Growth beyond imagining

How the partners of Haybury Farms and Claybank Organics went from renting a few acres to farming over 4,200 in a few short years.

By Treena Hein

DJ Wassenaar and Matt Bergman of Jarvis, ON, have known each other since they were pretty young — both were farm kids at the same school but three years apart. The two began their working lives together, snowplowing and custom farming. They later formed a business partnership, which you could say, has worked out rather well. They now have 19 employees across multiple farm and off-farm businesses, with about 4,200 acres under production. They were also named Ontario’s Outstanding Young Farmers for 2024.

“We see each other more than we see our wives,” Bergman chuckles. “We never imagined this. We thought we would have three or four employees and make a living. It’s a bit of luck, a lot of hard work. It’s had its up and downs and we’ve had sleepless nights but we’re very proud of what we’ve built.”

Early days

Making decisions together is an integral part of a strong business partnership and that was evident early on when the first fork in the road appeared. “We got to a point where our acres were growing and the custom work was also growing,” Bergman says. “We’d bought our first farm here in Jarvis in 2017 and then another farm, and also expanded our rental acreage. We had a buyer appear for the custom business, and we decided to sell it. It was for sure the right choice.”

Big decisions like that one, and the decision in 2020 to purchase land in Algoma, seven hours away, were, as you would expect, made very carefully by the pair.

“There was a lot of ongoing discussions,” says Bergman. “Before we bought land up north, we talked about it off and on for, I’d say, between 12 and 18 months. (The purchase) would reduce our profit risks because you could have a catastrophic crop failure in one of the two places, but it was mainly about a cheaper land opportunity, a way to grow with good returns,” he explains. “We looked around the area up there, we did a lot of research, and we found the right opportunity. And it’s only because it’s a partnership that it could work. It’s very hard to do, with the long drive, the logistics. One person could not do it.”

A somewhat less gigantic, but still very important, decision was what crops to grow first. Hay made sense out of the gate because Wassenaar and Bergman had hay equipment sitting idle, left over from the custom business sale. In Jarvis, they grew straight timothy on some acres over three to five years, then rotated that land into other crops before reseeding it to forages.

They saw that they could maximize profits by growing organic grains after forages. “Organic is all about controlling weed pressure and you don’t have a lot of weeds in forage,” says Bergman. “We started transitioning some fields in 2018, and now about a third of the Jarvis operation, about 2,800 acres, is certified. We called it Claybank Organics.”

They started with organic corn, which is currently sold to buyers in Ontario and the U.S., then they added organic soybeans. With the careful handling already required for organic crops, it made sense to go with identity-preserved varieties, which guarantees the purity and quality of the crop is protected at every stage of production and handling. The rest of their acres are in rotations of conventional crops.

Meanwhile, up in Algoma, they added a second parcel of land plus some rented land. And they had to do some strategizing about what crops to grow. “Covid resulted in high trucking costs so that killed the hay,” says Bergman. “We had to make every load worthwhile with higher-value crops. We started with soybeans for two years. That’s the easiest way to turn pastures into fields, then we go with wheat. Every year, we clear more of our land up there and add tiles and lime.”

Bergman and Wassenaar now have about 1,800 acres under production in Algoma, and all of their conventional production, north and south, falls under the umbrella of Haybury Farms.

Long distance challenge

Running two farming operations so far apart isn’t easy, but they make it work.

In the spring, Wassenaar does the planting, then they take turns going up during the summer months. Come fall, Bergman does the combining and, in winter, Wassenaar does more of the snow removal management in Jarvis. They ship tractors back and forth, but they keep combining and seeding equipment in both Jarvis and Algoma. They have also had a full-time employee in Algoma for the last two years.

Not only does this business structure absolutely require a partnership to make it work, Bergman also explains that it wouldn’t work financially if they didn’t own floats and trucks to transport equipment.

“We have a full-time construction business and also a snow removal business,” he says. “We constantly move equipment around. We also have a mechanic for the farming side and another one for all the other equipment. We now have about 120 pieces for snow removal, including our subcontractors’ pieces, with two employees looking after it full-time eight months of the year. It used to make sense to lease equipment but now you can own your own for much cheaper.”

Future directions

Wassenaar and Bergman are going to keep doing what they’re doing. Their strategy of making sure income grows alongside new investments, of measured risk, has worked well.

They will continue to hire carefully, too. “You’re as good as your worst employee,” Bergman says. “We’re very choosey. We have very little turnover. It’s an inner circle, borderline family. You have to be able to trust your guys, and they need to able to trust each other too.”

As to their partnership, Bergman says it works well partly because he and DJ are very different. “We complement each other’s weaknesses, and we sometimes have opposite opinions, but we have the same goals and we figure out how best to get there,” he explains. “And you also always, always need to think about what is best for both of us, to have to have each other’s best interests at heart. You have to be in it for both of you or it won’t work. It’s no different than a marriage.”

He also stresses that partnerships only work as long as no one feels they are being taken advantage of. “It falls apart if you think you’re working harder than the other person,” Bergman says. “I’ve never thought that of DJ, and I don’t think he’s ever thought that of me. We both work hard and we get along well. We’re looking forward to future challenges.”