I have been taking a business development class alongside fellow farmers that has been put on by the Wolfville Farmers' Market with funding from Workplace Education. In this class we have been learning a wide selection of things all to help us fine tune different aspects of our business. The final goal is to have an in depth business plan that we can use to obtain funding through the "Small Farm Acceleration" program as well as apply for any business loans we may need. 

Recently in class I had said that "I plant about 50% more seed than I need for my CSA". Some people were surprised and some people were unsure. I then explained that because we don't spray or have a lot of row cover, irrigation, etc. that we can't take that risk because CSA members expect a crop (rightly so!). I also went on to say that our crop failure isn't 50% but some crops we harder than others. The conversation kind of ended there and I was left thinking about this more deeply. Was this the right thing to be doing? Am I just a crappy farmer? The list went on! So I decided I needed to go back and find out why I am doing this.

I started to realize it's about building something of value. I have all the time in the world to get my 50% extra that I seed for our CSA to a lower number and indeed I am working on that. What I can't do is focus on the numbers because quality should come first! Numbers can be worked on slowly as I learn ways to improve our farm. I think as small farms we often find ourselves in a panic but what Adam always reminds me of is "life is about the journey not the destination." 

We are partners, Adam Webster & Courtney Madore and we farm 4 glorious acres on a +100 acre family farm in Port Williams, Nova Scotia. Our farming practices are stubbornly focused on the health of our land and all the livings things that are a part of it. We feel that crop loss due to insects/diseases is a very small price to pay for the overall health of the planet and since we are a diverse, small scale farm, we can make this choice. We are extremely passionate about rare & heirloom varieties that offer rich colours and lots of flavor. We are always interested in the history of these vegetables because this is what brings them to life for us. They have a story to tell and we're going to share it.  We share our harvest through a weekly CSA share that runs from July 10- November 20, through the Wolfville Farmers' Market every Saturday from May to December, and WFM2go online ordering every Wednesday through May to December. 

We really focus on vegetable varieties that offer rich flavors and vibrant colours. Vegetables that you can't just find anywhere but are common enough that people can easily use them. We want people to re-discover the carrot or zucchini by tasting the variation of flavors and colours they have to offer.  We feel this is what will cultivate your connection with food. The bravely coloured tomatoes will translate into a courageous cook in the kitchen. Your curious children will gather around the supper table and together you will all have a feast! On this food journey we will share our inspired knowledge of food and farming so you are never alone as your learn new things. 

You come to our table when you are looking for something new to try. We enthusiastically guide you through what we have to offer and the best way to prepare it. We try and help you think of vegetables is a new way that isn't scary but fun! We offer honest conversations. We want you to fall in love with heirloom vegetables. 

Wfm2Go is our newest addition, started in July 2017 by the Wolfville Farmers' Market. Essentially it is an online version of the market where you order by every Monday @ 7pm and receive your freshly picked/made local good at hub closest to you every Wednesday. This is very much a collective venture made by many small businesses here in the valley. We grow and we learn together. Our farm offers many of the same heirlooms that we do at market and try to expand our offerings on WFM2go every year. Our aim - more variety! 

The main change is teaming up with WFM2go (Wolfville Farmers' Market Online Ordering Service). This service really focuses on the distribution side of things (something very much needed in Nova Scotia) but with a local point of view. As a small-farm business we would never feel confident in teaming up with a larger distributor because there is so much nuance even in delivering. You need people who know your product, your business, your values and the people at the hubs, because without that a lot of things can go wrong! Over the years we have built a very strong relationship with staff and vendors at the Wolfville Farmers' Market and share a lot of the same values and visions for the future.  So for us, it seemed like a no-brainer to team up with WFM2go and have them help us get our CSA shares to the city each week!

So how does this help us? This frees up nearly an entire day that can now be dedicated to farming which is the backbone of our business. Last season there were many unexpected curveballs that mother nature threw our way and it added on lots of extra work to an already very full schedule. For instance when we got our early frost we had to spend extra time covering what we could, seeding extra transplants to replace what we lost and re-planting out those transplants. The reality of farming is that you'll never have enough time to get everything done but you can always get more done each year if you plan it a little better, so that's what we're doing. 

There are also many added benefits to our CSA members, the main one being that they can now add-on many more local products and with much more ease.  Some of these local products include free-range eggs, milk, free-range meats, ferments, grains, breads, tonics, teas, etc. Before we use to handle collecting these orders and payments ourselves, which was a whole other job we simply don't have time for, but we knew this was of great value to our customers so we are glad we were able to come up with a better solution!

