Right now, we’re focusing on streamlining, simplifying and making things more efficient,” Craig Ference says. “That’s kind of our next expansion … making what we have a lot better. Improving our production, our land and our cattle to get a better gross margin from our current asset base.”
Yup, that’s a farmer. The same or similar words could be said by other farmers all across the country. They’re all expert at production and they know the value of getting better at it every day.
Except Craig may be more committed to using big changes to get there than most.
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Third-generation farmers Craig and Jinel Ference of Double F Farms are based at Kirriemuir in southeastern Alberta, a farm founded by Craig’s parents, Harvey and Joyce. It consists of 18,000 acres of grain land, a 4,000- head cow-calf operation, 12,000 head feedlot and a custom operating business.
“You can’t afford land at today’s prices by doing the same practices,” Craig says. “So, we changed our whole cattle model. Rather than the traditional graze in the summer, feed in the winter, we’re kind of the opposite; we graze in the winter and feed in the summer. We delayed calving, so we can feed the calves off the land. In summer, we have to grow an awful lot of corn to be able to produce the biomass to enable us to do that.”
It’s bold thinking, aimed right at the productive and economic heart of the business, just like so much of the dynamic, transformative thinking here.
Around eight years ago, for example, the Ferences began switching from annual cash crops. Today, 80 to 90 per cent of their grain acres are growing corn for feed.
They have paid special attention to their cow genetics, too, to ensure that they have animals that will be best suited for their operations.
“We don’t have wild cows, so even with a large herd they can be handled easily by a few people,” Craig says. “We cull extremely hard. All those little things make a big difference in the amount of labour we need for calving. It makes a difference in rounding up cattle in summer pasture. It makes a difference on cows getting out. If you have good cows that respect fences, they stay in, so all those things we try to correct on the breeding side.”
But there’s also more. As you’ll see below, there are decisions that get made for business reasons too. And you’ll see that on the Ference farm, they’re every bit as bold as the production thinking that’s going on. And it’s just as essential that they get integrated right into every inch of what the farm does.
Finding a new model
Craig Ference took a business degree at the University of Alberta, which is where he met Jinel, who was studying education. The business training gave him useful skills and insights for managing a large farm operation in an industry with the pace of change of today’s agriculture. That’s what he expected it to do.
But the big take-away has been something different. What he learned is to always keep an open mind.
“We are constantly learning,” Craig says. “Although I took a lot away from university, they didn’t teach us the models we’re using today.”
He’s not downplaying his business training. “It allowed us to find information, and know how to ask the right questions,” he says. “I am a big advocate for university, college or further education, but you still need to be willing to adapt, change and make progress.”
The Ferences are constantly questioning and refining their business model to reflect the current times, and they’re ready to wade into balancing the pros and cons.
“Today, there are so many ways you can insure risk that it’s a lot easier to preserve margins than it was 20 years ago,” Craig says. “But again, that all comes at a cost.”
The key then, is to be strategic about the ideas that you import. Test them. Are they innovative enough to bring real change, can they work alongside the production realities that you’re dealing with, and can you commit to the hard work it will take to excel with them?
To illustrate, Country Guide talked with the Ferences about two such ideas.
1. Diversity as opportunity
For Craig and Jinel Ference, embracing diversity and inclusion as an essential element in their business strategy is tied to their vision of expanding into a multi-enterprise agricultural business, with a reliable, diverse and dedicated workforce.
It has done much more than that too. It has helped fill seats in the local school, enhance the economic diversity of the community, and ensure there are more hands to flip pancakes at local fundraising breakfasts. It has meant new friendships, too, and new perspectives on life, culture and business.
It all began, though, with acute labour shortages and the experience of working in agriculture halfway around the world.
It’s no secret that, for the past couple of decades, agriculture has had a tough time competing with other industries, like oil and gas, for labour. At the farm level it was particularly hard to attract people due to the nature of the work, its seasonality, and the fact that farms simply couldn’t match wages that people could get in the oil patch.
That over heated labour market may have moderated somewhat today, but back in 2004, it was at its height, just as Craig Ference was completing his university degree and getting more involved in managing the family farm, Double F Farms, with his parents, Harvey and Joyce. The labour squeeze was having a negative impact on the farm’s ability to expand and develop into the diversified agricultural business that the Ferences knew was vital for the future sustainability of the operation.
“All the young people wanted to go on the drilling rigs, and all the experienced guys wanted to drive truck long-haul or they wanted an office job, so it was tough,” Craig says.
So, the Ferences decided to look further afield for the people they needed and Craig set up a recruitment agency, turning his attention to other countries such as Australia, where he had spent a year working on a farm in New South Wales. Before long, the Ferences were hiring people from many countries including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ukraine, Germany and Ireland.
“We originally started out to find labour, but now we try and find the best labour,” Craig says. “It doesn’t matter what country it comes from, we want the best, hardest- working, smartest, most loyal, most dedicated people. Once we’d cut our teeth on the world labour pool, we have found lots of people with the skill sets we need and who want to come to Canada.”
