably 30 times when I started because I was trying to understand how to make this work and I didn't have any role models I didn't have any people who were actually doing it to kind of mimic except for his book and you know the newer grounding the new organic grower is a great book the only kind of problems I saw with it is that you can't really know how to do everything every step of the way which I think was kind of lacking and that was one motivation to write another book following in his footsteps to have something that is perhaps clearer more concise more practical about how to do things every step of the way is my book still going around all right because I promised the lady I would bring it back so I can't forget about that so we didn't buy a tractor but we bought a walk-behind tractor and so that's a picture of the first walk-behind tractor that we bought in 2003 my son was not even one year old or perhaps one I'm not sure I had never seen one before I had never driven one YouTube wasn't around and then this was the best leap of faith we've ever made this tool is tailor-made for what we wanted to achieve on the farm for working on permanent bed system for us it was also an economic reality at that time we didn't have a lot of cash and now that we know we don't have a lot more today but we know we're better off but when we started we knew we wanted to work with a Harrow and we knew we wanted to work with flail mower key component of our systems and looking for these tools on small compact tractors was about five five times more expensive so for us that made a lot of sense you know diego's has asked me to talk a little bit about design and I think design in the pattern of how we shaped the farm goes a long way you know telling the story about why our farm works and one of the key thing that we did with the permanent beds is that we've standardized the length of our bed and I was really lucky when I started to have friends like dan and Emily is Emily here still yeah from from till new sod farm and we were just talking me and Dan today we're the same age we started our farms together but these guys have a co-op and they're five and five kind of brainy dudes really geeky about how to how to start a farm and so we would get together and then we would talk about certain things about how to have good practices and we would share things that went wrong and things that went well and it's just seemed that we there was about four or five of us different farms farms together talking about these thing and our just our level of knowledge went high really fast and one of the key thing that we've learned for that time was to standardize the bed width and the length because then all of the material use on the farm the row covers you know the the nets sprinklers drip irritation they're all the same size so you need less of them and you're not rummaging around looking for the row cover of the right size because that's what we were doing before there's a lot of downtime to that so the bats standardized all of our beds are a hundred feet they could be thirty they could be forty they could be 50 but the key here is to standardize them to all the same size and then the the bed became a unit of measure on the farm I talked about that in the book a lot but it just breaks down to metric to not yields per acre but you know four wheel barrels per bed and so that helps a lot especially with crop planning I'm not talking about crop planting today but if you look at the market gardener there's a lot of charts you know giving you yields four hundred foot bed giving you the number of trays you need to start for each of these crops to the transplant you know 100 foot bed of beets is 11 trays we've made this mat once and that we've been using this information on and on over the years the other thing that was really key is really simple we had a design before we started the farm and that's the peas that a lot of people overlook they just go ahead they plow they work the land but they don't have a map they don't have like you know they don't have a design of how things are going to be set and I was reading a lot of permaculture book at that time especially the Bill Mollison Bibles and you would always see these overhead kind of pictures of farms and and and Bill Mollison will always really go a long way telling you you need to place things that are more frequently visited at the center of the design because down time is what you want to avoid and that's why you would have a design so we were sensitive to that and when we bought the farm one key feature was the fact that the warehouses where we wash the vegetables where we store them where the tool shed is is in the center of all of our garden and so wherever we are you know bringing stuff from the fields back we're closed and so we're not losing a lot of downtime just walking to the fields and you know it might sound like not something that is revolutionary for you guys I don't know but you know if if you if you map out how you work and you just draw lines of all the places you visit in a day there's any you can really see that you can lose a lot of time just walking and that's what you want to avoid and that's what you do at the design stage so to compost piles to make this easier water line that goes all around it we've separated all of the permanent beds into field blocks a lot easier to manage ten field blocks than a hundred and eighty beds and all the field logs are all the same size so that was that was the intent and at that point in time we also took on the crop rotation and crop rotation is a good thing to have in a system especially if you want to