​I've had alot of thoughts rolling around in my head this growing season and it really reached a pinnacle when we learned we were going to have an early fall frost this year. This is not just an isolated setback that we've faced this year - we had a cold spring, a frost in June, blazing heat throughout the summer, lack of rain, and now this early fall frost. This is very unusual weather to have all clustered together - in our previous years of farming we've come to understand that even though we might have a bad spring we can usually make it up in the summer and fall, etc. This is the only year that we've farmed in that has been like this. As farmers, we have to be very aware of the weather, from which day to plant seeds (the day before a rain) to which day to transplant (an overcast drizzly day) or which day to weed (hot and dry are best because it kills the weeds). If you were to weed on a day that was rainy, for example, most of the weeds thrown to the side will reroot and start arching back up towards the sky, and the energy spent would have been for nothing. 

Frosts are a huge thing for vegetable growers to be aware of, because it can mean losing your entire crop depending on the vegetable. Certain vegetables like kale and carrots don't get too bothered by it because they evolved in a northern climate, but others like tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini and basil have little resistance to it so usually are lost. The problem with unexpectedly late spring and early fall frosts is that it cuts into the time that you can have those veggies available, and it might not let you grow them at all. Every variety of vegetable has a "days to maturity" count which means (in ideal conditions) thats how many days from the seed germinating to when you can harvest it. This year we had a frost on June 3rd and on Sept 24th, that means we had 113 continuous frost free days (I know some other NS farms had an even shorter window). Compared to other years we've farmed, the last spring frost would usually be late April and the first killing frost in fall woundn't be untill well into October. This means we lost atleast a month and a half of growing time, and for some vegetables  that have 90-100 days to maturity (or more), this doesn't give you alot of wiggle room. And remember that count is for ideal growing conditions, if it's too cold, too wet, too dry etc it can slow things down considerably, these plants are very tough but even they have their limits.

Every year of vegetable farming is a gamble since there is always the unknown element of what type of weather we will get, and this year has been especially volatile. We've learned some surprising things about different vegetables this year that we might not have learned otherwise - for example, our potato crop got a frost when it had around 8 inches of above ground growth, we thought for sure this was the end of them, but we noticed in about a week that new shoots were growing right at the soil level and before long they were back to their former glory. We actually got a pretty normal crop of potatoes this year despite that frost, and that blows my mind, we think that the frost might have killed off alot of the potato beetles (the main pest of potatoes) so that could have aided our harvest. Nature gives and she takes away, it's quite an amazing thing! Speaking of pests, we also had less squash bugs this year, and something seemed to be killing them (maybe a new insect predator moved in because of the heat? who knows). We've learned in previous years that starting tomato transplants in a cool greenhouse gives them a little more cold-hardiness, and that planting crops closer together reduces the bad effects of lack of rain. There is always more to learn with farming, and even though it can be incredibly nerve-wracking crossing your fingers and waiting for a decent rain, we find it endlessly interesting.

Another thing I'd like to mention is that it's difficult to make money as a farmer even in good growing years. One thing I've realized this year is that one of the main rewards to a successful year is the fact that you're able to continue doing it the next year. This is very different from alot of other jobs out there (even though every job has some element of unpredictability) - just think about some of the apple, grape and strawberry growers this year who lost all or most of their crop due to the June 3rd frost, there's not really any other businesses that can lose their entire profits for the year based on one poorly-placed cold night. There are alot of small -scale vegetable farmers that are calling it quits this year because the volatile weather has been "the last straw that broke the camels back". We feel their pain to stop doing what they love because they can't deal with this one added variable to an already perilous line of work, and I'd be lying if I said the thought hadn't crossed our minds this year as well. We are an extremely small-scale operation compared to larger farms, we have one greenhouse, very limited irrigation, we don't use row-cover, black plastic or any form of pesticides. We have just two workers (us) for the majority of the time. We also make great sacrifices for this business, we had lived in small camper for several years, we invest most of the money we make back into the farm, we work 6 days a week from May to October, and we find other jobs in the winter to support our farming "habit", while also planning for the upcoming year (which actually is happening year-round).  I'm not saying this to complain, it's our own choice to do this and our reward is to make enough money to continue doing it, because we love it! Working outside, connecting with nature and keeping it healthy,seeing plants grow and produce healthy food, and being able to share this food with others as well as eat it ourselves is a huge passion for us. As well, with the future becoming more and more unpredictable in the way of climate change (or climate chaos), political chaos, and multitudes of other things, we find small-scale vegetable growing to be a sustainable and independant way of living in many, many ways, even if it's tricky in the financial sense. We wouldn't be able to continue doing this if we hadn't made so many sacrifices and if we hadn't had so much help from so many people along the way - the first would obviously be my (Adam's) parents Don and Deenie who have helped us beyond imagination, by letting us use the land and tools on their property and just constantly being supportive, and even before them my grandparents who moved onto the farm in the 50s - and after my grandfather passed away my grandmother Myrna and her 5 children all worked together to keep the farm going. The land wouldn't be what it is today without Myrna, you can tell from her photo albums that she loved every piece of that land and probably watched individual trees grow over time as you would a friend. More recently, we've been helped by a friend who is letting us rent her place for a very generous price, with other farmer friends who are aways offering advice and support, incredible farmers markets where we've made so many friends and connections and learned what community really means, as well as our CSA members and farmers market go-ers who actually buy the vegetables that we sell, we certainly wouldn't be still doing this if it wasn't for all of you! Not only just the monetary income but the spiritual fulfillment of connecting over naturally grown food and knowing it is something that other people care about - not just us!