Though no longer actively recruiting people from abroad, Craig says the evolution has been an unending supply of people willing to come to work on the farm due to recommendations from the employees who are already there, and who, in some cases, have settled right into the community.
“A lot of our employees have come from other employees,” Craig says. “I think that also helps with long-term retention.”
How to handle the challenges
But having many different nationalities and backgrounds on the farm can present challenges, and Craig and his wife, Jinel, who handles most of the human resource side of the business, try to make sure that people new to the farm, the community and the country feel comfortable, welcome and included.
“Craig and I love travel. Learning about and experiencing different cultures for our entire family is something that we embrace all the time,” Jinel says. “So, I always try and put the shoe on the other foot. If Craig and I were taking our family to another country, how would we hope to be welcomed? It’s simply about respect, and my hope is that we are a safe, welcoming place for people to come to.”
There are the day-to-day operational things, such as language barriers, that are easily overcome with some different communications strategies and a little technology.
“If somebody’s struggling to understand something, you can text them and Google Translate will make it quite clear for them,” Jinel says. “If somebody is more confident to read something rather than speak on the phone, Craig will text them, or speak to them and reiterate the instructions via text so that it’s clearer and more concise.”
It’s also about being willing to take some extra time and care to make sure everyone is on the same page. “Sometimes it just takes patience,” Jinel says. “We try to encourage everybody that they can ask questions and come for more instruction if needed. If you don’t have patience, it’s not going to work.”
It’s also about showing you’re committed to diversity, and you’re proud of your team.
Quite often, it can be something that seems simple that counts. When you drive into the Ference yard you see four flagpoles with the flags from the nations of the employees working at the farm. Employees also put decals of their country’s flag on the equipment they drive.
Another important thing, for the Ferences and their employees, is to share food together, just as any family would.
“We will have a potluck dinner and people will bring their traditional food, so you are interacting and enjoying the things that being diverse brings to your farm,” Jinel says. “We want to experience what their culture has to offer as much as we want them to experience what it’s like to be in Canada, so I think it’s just embracing those things.”
Helping to integrate
Although some of the overseas employees are temporary or seasonal, some have elected to stay and become Canadian citizens, and, with their families, have integrated into the life of the community, something that the Ferences have felt it important to encourage, and support.
“One of the very basic things we do is provide living accommodation for them,” Jinel says. “We own several houses in a couple of nearby towns, just five minutes from the farm. We could ask them to live in a larger town half an hour away, but because we can provide housing, then it gives the opportunity to have these families in our community.”
The community response to the new families has been tremendous, Jinel adds.
“Our school is small, and the kids, especially, are very welcoming and it just trickles down from there,” she says. “Children want to make friends and have fun. They don’t worry about things like language barriers, they just play and have a good time. We haven’t encountered any negative experiences. It’s a pretty welcoming area to come to.”
Some of the newcomers have even started their own small enterprises, like some women who have a cooking business.
“We try to promote and support that by telling friends about it because we’re proud of them if they want to have their own small businesses going,” Jinel says. “It just becomes so normal, that you want to include them, you want them to be a part of the community in any way.”
It could easily have been a different story. Small, remote rural communities can get stuck in the past and entrenched in traditional beliefs and deep-rooted thinking that makes it hard for some to get used to changes and revisit their own attitudes and biases. Although there were some concerns expressed at first about the Ferences “open door” policy, the community has quickly seen the value of having new perspectives and people to help keep the community vibrant for the future.
Says Jinel, “We’re now at the point where we have permanent residents, and Canadian citizens, families that are in the school, people that are dedicated volunteers in the community.”
It’s about believing you can build the future that you want, the pair say.
The key to making any farm, business or community more inclusive, the Ferences explain, is simply thinking it out, and doing it.
“It’s having those long-term thoughts, what do you want for your farm, for your community. How does that look?” Jinel says. “For us, and for our community, having that inclusive and diverse lens has been very successful and positive.”
2. The value of distance
“Our business model 20 years ago was, you would buy the least expensive land, develop it and take advantage of inflation, because we knew that land value in time would go up,” Craig Ference says. “But we realized there are added costs, with logistics, things like moving combines. The more central you are, the less those costs are.
“But then you have all your eggs in one basket if there is drought, with all your land in one block, while if you have land in multiple blocks, it all helps to reduce some of that risk.”
The Ferences aren’t alone in thinking about this, of course. The scarcity of land closer to home, and the high price of the few bits that do come up, are making established farmers across the country look farther afield, even to other provinces for opportunities to expand.
As business strategies go, the opportunities look attractive. But there are also negatives, like the extra challenges of managing crops and livestock at a distance.
Country Guide turned to the real estate sector for insight. “Relocation or farming multiple locations has been done for generations,” agrees Alberta farm realtor Ben Van Dyk of Real Estate Centre.
But then, he adds, “some have become really good at it, while for others … it’s not really for them.”
