Peer-to-peer support helps new farmers succeed

For many new direct-to-consumer farmers, growing a crop is easy. It’s the business side of running a farm that’s more challenging. Here’s how one organization is bridging that gap.

By Dianne Finstad

The road from wanting to be a farmer to actually being a farmer can be a long and winding one.

Having a good map, learning the necessary skills and building community with peers and experts can really help make the trip a lot smoother. Luckily all of that is available to new farmers through the Business Bootcamp, an 11-week course developed and run by the Young Agrarians (YA), an educational resource network aimed at new farmers.

“The bootcamp came about after recognizing a need in our new farmer network for support in navigating the very early start-up stage of farming,” says Alex Pulwicki, e-learning program manager for YA. “New and aspiring farmers need to gain both production and business skills to run a successful farm. You need to know how to grow a carrot or raise a cow but then you need to know how to sell it and manage the finances of your operation,” she says.

“We have people in our network who had the production skills, but did not know how to start a business and set it up in a way that minimized risk,” says Pulwicki. “The bootcamp was designed to walk people through the farm business start-up and build community with other new farmers.”

The Business Bootcamp for new farmers addresses a growing sector in Canadian agriculture — direct-to-consumer operations. Census data released by Statistics Canada in 2023 reported that in 2020, a total of 25,917 farms across the country were selling both unprocessed agricultural products, such as eggs, vegetables, meat and honey, and/or value-added products like jam, wine, cheese and sausage from the farm gate. This represents 13.6 per cent of farms across Canada — almost one in seven — an increase from 2015, when 24,510 farms (12.7 per cent) reported direct-to-consumer sales.

While it’s hard to deny that the COVID-related public health measures of 2020 drove some of this growth, anecdotal evidence suggests that few farmers abandoned direct sales when the pandemic ended, and that new producers continue to enter the sector with the help of organizations like YA and the valuable support it offers.

How does it work?

The Business Bootcamp for new farmers kicked off in 2021, offering two sessions per year, which always fill up, says Pulwicki. Participants represent a wide cross-section of agriculture and food enterprises, but a common denominator is the desire to market directly to consumers, as this is a more feasible entry point into farming.

“It's mostly first-generation farmers but we do have people joining the course who grew up on a farm,” says Pulwicki.

Topics for the 11-week course align with typical business planning classes. “The content is approached from a farming angle to account for the unique aspects of running an agricultural business,” says Pulwicki.

“All of the speakers are either first-generation farmers who started their own farm business, or business experts who work directly with farmers. This blend allows for participants to get quality insights and feedback from professionals, as well as farmers with boots on the ground, she says. “We also go through a lot of examples and case studies from the farming world related to marketing, cash flow, financing, and risk management.”

Participants are expected to complete worksheets that help them solidify their farm vision and get them writing a business plan. Each weekly two-hour session includes short videos from the farmer-instructors, who are then made available in online “rooms” for one-on-one discussions.

A focus on new farmers

One of those instructors is Andrew Rosychuk, a Nuffield scholar and first-generation farmer who is pioneering production methods and processing of haskap berries on his farm north of Edmonton. (See Farm Forum [dates] need to link to story online.)

And like many bootcamp participants, he started in the industry with just an idea and a dream and that’s why he supports the program. “For me, it became that instant connection.”

Both Pulwicki and Rosychuk point out that, despite the “young” part in YA’s name, this program is called Business Bootcamp for new farmers, not just young farmers.

“It’s cool to get the first-generation perspective because that’s the vast majority of the people in these groups,” says Rosychuk. “But there are actually a lot of retirees too, which I think is great.”

Hard lessons of business

Rosychuk says the bootcamp can be a reality check for some participants. “With starting a business, there’s always a fantasy towards it, and it’s a biased fantasy,” he says.

“Our job is to support that fantasy in a realistic manner. We talk about the pitfalls, which I think is the most important thing. But I also talk about having fun with the business plan, because it is fantasy, and that fantasy needs to go anywhere and everywhere before you pull it back to reality,” he says. In other words, it’s important to dream a bit, get ideas, and think about what could be possible before deciding whether or not it is.