be cultivating the same land piece piece of land for a long time and so we were because we had been to France we had seen the importance of that and so we incorporated the crop rotation at the design stage of our farm and so you know there's there was there was a strategy we were looking for and I won't go in detail but we wanted to have heavy feeders followed by light feeders we wanted to have vegetables group by botanical families we wanted to put compost every other year always on the heavy feeders we had all of these parameters that we were working on you know wit on paper trying to find the proper sequence and in the end we needed to have ten field locks to make the sequence work and that's why there's ten field locks on our farm so now you know we've we've created this really sophisticated if I can say or complex crop rotation and boiled it down to something that is really simple to follow and so every year we know what's going here is going there and there and there and we just follow follow that guideline so we've put a fence around what we can do and what we can't we can't just plant everything anywhere we have a guideline and that ensures that we're going to be sustainable for the long run which is we have no choice because we can't just farm the neighbor's piece of land ok so I'm a strong advocate of crop rotation at the design stage and I always advise people if you're starting or if you're new in your second or third year crop planning is a great strategy to simply in your ignore this plant anything anywhere because there's a there's a pretty good chance that you'll just change your mind about thing and even if you spend two months designing this really complicated crop rotation if in two years you change where you plant things then it's just it comes to there's no point to that okay so you're you're you're not asking a question but what you're saying is that so we we made a design on rented land first year and then we figured out after the second or third year that the design was off and we had to change everything great learning experience for you that's why you start on rented land okay you make these mistakes now you understand your mistakes so you've learned from them next time when you buy your piece of land or when you go for something this long run you'll know what you're doing that's how you learn and that's why it is great strategy to start on rented land because you are going to make mistake even if you would copy and paste that there's a chance that wouldn't work perfectly you need to go through the motion of understanding why it's relevant to be close to the washing station you know when we started on the rented land the washing station was uphill of a big hill from the gardens and so we were pulling the carts and we needed not to have too much vegetables in the carts because otherwise we couldn't bring it up so we needed to do it twice it was ridiculous but we had we didn't know any better but now you do okay yeah and that's why you know people ask me you know I want to do this what's the what's how to start I always tell him okay you want to be a market gardener you want to be a market farmer work one full season on somebody else's farm okay you'll see how these people do it you'll see how they do certain things well perhaps you'll probably you'll see how they do certain things not so well but at least if you commit to one full season you'll know what it takes to do it you'll be on your knees a lot you'll be working outside you'll see if you have the right stuff and after one or two season you need to start your own because otherwise you're delaying all the mistakes that you have to make so you start first you do 30 CSA 50 CSA whatever you make all this mistakes and then you grow from that and then you learn and eventually you know you you'll understand how how and why this needs to be done in a way yep okay so how do ya how do you build in experimentation discovery curiosity that is a very tricky question that you're asking me here because I have kids I've made a lot of experiences of experiments on the farm that's how I came up with this model but I can't tell you to do that because you're losing a lot of time and money in your system because either that is my system that's it yeah yeah well you know I don't do experimenting with my kids because you know I I don't think they want to shovel 180 bed that way because they were like two years old but hmm we were having this discussion me and then is that when you're when you're working on a farm you know 50% of your time on the farm should be harvesting because that's how you cashflow the farm and so all of this time extra time that you spent spending doing research or trials or you're actually not very productive and so ideally you'd be limiting that and perhaps III when we're talking about experimenting for me that's different from trying it the way you think it should be done and then realizing that that's that's off or that's wrong that's different you know you think the beds should be shaped that way and then you realize there's a flash flood and then all your topsoil gets washed down and you're like oh I didn't know that well now you do and the next time around this the you know the orientation of your bed will be with the slope so you're not trying to capture water you're trying to channel it away from your growing area because if if you have a flash flood and you've you've spent four years building up your topsoil and it gets washed down the drain in the first event you just lost a lot of money and resource that way okay so these are the kind of things that you learn ideally you would learn them