Well, I hope if you got through this long-winded blog post it helped you understand a bit more what it's like to be a small-scale farmer - I sometimes feel that because farming has been around for such a long time there are some subconscious myths that can be in many peoples minds without them realizing it. For example that farmers charge too much for their produce or that we spend all day peacefully meandering through our fields. While it is true that there are many genuinely peaceful moments watching the sun rise through the mist or hearing the birds singing in the trees, there is also the very real underlying tension of "is anyone going to buy this kind of radish?", "is the frost going to kill off that planting of beans before we get anything to harvest?", "are we going to get any rain so we can do the next succession planting of carrots+beets?", "are we putting enough in the CSA bags so people feel they get what they paid for?". As for over-charging for produce, it is a very sad fact that farms definetely under-charge for their produce, for example - something as small as green onions can take 70 days from germination to harvest, and that is with perfect watering and compost. Tie in that with Nova Scotia's already short growing season, and now climate change, there is alot of energy that goes into producing every leaf of lettuce or basil or arugula. This is not to say anyone should feel guilty, farmers want food to be affordable too because we also have to eat to live! I'm not sure what the solution to all this is, but I think the more we all talk, communicate and understand the closer we will get to a solution.
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Okay I think I've said most of what I wanted to say, these are the reasons why 2018 has been a particularly bad growing year and it lays another variable on farmers that are (many of them) struggling. Our plan is to do some improvements to the farm next year to increase our chances in gambling with the weather - these include more irrigation and landscape fabric. This is the plan for now, as we all know plans can change depending on variables - speaking of which I forgot to mention we also had our tractor break down in June (prime planting time)and our farm truck break down twice (we did an extra mini-CSA to fund the repairs only for it to break again a month later) that's just how it goes sometimes. Despite the numerous struggles, this is what we love to do and we appreciate every moment of being involved in this re-igniting of the small-farm movement and healthy food movement. Thank you for reading! - Adam

This is something that seemed simple to change but it would take a commitment of organization from us that we had not yet done. We had always operated our CSA with some flexibility around vacations for any one who would ask. We never felt that we could justly give away a share someone had paid for unless they specificly said that it was fine. Instead we opted for the "double your share" when you returned the following week which required extra effort on our part as well as the customer, leaving them with some BIG veggie commitments that week. Of course we encouraged customers to make arrangements when they could but sometimes life just doesn't work like that. 

So we came to the solution of "Choose Your Own Weeks" and pay for JUST those weeks. You can start and stop as often as you needed as long as we know the dates before the CSA starts to allow us some time to plan. We also found this would be a great option for single family homes (which may find it challenging to get through their whole share in just one week) or CSA-curious customers (who don't want to make too big of a commitment before they really know it is right for them) because they could choose to have a bi-weekly shares delivered while experiencing a whole growing season of Nova Scotian veggies, fruits & herbs!

We always thought if someone really wanted to be part of a CSA and they were not as financially flexible they would reach out to us. In some cases this was true but it seemed like we might be missing a piece and we were! We needed to make it VERY clear and WELCOMING that we do payment plans! It is not easy to ask for a service you're not sure is available and we recognized that. We have already had several more people opt for this option and it WARMS our hearts so completely! Food should be an option for everyone and while we ourselves are a small farm and can't do it all this is something we can do!

I wanted to speak about some personal nourishment and how it's helped me. I came across these wonderful ferments in 2016 from Seven Acres and at the time I was having difficultly with digestion mostly due to stress (this tends to be a rather natrual state for me, something I am working on. haha) What I have come to realize is that the friendship I have built with Jocelyn greatens the nourishment I get from these delicious ferments. Anytime Adam or I pull a jar from the fridge we instantly just have a feeling or warmness and goodness. 

If you have an opportunity to deepen your relationship with food - do it! Talk to the people behind the product and then take note of the first thing you grab from you fridge... :)