Small can be beautiful
You don’t need to be big to be successful. Smaller-sized operators are winning over consumers, and bringing valuable diversity to the marketplace.
Hobby farm? To some, the term sounds almost offensive. It suggests people who aren’t quite serious about what they do, or for whom results don’t really matter.
Suppose we adopt a new-and-improved expression for smaller Canadian farms. How about: micro-farm. After all, no one calls Sleeman’s, Unibroue and Big Rock "hobby" breweries.
These micro-breweries, dwarfed in size by big-volume brewers, emphasize unique tastes, small quantities and hand-crafted care. Though they account for only a small percentage of production by volume, they’ve built a viable market with consumers.
Can a small Canadian farm – a micro-farm – do the same?
According to Wendell Joyce, Executive Director of the Canadian Farm Business Management Council, it’s happening all over the country.
"Compared to larger farms, these smaller-sized operations have a very small share of total food production," he says. "But look what they’re doing. They’re connecting consumers to agriculture, they’re preserving rural Canada and they’re running self-sustaining businesses."
While many large farms emphasize low per-unit costs – dollars per bushel of crop or per pound of grain – micro-farms play the game differently. In Joyce’s experience, they tend to be diversified, to focus on value-added and to touch the consumer as much as possible. It’s about earning an extra dollar through on-farm processing, ancillary resources like woodlots, direct-to-consumer sales and even agritourism, to some degree.
"These things aren’t an inexhaustible source of oppor-tunity by any means," says Joyce, "but the full potential of these strategies still hasn’t been tapped out yet."
SUCCESS, ONE PUMPKIN AT A TIME
You can call Strom’s Sweet Corn a hobby farm if you want. Then again, with this kind of revenue per acre, it’s the sort of hobby most people would love to try.
For the past 25 years, Jay and Margaret Strom have welcomed consumers to their 60-acre farm in the Guelph, Ont. area. Popular with weekend family visitors and for school trips, the farm grows 45 acres of sweet corn and 14 acres of pumpkins.
Sales of hand-picked sweet corn at $6 per dozen can generate up to $1,500 per acre. During October, the Stroms sell upwards of 7,000 pumpkins, grossing up to $4,000 per acre.
With limited resources to work with, the Stroms know they won’t be putting General Foods out of business any time soon. That’s not the point.
"I think we have to teach the consumer," says Marg Strom. "They want to learn more about their food, and we do that. I enjoy seeing the families come out to the farm. They know we have a good product and an enjoyable setting."
Hobby farm? Please. Like hundreds of other small Canadian agri-enterprises, Strom’s Sweet Corn is a micro-farm, and a good one.
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