from somebody else that is the guinea pig for you and and that's why when you start and you're following guidelines like those of the market gardener they work and that's a good blueprint and then from then on you can involve and and you know to your own kind of like imagination and scheme alright so that's a picture of the design you saw you see that it's pretty much that was taken last year and it's the same design was it's been on the farm for more than ten years and it's been doing really well for us okay yes mm-hmm we grow yeah if we rotate the greenhouses we don't we graft our plants and we grow year after year the same things in the house so by grafting we take root stocks that are resistant to disease and that's how we avoid building up disease in the greenhouse okay moving greenhouses is a pain in the ass okay especially in a cold climate so and having a lot of them is a big expense so you need to figure out ways around that so grafting is one's one strategy any questions with the design of our farm alright so there's this there's a south-facing slope which is really good and then there's a ridge so there's a there's a first slope and then there's other slopes and again the field locks the orientation is done so that the water gets channeled away and that's pretty much it so that was and then we needed to fit everything because they're all 104 bed everywhere yes yeah we have you know 12 fruit trees and it's just like how can I say this when you're young and starting into farming you're thinking I want to have a food forest and I want to have an orchard so you plant small trees but catering to 15 apple trees is kind of the same thing as 60 because you need to manage them you need to look for disease and pests like in where we live we have a lot of problems with apple trees so you know after 10 years we still don't have a lot of apples and we're certainly not making money with that so for me that was just like the kind of hobby part of my farm same thing we had two goats and chickens and from the get-go perhaps because of the land constraint but also because I'm pretty much framed that way I I didn't want to have animals and I didn't want to have a food for us and I didn't want to have all of that because I knew that it would take a lot of time to do all of that and to maintain it and manage it and I wanted to be growing vegetables and I thought because I've seen a lot of people doing do it all and then they're not good at any of it and so we wanted to become good growers and get efficient and prolific at it and that's what we did and I'm super happy to trade vegetables for apples at the farmers market this is way more intelligent for me because I'm good at vegetables and my neighbor he's really good at apples at farmers market so really moved away from this whole concept of self-sufficiency for us self-sufficiency is I have a lot of friends that are growing stuff so I can trade with them trade for me trade for cheese trade for you know wine well we don't anymore because Mead is you know the wine is not so great where we live but anyway so that that is for me very empowering to go to farmers market and have all these friends that are growers and then we just share and trade what we do so I think that's that there's a lot of power to that yeah question back yeah we're using compost a lot of it 40 tons per acre okay well all by wheelbarrows okay and every year there's an intern comes to my farm and says why don't we get a manure spreader I'm like yeah I've never thought about that thank you and so a manure spreader man it just takes you'd need to turn all the way up to here so you'd have all this dead space to put compost faster and you would need to get one load tractor with a loader and another one you'll probably pay a couple of thousand dollars for each I bet you my shirt that when it's time to do it one of them's going to break down and then you lose spending your whole day either fixing it or looking for parts and then I tell my intern while you could be doing this faster and not be thinking about a manure spreader well we've centered the piles so there's one here and then the word there's one here okay the compost is delivered by a dump truck we pay two thousand dollars for a load and that solves the compost issue really fast we get the highest quality compost out there certified organic comes with seaweeds in it so and it comes with an NDK so we can we can calculate how much to put in compared to how much our soil has in it and it simplifies that whole operation I'm not going to justify getting a tractor with a loader to make my compost where I can just buy it and it's much simpler okay yes well the whole story of our farm is that yeah the question is have we dealt with mushroom compost and other other kind of compost well on our permanent beds and I don't I'm not going to show you this today but we the soil organic matter went from 2% when we bought the farm to 12% okay so there's a big increase in organic matter first of all because we've been adding a lot of compost which which was a peat moss based compost and because we're not turning the soil upside down okay but now because our soils are so filled with organic matter we've were using warm casting and I could all could I could do mushroom compost but we don't have access to it so well so we've moved away from just adding a lot of compost to putting worm casting which is not high in organic matter content but it's really potent and fertile and it adds a lot of microbial life to the soil yeah not on not on that project yeah if I'm using compost tea not now perhaps in the future that's something that I want to