The Market Gardener with Jean-Martin Fortier
The idea today is to present to you an image of what I'v described in my book The Market Gardenerand the premise of everything is that you can make a really decent livelihood farming on small acreage we've been doing this for more than and decade and we've learned so many thing so long the way and if I had known all that we've came up with when I started I think that would've really kick-start our career so hopefully we're passing this on to you guy swere going to talk about the cropping system per see this you know the first half and then we'll talk about some management practices, weed prevention,crop planning and the tools we use this is all going to go with as the day goes by
I think I'll start my presentation today with just giving you numbers of what we do so that'll kind of give you the scope and the idea of the farm so my farm is called the de la Grelinette which like is the broad fork far min French and we farm on an acre and a half of permanent raised beds the CSA share is a 140 mem bers we deliver for 21 weeks and we also do two farmers markets one on Saturday morning one on Thursday the sales of the vegetable sproduced on-site last year was a hundred and fifty thousand dollars of production these are the vegetable that we produce on the farm the labor on the farm has been me an my wife full-time ever since we started the project in 2004we've had no outside labor's and we're hiring two full-time staff 40 hours a week from March to December and so there's four of us to make the show a run and we also have interns on the farm we have from to 2 to 3 they come for a four week internship program but I don't count them as labor on the farm and the reason is not because they're not good workers it's just they're not reliable and every year I get these long letters from people that read my book in French most of them come from France and you know their computer people and then they've read that and they want to change their life and it's like this big heart opener for them and then they want to come and intern on the farm and so we give them a slotand then when it's time to come I get a phone call from from John luke that says I've met this beautiful French Canadian girl and I'm going biking across Canada I will not be not be there Jean-Martin tomorrow and that happens so often you wouldn't believe it that we've stopped relying on these people for labor because if I'm planning that these guys are working and they're not there that's more pressure on me to operate so without them we can operate the four of usan actually we can talk later on about interns or internship programs if you want button our farm the interns it' sit's something that Maude-Hélène and I my wife my girlfriend my wife in French in Canada we say girlfriend wifethe same it's romantic that way I think but it's not a gift but it's like we want to becommunicating what we're doing so that's why we have interns so they're more of a distraction if you want from productionso they're not equated in the labor forcewe have no tractor on the farmand it will become clear to you guys why itsit's not for philosophical reasons or because it's a dogma it's just because we didn't need one an our farm got to be successful because we don't have one people don't believe me but that's the case I'm going to try to make the breakout for diesel and fossil fuel is really low diese because we go to Montreal twice a week our delivery truck runs on straight vegetable oil so if it didn't that number would be much higher we have a high cost for propane because we're in the northern climate and our goal is by the first of June to have you know a booth with everything on it so we we plan to have tomatoes by the first of June so we heat a lotthe greenhouse but two hundred and sixty dollars is what is equated for the gasoline that I put in my walking tractorwhich is all of the fossil fuel input for for soil working on the farm which is really not a lot like I'm doing my accounting these days and you know just my parking tickets in Montrealits five times that amount of money and and most importantly the number that is important in all of this this is interesting because it illustrates that we can we can have on small acreage we can have a lot of production an we can have you know full-employment with not a lot of fossil fuelconsumption but what's really important and why this farming model
I thinkis relative and why i'm invested in passing it along and teaching about itis the profit margin on our farm ever since we started the farm in 2005 wasour first year operationour profits have been around 45 percent meaningthat at the end of the year when we've paid all of our expendituresyou know the salaries to our employees, seeds,mortgage whatever almost half of the productionthe income from the production comes back to Maude-Hélène and Ias our salary which you knowwere not you know day tradersat Wall Street but we're making enough moneyto have a very comfortable livelihood okayso that's what we're doing in numbers and I don't know if some of you guys are familiarwith numbers with farming numbers if you have a farm or if you know aboutfarming operations you could have a sense of what this is if this is good or not but if you don't this is really goodthese are really great numbers for farming especially the 45 percent margin and then the question iswell how do we do this how do we get this going in a northern climate because you know people werefended away today because of the snowstorm but how muchin fahrenheit how much was it at my farm this morning -20was this morning on my farm okay just to give you an ideaso I'm not saying this is super good just to brag I'm saying okay so then the question is how do we do thisand that's what the workshop today is about making sure that you guys understandthe key elements the key factors that allow us to make this happenand hopefully to make it happen for you guysokay so I'm gonna startoff by taking about you know half an hour to tell you a bit about my storyand how our farm came to be because I think it's important thatyou guys understand how this system evolved because we haven't started withthese numbers you know weI knew nothing about farming when I