38 CHANGE
In addition to having to create her own soil, she has spent $100,000 just to get potable water. To make matters worse, her house burnt down at Thanksgiving. “You have to be resilient,” she said matter-of-factly.
Overcoming obstacles
Oostenbrink has also had to overcome considerable obstacles since deciding to abandon teaching in 2013 and start farming 30 acres his father offered him. The first obstacle was his idea of what farming was. He started by spending a lot of money on equipment, fertilizer and planting acres of blueberries, raspberries, potatoes and sweet corn. Despite all the money thrown at them, insects and diseases ravaged his crops.
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His best investment was hiring “a young guy” and giving him an acre to grow vegetables. Despite being armed with just a handseeder and a hoe, the young fellow’s acre produced much more than his did.
“I underwent a complete transformation before my first year was up,” Oostenbrink says. “I was focused on chemistry, not biology.” He realized “healthy plants have an amazing ability to look after themselves” and “one acre of land can make you a lot of money if you can sell the produce.”
He started using organic principles on his farm and converted his barn/machinery shed into an on-farm market. “The first day we sold $1,000 of produce, I knew could do something so I decided to produce food year round.” He is now firmly convinced • you can make money farming on a small plot • machines do not do a better job than people – you have to work with nature and not against it • institutions do not know everything
• farms must be community- centred.
Jump start
Unlike Murphy, Finley and Oostenbrink, Daniel did not start Sapo Bravo from scratch, although it took “25 years of dying a slow, painful death”
COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • FEBRUARY 2017 nfrom page 37
before she was ready to transition into agriculture. “Never, never give up on your stupid, stupid dreams.” The former office
administrator and avid home gardener started by attending the Richmond Farm School 10- month program in 2011. She moved to a half-acre incubator farm, started a canning CSA (now turned over to farm school students) and co-ordinated the farm school for two years.
But she wanted more and last year purchased Sapo Bravo, “a completely off-the- grid” certified-organic heirloom tomato and vegetable farm in Lytton. “I fell in love with it,” she says. Although the farm encompasses 21 acres, she grows on only five, half planted in fruit crops and half in ground crops.
“You can grow so much on so little land,” she says, echoing Oostenbrink’s observations.
Marketing is often the biggest issue for new farmers. Although Daniel was fortunate in getting a farm with established marketing channels allowing her to farm instead of spending her time marketing, that is rare. Finley admits she spends less time farming and more time marketing as her farm continues to grow, saying, “I spend only 20% of my time farming and that’s not what I wanted to do.”
Marketing takes up 90% of Murphy’s time. He does not rue that, saying “when I hop on the tractor or pick grapes, it makes it all worthwhile.” Finding affordable land to farm and financing the enterprise are two other obstacles although there appear to be new options for both.
Murphy notes he has been approached by a number of offshore investors who are “offering free land in Langley for 10 years for farmers.” And in early December, Farm Credit Canada’s Young Farmer Loan program was changed, doubling the amount of credit available to $1 million and reducing the minimum down payment to 20% of the value of the loan. Young farmer loans incur no processing fees and offer either a variable interest rate at prime plus 0.5% or a special fixed rate.
“This potentially makes more working capital available to qualified producers, under age 40, as they look to enter the industry or grow their business,” FCC said.
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