investigate and it'd be great to have geeky friends to teach me how to do this and actually I do have these geeky friends and so they'll teach me yeah no well that's no though okay so the question is is that $2,000 for vermicompost the vermicompost comes in totes and so we buy for $2,000 we get five totes and that's that's enough because it's like 10 times more potent so you need to put less of it okay so how much warm compost I'm using I'm using three buckets 400 foot bed okay and you should take that with a grain of salt because I can't come here and tell you that that's the right amount because you know it depends on your compost depends on your soil depends on the crop but as a general rule of thumb that's what we use okay yes yeah so the question is were the initial beds double dig or how do we go about it and so there weren't double dig a double dug and we had a shovel I had a shovel and I just shoveled one scoop to the left when scoop to the right and did that for two weeks and because you know the whole field was plowed and and chiseled and and and leveled and it was all good and then I just break I just shoveled my way making these beds did that for two weeks but I was quite younger and very passionate about this and I knew that I would do it only once so that was okay now I could show you pictures of how we raise our beds now we have a Bertha plow it's a rotary plow connected to the BCS and it takes the dirt from the aisle and shoots it onto the bed so it goes a lot faster if I go ahead I'll show you guys all right so these are the numbers that we do on our farm okay after ten years of doing this we got to these numbers and so if you're familiar with with you know crunching numbers with regards to farms this is pretty interesting so we have a a cur and a half of permanent raised beds our CSA is a hundred and forty member and we do two farmers market we have a short season in Quebec so we we have you know pretty much around 20 weeks where we sell to customers and the sales on the farm last year were 150,000 plus okay so that's all of the vegetable produced on site that's not the potatoes and the squash that we buy and the melons that we buy from our neighbors the labor it's for the longest time it was me and my wife full-time Madeline and two employees that are there for the full season from March to December and we also have interns on the farm okay we have about three interns for four months in the season but I don't count them as labor okay I don't need to justify any I just don't count them as labor yeah oh these are Canadian dollars you can compare though because the prices are somewhat similar depending on how where you are in in in the u.s. sometimes I go to places I need to tell you I see the I go to farmers market and I look at the sell selling prices for stuff and like if I would move I'd be rich okay but then when I would want to buy land it would work land is cheap in Quebec but people have lesser income so there's this balance point okay so we're in production for March December we have no tractor and we lose not a lot of fossil fuel and I don't really never talk about that because I've never really done the metric to compare this production system with another farm that really has a you know a lot of expense fuel expense but you know we're doing six thousand dollars of of diesel per year and we're heating our greenhouse and so it's not a lot so that meant that 260 dollars is the gas I put in the BCS to do all the field work on the farm it's really not a lot and so we're kind of showcasing that you can have a small personal and you can feed 250 families you can have four people working on it and you're not using a lot of fossil fuel and all of this makes sense because of the last number which is a forty five percent profit margin more or less which we've been achieving for the longest time on the farm okay so all of this is interesting but the last number the 45 is really what's interesting and that's possible because we've kept labor to herself mainly and because our overheads are really low okay yeah yeah that's our salary that at the end of the year once we've paid for the mortgage once we've paid for the loans once we've paid the employees almost half of it comes back to my wife and I as our salary so you know if you compare that salary to you know a lawyer or a banker we're certainly not winning the race but we have a great lifestyle and we've been able to raise our kids built our house live you know own homestead while doing this so I think it shows that you can make a good living at this okay so you're asking the question is this paying for the mortgage and your living expenses so if I was in Quebec I couldn't say yes to that but now here I think I'm okay yes most of our expenses are life expenses you know some of the food that we buy bulk for the crew you know the gas that we put when we go to the cinema or whatever gets into that in our expenses so and we have half of our revenues is cash which I shouldn't talk about also yes yeah that's for delivery and it runs on straight vegetable oil so if it didn't that that would be higher we go to Montreal twice a week so it's 60 miles away from the farm yeah the VCS and how he barely even uses that anymore what would you say to a reduction in percentage of using pcs for cultivation as its transitioned from additional to where you're at now that you know if you were going to come in and have somebody use a big boy tractor to come and take care of a lot of base stuff yeah all right would you have waited if you had that off all right so I if I'm understanding your question your question is if I would do a Farms