startedI graduated from McGill University I had studied environmentalscience ecology basically I tookthree-year courses inenvironmental disasters and I was really bummed when I finish because I had no isgeez I just learned how you know there's an ecological collapse happeningeverywhereand i felt invested in trying to be part of the solutionand we were looking both that's where I met my wifewe were looking for answers about how to be aa positive factor of change but to be doing something physicallywe did a trip we went toMexico we worked on coffee bean farms we were worked on fair trade farmsand then we went to New Mexico and we started to woof on a small organic farmand that's where we met the French Canadian guythat wasfarming there around Santa Fe anthat was a great giftfor us to meet this guy because he was our firstimpression of what farming wasbecause again I I didn't come from a rural background and back in the early2000 at least where I was living in organic wasn'twhat it is now and the local food movement wasn't as developed soI really knew nothing about farming but here was this guyfarming in beautiful abiquiu like beautiful areabeautiful light working all day growing stuffpreparing his things making it really neat to go to market on Saturdaysand then he would we would wake up early go to market and then there was likeyou know people lining up like these were like 20 people lineups tobuy rishar salad because he was the salad king over there he was one of thebetter growersand people were thanking him for his work hey Rishar whaaaathanking him and I was doing the cash register now and I was looking at that money hewas making like manthis guy is making like three grand in half a day's workand I would likemake three grand in the whole summer as I was like whoa this is cooland then Rishar would take his winters to go to Mexico and hang outand I was like whoa that's a pretty sweet setupand that got me interested in this lifestyle of farmingand so that was the start of itthen we were asked by you know anotherfunny turn of event to work as farm managers on another small farm which wedid in New Mexico stayed there for a year and a halfand after two years of you know farming really really small scale we werefarming on 11 acreswe came back to Québec because that's where our roots are fromand we started our own little operation and we had a grower that was doing CSAhe had like thirty membersandand he quit and so we took his client'sand we started our own little program we didn't have a place to livewe didn't know where we wanted to go so we just figured you knowtrying to find a cool community which we did and then we asked people if wecould just set up a summer camp on their placeand we had a couple of FrenchFrench people that had like a B&B kinda farm to table thing and just bluntly whensaid you knowyou guys would you guys be interested in having uslive live on your farm and they said yes and then so we set up a summer campand we lived there for two years and the you knowI had seen a young couple with kids in in New Mexicoput up a teepee and live in a teepee and I thought wow that's coolso we did that in Quebec but there was something that was lost in translationbecausethis you know your better off with a yurt or you knowwhatever but not a teepee because you're losing all the heat and the water gets innow those two years we did a lot of mistakesand that is was a another blessing in disguise because when you make these mistakesthen the next time around you don't do them again you know an exampleyou know the teepee was like pretty bad in itself butthat was a Northern slope really big slowclay heavy clay butthe site had an amazing view of pinnacle mountainand back then we're like well this is what you want you knowwhen you're working outside when you working the fields when you doing thingsecologically you wanna stop and contemplate and be in blissbecause it's a nice you know environment and so we thought that sothat was a key factor fortaking on this site but know if you want to be a successful small-scale farmeryou should perhaps not stop and just workand have a beer at 5:30 and you can drive up to theyou know whatever and so we didn't know about thatbut we learned a lot and I incourage everyone that's that wants to get into farmingto start on rented land and make your mistakesthere before buying so that's what we set it up andone great one great part of thatabout that time is that we were doing it we were doing ityou know really right on we had 30-member the first year we had fiftythe next year we started a small farmers market toand already we were making like you know 6, 7, 8 grandof profit at the end of the season because we had no expendituresall the tools were super simple hand tools that we boughtfrom Johnny's and were farming with rakes and an old rotor tillerand we had put up a teepee and it was good enoughthe only drawback was winters and even there we took our wintersand when traveling down south and one of the first trip that we madewas to go to Cuba and that for usas I look backward now of what came aboutin are cropping system was a very important moment becauseit was the first time we were seeing farming without tractorsin a large-scale perspective andthat didn't happen by chance because we had studied at McGill when we were atthe university therethe cuban experiment which lasted about12 years and really was kick-start whenthe Soviet Union fell apart these guyslost all of their fossil fuel input on the island so all of theyou know fuel for the tractors or if they had a little bit of fuels when thetractors would breakthey didn't have any parts to repair them and all of theyou know synthetic fertilizersfungicides herbicides pesticides these are all petroleum-basedproducts so they had none of that so they had to basically reinventtheir whole agriculture for it to be 100 percent organicso with regards to vegetable production what they came up withwas these permanent raised bedsof cement slab contoured you knowbeds called organoponicos and in these beds you haddensely seeded or transplanted cropsand you would see these you would seeacres and acres and acres and acres of these organoponicosand the growers they were gardenersthey were farming with hand tools and