Farmers who can identify new business opportunities have a valuable leg up in this competitive and rapidly changing world, so Country Guide reached out to innovative farmers and to innovation experts for their insights into finding that next winning idea.
1. Be Tenacious
What does it take? For one, it takes attitude. Over and over again while researching this story, Country Guide heard the phrase, “Be patient.” And we heard it both from experts and farmers alike.
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It’s true of consumer-directed farms. For instance, Meghan Snyder, co-owner of Snyder’s Family Farm, an award-winning agri-tourism operation near Ayr, Ont., tell us: “It takes time for an idea to catch on… You have to believe in it. It’s not instant. It’s years and years of working at it.” And it’s also true of large farms with bigger farm concepts.
Moyers Farm, in Ontario’s Niagara peninsula, has a multi-generational history of cultivating new markets for their crops.
Today the Moyer farm continues to push the boundaries based on its understanding what it takes to succeed. Paul Moyer calls it “believing in yourself.”
And there’s a related word he hypes too. Says Moyer: “It’s tenacity.”
2. Always Be Learning
Owen Kinch, who farms 3,000 acres south of Whitewood, an hour and a half east of Regina, and is also the co-founder of Mojow Autonomous Solutions, Sask., says he reads magazines like Country Guide and attends trade shows, especially ones with live demonstrations, to see what’s new.
“I want to see it first-hand, to sniff out the BS,” says Kinch. “As a farmer, I want to talk to those involved, especially when it’s leading edge.”
Snyder, meanwhile, makes it part of her job to also learn from her customers and from the market, and she regularly uses guest and employee surveys to test market direction.
“It’s a constantly moving target,” Snyder says, while emphasizing the importance of giving people what they want. You might start with a picture in your head of what the market wants. But what’s in your head isn’t what matters, she insists. “It’s not.”
Snyder is also a strong believer in networking. When it comes to agri-tourism, local tourism organizations are an incredible resource, she says.
For inspiration, Snyder’s key team members attend tours by farm organizations like the North American Farmers’ Direct Marketing Association and Farm Fresh Ontario. She says the tours are great learning opportunities. “The truth is, farmers are sharers with unique problems and unique solutions. This isn’t the kind of thing you can learn from a book.”
Jim Eby’s experience with the helpfulness of other farmers mirrors Snyder’s. The Waterloo, Ont. milk producer has been selling his Eby Manor Golden Guernsey milk direct to consumers in glass bottles for more than a decade now. After another producer in the process of building an on-farm dairy processing plant spoke at his local milk producers’ meeting, Eby reached out to him.
Eby had long been thinking about value-adding, but it was reading a story about the success of dairy farmers in other countries that helped convince him to go the next level. These farms were capitalizing on the special quality of milk from Guernseys — a breed Eby knew how to work with — and he felt he had a marketable product.
Through the years, Eby Manor has added cream, chocolate milk, yoghurt, and cheese to their retail offerings and they are considering more products. “It’s about finding niches — selling something unique and different that’s attractive to the public,” says Eby, who isn’t a fan of the status quo. “If you’re not intentionally growing your business, you start to go backwards at some point.”
3. Be Curious
In the 1920s, Moyer says, his grandfather used his truck to deliver fruit direct to their customers’ homes, instead of a market in town. Then, in the late 1960s, his father started a pick-your-own operation — another innovation for the time.
Most recently, Moyers Farm has begun producing caramel apples, sold through major retail chains across Canada.
It’s crucial to “always be questioning and looking for what will give a market advantage,” says Moyer.
Rob Hannam, an agricultural entrepreneur and president of Synthesis Agri Food Network, a Guelph, Ont. consulting firm, agrees that farmers who pick up on new business ideas are curious.
“They ask questions like ‘How is it done? Why is it done this way? Has it been tried in other ways? Where is this thing going in the future?’”
Then they match their curiosity by routinely seeking out leading-edge information and reading widely, participating in conferences and attending trade shows, farm tours and more.
Hannam points to the ease of accessing information from around the world via the internet. “There are all kinds of e-newsletters for ag tech and food companies… any topic you can think of, you can sign up for an e-newsletter.”
These are the kinds of questions that first-generation Cochrane, Ont. vegetable grower Luke Dinan is asking. One of the reasons he chose to grow vegetables in northern Ontario’s Clay Belt was based on scientists’ climate change predictions.
Although the growing season in Cochrane is short, it’s already getting noticeably longer, says Dinan, who had originally purchased land on Prince Edward Island, not far from the coast. However, with rising sea levels predicted, he was concerned that land might eventually be under water.
Dinan recently won first place in the Northern Food Security Challenge where, driven by a desire to grow vegetables year-round, he is using a combination of innovative approaches to extend the growing season.
For greenhouse crops, for instance, Dinan focuses on pumping radiant heat in lines that warm up the root zone, a strategy that began to make sense after he found wood-fired boilers already in use in Scandinavia.
Like the other farmers interviewed by Country Guide, Dinan finds it’s important to do the research to find out if your problems have already been solved. “I’m not re-inventing the wheel here,” he says.
4. Seek out expertise
Similarly, all agree that finding people who have the expertise to help commercialize their idea has been critical for them. When the Moyers were developing their caramel apple business, for instance, they needed new ways to document food safety, which led them to partner with researchers at the University of Guelph to create new technology needed to sanitize the apples.
This award-winning fast and waterless cleaning technology is now patented and used by packers and processors for other types of produce.
Murray McLaughlin, an innovation advisor with BioEnterprise Canada, a Guelph, Ont. organization that supports agri-food startups, sees it as a powerful business strategy. He advises farmers to seek out the expertise they lack. Look at universities, he suggests, where there may be experts in your sector, or where they may simply know how best to measure and evaluate a concept.
“Look for people who have the strengths you don’t have,” McLaughlin says.
It works for Kinch too and his ambition to develop tech that will allow tractors to work autonomously for the “whole farm entity” so farmers won’t have to work such long days.
He also takes his own advice. He sees himself as “an enabler” with practical farming know-how, but he isn’t a software developer so he sought out an engineering partner who brings that expertise.
However, Kinch says that even before starting to develop the technology, he spent a lot of time talking to other farmers to gain insight into the gaps that needed to be filled.
5. Get Down to Business
Snyder is optimistic about opportunities for farmers to diversify through agri-tourism. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to keep the next generation on the farm,” she says. “It’s a ton of work but there’s revenue to be made there.”
Hannam sees potential too and says Canada’s excellent reputation for farming and food puts farmers in a good position to take on new market opportunities.
But it still takes business smarts, Hannam says. “The challenge is really to sort out the opportunities into ones that are worth pursuing based on their probability of success.”
– This article was originally published in the April 2024 issue of Country Guide.