set up a new farm set up would I use a tractor to set it up or if you were using your PCs originally in the first initial years yeah all right so just to clarify we use our walk-behind tractor only to cultivate the surface of our permanent beds that's it we don't plow with it we don't make new beds all the time that's pretty much it so we don't use it a lot but when you're growing salad greens you want to have firmed level seed beds because then your Cedars will work better and then your harvesters will work and so it's kind of looped in the system okay okay so the these numbers hope there's another question yeah if I think the cost of a BCS is worth it absolutely and it was funny talking with my buddy Dan here is like well if it breaks worst case you buy another one it's a couple of grands if you if you have a 60 horsepower tractor that's another deal there's a big expense and if you compare it five you know money for money and you're setting up your rig for tractors and you'll you buy a tractor that's $5,000 it's gonna be a tractor that is kind of like no but for a brand-new BCS it's gonna last you 20 years like I've had mine since 2004 and they're still they're still going 853 for the lot which model the model is 853 because it for BCS it has the longest handlebars and so some of the implements in the back that you know you want to have clearance for your for your feet okay so if you visit the market gardener comm you'll see all the tools that we use what's their commercial name and where we get them from okay yeah that's a great question I is there a size of plot where the BCS becomes not efficient anymore and you would need to have another kind of attractor or whatever Oh down oh you're thinking down I'm thinking up yeah yeah let's talk about both scaling down yeah I think if you're doing you know a hundred CSA member you don't even you don't need a BCS for sure and you could you could use a wheel hoe you could use a tiller you could use you could put a lot of compost and just go no-till so you you have what's grown on your bed and you just put a thick layer of compost and you bright plant back into it or you can get a small rotor tiller but I'll explain to you why you perhaps want to move away from a rotor tiller we had a woman that worked two years on our farm harvesting with us she started her own little market garden she cultivates a fifth of an acre she has a hundred members CSA more or less she makes 40,000 net a year and she she knows she grosses 40,000 she Nets about twenty-five that's pretty sweet working with hand tools she has a lot of interns that she counts as labor but so you know you can scale that model down you can scale it up how far can you scale it up I don't really know but I'll show you pictures of what I'm doing now and you know it's we've took that model and we brought it to ten acre to see if that could work and so I'll show you pictures of that later on so in our design though one of the key features was again the fact that we didn't have a tractor five minutes left wow that went fast what's after this okay well would you guys you guys want to stay a bit longer cuz I just talk too much yeah where you can keep you filming whatever whatever you want okay so the tractor in the setup on most farms when I started that's how everything was organized because the cultivating tool and so you would have somebody that was growing potatoes my neighbor was growing potatoes and all he so he had the gear to cultivate potatoes and then all of the other vegetables were organized the same way so the spacings were determined by the weeding implement and since we didn't have that tractor we went for we want us make it as dense and intensive as possible and took us a few years to figure out the good spacings you know on 30-inch is it four rows at six inch or three rows at eight so we experiment with that basically what we wanted to achieve is to have the Leafs of the crop touch one another at 3/4 of their growth to form a canopy which is really cool and when we're talking about permaculture and having you know multi functions is like you're growing a crop that becomes a cover crop and to shade out the weed really helps with your production but also to have not exposed soil is really beneficial for the moisture and for the microorganisms that are living in the soil ok so that's really interesting you want to get that canopy you get more yield but all of this only works if you have really good soil structure ok so your roots they need to be able to shoot down and if they hit layers of heart pans or just layers that are harder they'll go sideways and then they'll compete for nutrients and for water and then you won't get good quality crops and so this needs to be understood soil structure is the foundation for this to work and a permanent that setup is you know you just eliminate much of the compaction from the get-go so all the tools that we use on our farm they're all thought with that in mind okay and the root so you guys can dig up you can see if your roots are shooting down or not they'll tell you that it'll tell you this story yes Chris so how's the disease pressure because of the density so that's that's a great question and we've had almost none of the major disease over the years we've had a few outbreaks of mildew over all these years and so then the question is is you know is it because we have where this is a miracle farm or so I don't know but I have an opinion about it but it's it's not scientifically proven I think that because we have a good rotation that because our soil is covered most of the time and because we don't turn it over the soil is really