we were looking at thisyou know around La Habana or in the countryside you know it was always the same setupand we're like geez man this is a lot of production per square foot and that was likesomething that got us thinking about kind of like trying tobuildup that kinda model the next winter we made another tripand this time we went to aFrance we went there because at that timethis was already my fourth growing season and I was reading a lot of thebooks coming out of California about bio intensivegrowing you know John Jeavons high-yield gardening square foot gardening allthese booksand they would always refer to the French intensive techniquesand so i'm frankaphone and so I thought you know I was gonna fly there and checkit out for myself in and pick up all the best tricksand what I found was that every time I would ask people about bio intensivethey would go whatwhat is that bio you know that didn't computed at all for themand then when we would describe these patterns of you know densely seeded areathey would bring us to these kind of operations which was you knowsuper productive but monoculture kinda typeyou know glass houses that costed millions and millions of dollarsand basically we toured part of France looking foryou know acre farms that were really doing it and we didn't find anynot to say that they weren't any but we didn't find anywe learned a lotfrom these growers because even the conventional growersyou know they have they have a lot of things to teach and so we learned aboutspacings we learned about qualitywe learn about different cultivars varieties becauseyou know in france is just crazy how theythey're really into it for the taste and the quality of the produce and so that wasinspirational for uswe also learned a lot from working the soilreally gently because these guys it's not like over herethey don't have space so if they've been farming for thirty yearsor forty yearsand they've messed up their soil they just cant go to the next onebecause there's a parking lot or there's another farmer there's there's somethingyou knowEurope is like condensed there's a lot of people thereand so they've figured out through time how to work their soil to get their operationsdonebut to be really gentle with their soil to conservethe organic matter over 45 or 50 weeks growning seasonso we learned a lot about that socoming back more to our storyan event kinda propelled us to somethingnew which was the farm where we were workinggot sold and then we were we had to move againand we decided it was time for us to buy a farm becausewe had already one kid and we wanted toyou know get our roots established in that community and land was superexpensive it is super expensive where we are you know all theseday traders lawyers bankers they have second homesyou know where an hour south in Montreal in the Eastern Townshipsno mosquitoes no fly good climate whatevera lot of vineyards but we found that10-acre site which was seven-acre woodlotthree-acre prairie in the middle of which had a rabbit coopa rabbit coop is a building where you raise rabbitsfor meat and that was a forty by a hundred buildingthat was empty had been abandoned for like eight years andthe asking price was really reasonable becauseit was there there was a zoning regulation there that if you weren't afarmer you couldn't build a house on itand if you were farmer what are you gonna do with two acres of prairie except parkyour machineryon that so nobody would buy it but we thought this is perfectwe'll build the house inside that it'll be much better than the teepee which was moldingall over the placegetting sick about that and then we thought you know ifall this is planted it's going to be a lot and our goal when we started the farmwhen we bought it in 2004was to have two salariesderived from our farming operation andand having this generate enough income also to pay for the mortgage of the house that we wanted to buildinside the rabbit coop so we had a pretty clear mission statement from start thenwe went to different loan offices to get loans to get you know to get to buy have a mortgage and to get equipmentand we had a really sweet business plan really well madehad done our homeworks and everything was super fine with everyone that we went because we visited I think 4 or 5 beforesomebody said yeseverybody was like compelled it was like oh the charts are nice you put colorsyou printed in colors it was all goodand then they would really go through it and say whoa you're farming on an acreand a half
I and then they said okay that's not serious we're not interested because nobody knew about small-scale farming or micro scale farming the way we wanted to do it and so I think what happened to us is that one of the bankers they're really didn't readout they would just they looked at the color sand that was good enough for them and they said yes so so we finally end up starting our project that way soall this to say that that's been our reality ever since on the farm I we've had about two and a half acreprairies to establish a market garden that had to be quite productive and yeah so we you know first winter we bought in the fall first winter started to play their it was great we were building our house and again you know just like this for us like was way better than the teepee like I still remember I would step outside and just the when it would rain when it would pour is was like wow the water is not coming in the house now is like these guys know how to make buildings and I was like really impressed you know and and so now it's a nice house you know after two years two winters of building and unbuilding because I would do it myself and then I was kinda I had time so I would build it and then I wouldn't see you know my my father in law would come and say hey JM no that's not how you do this and then I would tear it up and then I would do it again so I I did the house twice but now it's a it's a fine house and I'm showing this to saybecause you know these old buildings these tobacco farms or whatever they're outthereI'm and why not give them a second chance if they're rightly built and if you know the roof structure is niceman they can go another 50 years no problem
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