“I think the big thing with the bootcamp is really trying to open up the system and say: ‘Hey, have you thought of all the pieces,’ because these pieces are pain points, and you might have been avoiding them because you don’t like that point,” he says.

Rosychuk says he has lived some of those reality checks with his own farm, like having to throttle back his marketing and sales efforts after realizing he could realistically support only 12 grocery stores, even though he wanted to support more.

He also shares insights on the financial realities driven by the cyclical nature of the industry. “It’s accepting that we work in the business in the summer, and then on the business in the winter.”

Completing the Business Bootcamp is far from a guarantee of success in agriculture. “What we’re seeing with the farming journey is that it’s a long one,” says Pulwicki. “It’s not like you take the bootcamp, and then all of a sudden you’re a farmer.”

She cites examples of some participants who realize they need a lot more start-up capital than they have, or need to build up markets first, or begin with small-scale growing and product testing. And, there have been times when participants decide that farming is not the right fit after all.

“That’s great too,” says Pulwicki. “I’d rather have somebody spend a couple of hours over a couple of months figuring that out than trying to start a whole business.”

Strength in community

Both Pulwicki and Rosychuk affirm community building is a big plus of the bootcamp program. “Knowing that there is a whole network of new farmers who have similar dreams is motivating and inspiring,” says Pulwicki. “And having a roster of farming business experts to provide advice and ideas can help new farmers avoid costly mistakes and make their farm businesses more resilient.”

“It creates a support network so they can fall forward instead of just fall,” adds Rosychuk of the bootcamp community.

Both acknowledge sticking with farming requires a truckload of true grit. “The one common trend between all people who are successful in starting a farm is that they are tenacious,” says Rosychuk. “They will go out and talk to anyone and everyone. They will go to conferences, even though they know nobody, and they will try and learn as much as they can.”

Pulwicki is busy taking registrations for the next Business Bootcamp, which begins January. The course pricing is between $250 and $350, but she points out no one is turned away for lack of funds.

“I find it so inspiring to be a part of an engaged group of people who are actively working to grow food for their communities and steward the land,” she says. “It’s beautiful to see how confident, motivated, and knowledgeable participants are when they complete the course. The farmers in this program are changing the face of agriculture.”

Rosy Farms: the future of agriculture is many-faceted

If your image of direct-to-consumer farming involves a quaint roadside fruit stand, think again. Farmers working in this sector, like all farmers, wear many hats in the process of establishing and running successful businesses.

For instance, in the 10 years since buying his first 76 acres of over-worked land near Edmonton, Andrews Rosychuk has planted the first haskap orchard in Alberta. He also helped found two producer associations, won a Nuffield scholarship (researched and written his report), is conducting extensive variety trials (among other collaborative research efforts), has established an apprenticeship program, is implementing regenerative agriculture practices to restore the land and its productivity, and has recently restored historic wetlands on his farm — among many, many other things.

It all rests on the success of haskaps. When he started out, Rosychuk made a deliberate and well-researched choice to grow haskaps, and while many are convinced the “prairie super berry” is poised for a demand breakthrough, he’s concerned about having adequate supply to meet such a surge if and when it happens: there haven’t been any new orchards going in and others have been plowed under or are for sale, despite the haskap’s reputation for hardiness.

“I think what I’ve learned is there’s a difference between survive and thrive,” says Rosychuk of the uniquely shaped rectangular berries. “So, they survive in a lot of amazing places, but we’re still trying to figure out how they thrive.”

That means developing new growing standards, and research to discover the best soil and fertility conditions to improve berry yields. It also means providing an active learning environment and mentoring new farmers: working with Young Agrarians, Rosy Farms hosted three apprentices in 2024 and will welcome more in the years to come. Rosychuk is also planting a new 10-acre orchard, with a thousand of a planned ten thousand plants already in the ground.

From production to processing to crop research to land restoration to mentorship, and more, Rosychuk is an example of how multi-faceted the direct-to-consumer farm sector has become in Canada. His Nuffield report about farmers owning the end-to-end value chain, will be presented at the Nuffield Canada AGM in Halifax this January, and will be available at: www.nuffield.ca.