alive really filled with organic matter and microbial life and it's just it's occupied but who knows okay yep yeah okay so do I use any insect habitats pollinator habitats to mitigate some of my pest problems we when we started the farm we had that in mind a little bit but not too much and we wanted to maximize the growing space I had the chance to do another farm design last year on a bigger project and 20% of the growing area was dedicated to habitats to try and see and I'll show you picture of that if this could work but it's a long shot because you don't know you kind of need to do it to see if it's going to work yep experimented with the perennial edges along your market garden beds yeah perennial edges along the bed we have we've used shrubs as wind breaks and fence but that's it okay again we perhaps are in a different climate for us you know water retention is not an issue we have excess water we want to evacuate it and then we use a pump and we put it back with wit sprinklers okay so these are pictures of the farm there's a DVD coming out and that the farm and it's coming out in May people will get to see what the farm looks like because they've read the book or they're interested in me talking about this but actually when you come and see the farm you understand that you know this is a lot of production on such a small amount piece of land and so the proof is really in the pudding I think yep if there's an opportunity for people to crowdfund the DVD project yes because we're going to translate it into more language and the graphics there's a graphic designer that is hired he's gonna go all out to make it as really as clear as possible the market gardener calm okay you'll you'll have a link for the film and I my bet is that it's going to be a really great educational DVD because the guy that did it was so serious he was there every day filming the farm and the crew and it's just he captured what we were doing and yep the deadline for the crowdfunding campaign is 15 days and then I think you get a deal when you pre-purchase the thing through the crowdfunding campaign so you guys should check it out okay yep how often are we using mulch paper mulch plastic mulch it's a big question we use it for crops that are a hundred days or more mostly the nightshades you know now we have a new plastic mulch layer it's a hand pulled plastic mulch layer I don't have the picture with me if you visit the website you'll see it that's gonna save us a lot of time okay so again pictures of what we do and you know at first when I was talking about that a lot of people were naysayers about why this shouldn't work densities are too close you'll get disease this is not how we should be done you read the seed package and perhaps my friend Dan could explain to me why this is but the seed package if you read the spacings they're always super wide apart never understood why can I put you on the spot with that so we've never followed the spacing on seed package because we're trying to do this intensively and this has been working and it's been working really well okay I'm not saying it's perfect I'm not saying that there you know there's no problems ever but you know this has been done for a long time on our farm and it works close spacing is you get a canopy you get yields Curtis does the same thing and there's people before Curtis that was doing that too and that's a picture that Elliot shared with me when I was researching about that and he said you know JM when I was 30 I went to France and I visited a two acre farm all intensive it was like back-to-back filled with vegetables and this was the most beautiful productive farm I had seen and that's what i mimicked coming back and did all you know all of my work from so these kind of models are not new and when you research market gardening books that were written before the 40s this is a typical productive setup it kind of all changed when the tractors came into play okay and so I'm not saying that you know the tractor is the problem but I'm if you're scaling out to accommodate the tractor you're moving away then you're less productive in a way and I think this this picture here that we did I see the picture yeah this picture tells the story if I'm doing this five rows of carrots on thirty inch compared to five rows of carrots on five or six feet whatever though this is pretty typical row cultivation and I'm covering everything with a row cover well I'm using one fifth of the material to do the exact same thing it's costing me one fifth of the price and I'm doing this five times faster okay so this kind of efficiency is done when I'm watering my crops when I'm scouting for disease when I'm harvesting everything is closer just there's everything that's us arm reach and so that was but when I started my only explanation of why what we were doing on our farm was providing what I saw as better results as most of other farmers that was visiting that we're doing 100 CSA on five acres burned out looking for the crop among the weeds and just kind of tired at the end of the year and said that I was in the case for us then we were kind of trying to compare it and that's that was my only explanation the design of the farm makes you more efficient okay and so that's that's what I believe these are the charts these are the tools that we use and when our overheads have been kept low so again most of this information is in the book the tools that we use simple stuff but they're efficient they're sophisticated even if they're hand tools and you know cultivating I could go on a rant about how everybody is focusing on weed control I go to trade shows a lot and people