A lot hangs on that one observation. Now, though, there’s an uptick in the trend, partly due to multi-generational farms that have enough people to be more flexible, and also with farms that keep things simple by having the distant farms custom-farmed, crop-shared or leased to third parties.
Spreading out the risk
Today, the Ferences have their Alberta operations centred within an hour radius of Kerriemuir, plus they farm at Biggar, Sask., 180 km east.
“We do this for drought risk, weather risk, soil types and things like that,” says Craig. “We own land that’s a couple of hours away that we use as a summer property. We developed it for cattle, so we fenced and seeded grass, and pipelined it for water, and we take some of our herd there for the spring, summer and fall months and bring them back to the home farm for the winter.”
But the decision has also been driven by the usual factors of today; land availability and price. When they bought the land at Biggar in 1999 it had just been released from foreign ownership under new rules that allowed only Canadian citizens and corporations to own land in Saskatchewan.
“That really suppressed the price,” Craig says. “Compared to similar land in Alberta at the time, land in Saskatchewan was a quarter of the price, so it made sense for us to develop that land into pasture rather than more expensive, Alberta land.”
It was also the only place where they had been able to buy the amount of land they needed, which is still difficult in today’s market.
“There is land for sale in Alberta, but usually a quarter here or there, so to put a big block together was, and is difficult,” Craig says. “A lot of Albertans have been going to Saskatchewan because of the size of the block they can buy.”
The Ferences are always on the lookout for larger, conjoined blocks of land, and in 2018, they did manage to purchase a block of 62 quarters in Alberta, which was partly a matter of being in the right place at the right time, but also a matter of being fully prepared to buy if the chance arose. In other words, they had executed on a clear business strategy.
“We were planning for a purchase,” Craig says. “We were setting ourselves up by increasing labour and equipment so we would be able to take advantage if something came up.”
But how do you run the farm?
Traditionally, says Manitoba real estate agent Sheldon Froese, with Royal LePage Riverbend Realty Farm Division, “Manpower and equipment are limiting factors because if a farmer is going to buy a large operation that is several hours away, they will either need a second set of machinery or they will need to haul their machinery there, and that can get pretty expensive these days. Then they need to get a big chunk of land to make it worth all the machinery cost.”
The Ferences, though, have worked out how to manage all the locations from the home farm, including employees and equipment. They have centralized all their equipment at the main farm and haul it to where they need it, although with 22 employees and such a scattered land base, they have had to change their business style to manage it all, including by simplifying and streamlining all their operations, from breeding, to grazing systems, and also by employing new technology.
With hundreds of fields to manage, the Ferences have also deployed technology like GPS and satellite monitoring through apps on their smartphones, which all employees are equipped with.
“It’s easy to send guys to different locations, and we try to have large, modern, well-kept equipment, so we have mechanics that keep things serviced. When we are going, we’re not stopping,” Craig says. “We don’t want to drive two hours and then break down. That’s very inefficient.”
They also have weather apps that tell them rainfall and weather conditions in each location.
“Rather than sending the sprayer an hour-and-a-half away, and then you get in the field and it’s too wet, we know ahead of time when we got rain, so those kinds of things help when you are farming at a distance,” Craig says. “We try to simplify and grow similar crops in similar areas, so let’s say one location might be all canola this year, another will be all one variety of corn, so when we go to that area, we just spray it all at once and harvest it all at once.”
Integrating all those different acres at different locations has been a challenge, Craig admits.
“It’s not easy,” he says. “We’ve had droughts and some of the land had oil rigs on it, and the oil companies quit paying revenues, so there have been some hits against us, but when it’s something that you’re really driven to do, you make it work.”
In the past, the Ferences have bought out-of-province land to farm and as an investment strategy.
Today, if they have advice for anyone considering purchasing land farther from home, it’s to carefully consider the end goal.
“If I wanted to expand because my children were coming back and we needed a big block of land, I would need to look to another province,” FCraig says. “But if I was doing it for an investment purpose, all land inflates the same percentage, so I might pay $5,000 per acre in Alberta as opposed to $1,000 per acre in Saskatchewan, because that’s always going to go up five to eight percent no matter which province it’s in. So, if I was going to do it as an investment, I might as well buy land in Alberta.”
Ultimately, though, if someone wants to buy land elsewhere, it’s a matter of doing some research and making sure it’s going to work for them.
That’s more than just soil quality, Craig says. “Get to know the community, and the people surrounding that land because the neighbours are very important.”
And be prepared to put in the time. “If you’re after the best dirt in the world, well you had better know your soil maps. There’s a lot of research that can go into this.”
Also be aware that no matter how well you pick your new ground, there will be regional differences, not just in agronomics but also in bylaws and the ways things get done. Again, it takes time.
Most important, though, is to ensure the strategy fits your production system, and it will grow your productivity and efficiency.
It’s simple, but it’s complicated, Craig says. “I would really understand what you’re after.”
– This article was originally published in the March 29, 2022 issue of Country Guide.