line up to look at the new technologies you know you you're looking at torsion weeders flex tine weeder x' robot cultivators and then people get pumped and jutting they're they're like yeah we need that and I'm like man how about preventing weeds on your farm how about now putting manure that is filled with weed seeds how about not putting straw how about putting you know using transplants to get a head of weeds how stale seed beds how about using intensive spacings to shade out the weeds all of these strategies are are often overlooked and I think you know we cultivate when it's really clean using hand hose we never let weeds go to seed and just these two principles they've helped us keep the farm pretty clean yeah it's you systemize it okay so you know when you're planting and then you always prepare your seed beds two weeks prior and you water the seed beds you'll germinate the weeds and then you use a flame leader you destroy them and then you plant into that well you can use a cultivator to cultivate and destroy them or a rake or a wheel hoe but if you don't systemize it then you're always kind of reacting to what's happening so you need to have the crop planning strategy that tells you what you're going to grow when and then you put in your calendar that before each of the crops you're gonna grow you prepare your beds that's like pretty basic but a lot of farmers don't do it okay yeah how many hours do we put in into the farm so whoo that's a big question we work in 8 to 5 we've been doing it for the last six seven years and I was telling you guys about constraint the land constraint was a big blessing because it forced us to look at how to grow the farm from the inside learn all these techniques that I've shared in the book but one of the biggest thing that we've did once was to put a time cap on our working hours and because we have kids you know we were bringing them to daycare in the morning working all day and then bringing the kids back and then having no time for them because we're still busy and it just kind of sucked and so we said we're working 8:00 to 5:00 and when we did that just like by magic we became more we got more done in less time and the reason is it forced us to prioritize things better it forced us to optimize certain things that we were not really good at it just kind of like created this this incentive for us to you know get moving and that's something that I would recommend things up there's a lot of extra work but once your green houses are built and your washing station is done and your toolshed is there and you have the good tools yeah put a cap limit to your time spent on the farm because it's an endless endeavor you can work forever on the farm and what's the outcome of that the outcome of that is that if you have a family well they'll you'll neglect them probably and that's that's kind of a sad you see a lot of these farmers that have kids that grow up on the farm and they they don't want to hear anything about farming they're like yeah farming sucks okay my parents got burnt farm working like crazy all the time so I'm not saying that you know hard work isn't something you don't want but you know you want to be efficient with your time on the farm time is what you don't have okay [Music] they reach double reach yeah makes a lot of sense okay plant you know planning your bed size - your arms reach because otherwise you're hyper extending your back when you're picking greens and harvesting is half of the work on the farm you if you do this for forty years like that then perhaps you know you'll end up being crippled okay yeah there's a problem more time and just beds that are how will you reach the middle of the bed you'll have to trample in them it's a long way dude there's a lot of time you want to be able to access the middle of the bed you know for me 30 inch you saw the picture 30 inch arms reach is in the middle of 30 inch okay so but you can do it like I'm not here to tell you not to do that for I don't want to be responsible anyway but these are the things we need to think about do you have all your tools for 15-inch 50 inch and have you gone to the motion of harvesting all the crops on that dead size and how comfortable is that because that's a choice you make when you standardize your bed on a permanent bed setup and you'll be stuck with that choice and you can say oh I'll change my line in ten years but then if you made all your beds and you've worked the biology and then you change your mind well you're kind of losing out a little bit yep so I'm really interested in your greenhouse Tomatoes I got a question about the new stocks is there a big difference between some of these more advanced hybrids that are being developed the comparison liver stocks and then also in your greenhouse what percentage of them are you taking up when tomatoes okay so the question is hybrid Tomatoes root stocks and yeah we use all these fairly it's you know hybridize tomato because we're I could show you pictures this is high yielding tomato production is there a big difference between the hybrids and a rooftop or use the hybrid all group stock yep we use both okay some of the tools that we use the broadfork you guys know about that tool but you know there's a reason why we use the broad fork because it allows us to work the soil and that making sure the roots will shoot down without overhauling you know all of the the soil structure okay and that's why we don't use a rotor tiller because when you rotor till you take Sol it has good aggregates and you pulverize it into finer particles and so you're destroying every time you rotor tail you're destroying your soil structure there's no way around that okay and so if you do that then you can't rely on earthworms do the job for you I quickly showed pictures of tarps that's how we prepare soil now we tarp them we tarp our soils and then we'll remove the tarps boom the beds are ready to be planted okay and then we use a Harrow that has tine on the vertical level shank and then we cultivate only the top inch without inverting the layers is just mixing the soil in gently and so this is the setup that we figured how to do this so I'm not talking about no-till this is a minimal tillage practice Simpson but it works okay and pretty much everything that we've come up with on the farm works and it's simple and that's a picture of my neighbor and he thinks were crazy but man I think he's crazy because this guy is always on his tractor now these are these he's growing you know soy and and and and corn it's a different kind of farming style but whatever it's just like like can we think about how to do this differently okay because this is this is not great for the environment this is not great for the soil it's not great for the farmer this guy works a lot and we probably make more money than he does so when we got we when we bought the farm and we were telling people we're farming you know a two acre plot these guys were like this is ridiculous but when I look at what he's doing I'm like this is ridiculous so anyway we should get together more but so anyway this is a picture of what I'm working on now I think we have a few more time I'll show you quickly what it is I was I was asked by this very wealthy businessperson if I be willing to commit the next few years of my time to develop a farm that would kind of take some of the strategies that we've come up with and try trying to scale it up to see if that would work and beef we could train more people to do this and so I I was pretty to make a long story short I would as I was excited about that and I said yes I committed to that project and we spent the whole winter designing the farm on paper and the whole summer building it so that's what it looks like that's half of it so there's a 26 filled box they're all 40 by a hundred and between each of these feel blocks there's flowering hedgerows okay and yesterday we showed a presentation about how they that came to be and basically I've hired a crew of permaculture designers to come in and look at all the insect problems that we've had and look at which kind of insects could be beneficial or or Birds and look at habitats that would Harbor these insects and so we've built gills of these plants and then we've put them in each between each of the field beds because that also creates wind breaks and Sun traps to create micro climates for for our crops so that's kind of the big design and you know one of the key feature here is that I've replaced the shovel with a excavator which I kind of like now I'm kind of thinking we should all have an excavator so a kind of moving away from my message of using hand tools and but you know that I got a lot done and again we're making these bed once and then we won't have to to do them anymore so because because there was a lot of beds to be made yeah it's just it's it's a lot of it's a lot of yeah you could so so if you know if we're in no hurry we could spend two months making these beds but then with the back with the excavator it took about a week okay used a lot of RAM eel wood chip to build the soil instead of relying only on compost we're using ramuel wool chip and we're putting it in the aisles of our bed we're going to leave it there for a year and then we'll when we'll use our you know when we'll use our BCS to remake the beds using our Bertha plow we'll be adding that carbon back into the soil so that's something that we've been doing you see how it is here making these beds and also putting some compost so really spent the whole summer does you know implementing that preparing soil getting the washing station up and running the greenhouse the toolshed and there's a lot of work and now Monday morning 8 o'clock we are turning the key to on just like cranking thing and get getting it done with production I like to come back here in the next perhaps in a few years to tell you how we designed the washing station in the nursery so it's one building and the north wall of the greenhouse which is the is the wall where you lose a lot of your heat is the washing station which is what you want because it's a north-facing building so it doesn't have a lot of light coming in so it stays cool there's a lot of cool things that are happening in these two buildings and hopefully someday I'll come back and tell you that okay yep yeah that's a that's that's the last light that's a picture of the garden as a drone so you can take a different scope different scale and it's kind of a big experiment to be honest we're trialing and not stuff and if this works however and we end up producing a hundred K per acre on five or ten acres I think that's going to be that's going to be quite interesting because then we're kind of redefining how farming could be done and so I'm interested in that outcome so yeah yeah the owner called it Lapham the cat Rhetta which is impossible to say in English so I filmed a cat with Tom you

Channel: Diego Footer

Views: 519,489

Rating: 4.8930993 out of 5

Keywords: permaculture, homesteading, farming, organic farming, market gardening, grassfed, grassfed life, vegetable farming, gardening, Jean Martin Fortier, Curtis Stone, JM Fortier, Eliot Coleman

Id: 92GDHGPSmeI

Length: 79min 32sec (4772 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 05 2019