Have you ever met a young farmer who was fresh out of ideas?
Neither have we.
The utter thrill of getting into farming for the first time is incomparable. The freedom to make one’s own decisions and, rightly or wrongly, see those decisions through.
Read Also
Is your parents’ accountant the best fit for the farm?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/D3DJQxJROoU How can you tell your parents that the accountant they’ve had for years might not currently be the best…
With time, of course, farmers gain perspective. Perhaps those older voices offering advice weren’t so out to lunch after all. And maybe some of the highly idealistic goals the rookie farmers set for themselves weren’t as far-fetched as others might have thought. There’s always a balance.
Country Guide was curious about what 10 years does to a person in the farming business. Did the farm and all its supposed glory live up to the hype? Surpass it? Fall short? Also, what’s different then versus now? Is what’s different better, worse or simply just different?
Two Quebec farmers share their thoughts on what it’s like to farm in 2025, and beyond, with 10 and 12 years’ experience under their belt.
Vergers Rockburn Orchards, Hinchinbrooke, Quebec
When Laurie Ann Prevost and Roger Duheme Jr. decided that a conventional 9-5 life wouldn’t cut it, they didn’t quite know where that would take them. It was 2012 in Huntingdon, Que., and Duheme was working in construction while Prevost was studying business administration.
“I thought maybe we can get a little farm and do something,” says Prevost.
While Duheme had some level of familiarity with farms having worked at a couple over the years, Prevost was a complete greenhorn but knew that an office job was not her calling as she trudged through a mandatory internship.
They found an apple orchard for sale by longtime farmers in nearby Hinchinbrooke. Prevost’s father financially backed their farm purchase: 125 ready-made acres (40 acres of which are apple orchards), a sizeable controlled-atmosphere storage, 3,000 maple syrup taps and plenty of room for their imagination to run wild.
From day one, it’s been a grind.
“Right away, we jumped right into it,” says Prevost. “The previous owners helped us out and quickly taught us a few little things, but it was very intense from the start.
“It’s a lot more work than I thought it would be. Everyone thinks it must be so nice and peaceful living on the farm. No, no, no. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot more complicated than what I was expecting it to be.”
The first thing they learned was that they were doing a lot with a lot. The 40 acres of apples were all dwarf trees, and each tree requires an 8’ x 16’ plot. An apple-heavy region, many other producers in the area were moving away from the dwarves and replanting with tall and thin super-spindle trees that only require a 3’ x 12’ plot. Having 1,210 trees/ac. is much more efficient than the previous 340/ac.
“And the yield is higher,” says Prevost.
They grow nine varieties, including Ambrosia, McIntosh, Honeycrisp and the ultra popular Ginger Gold. In addition to the apples, they now plant and manage one acre of blueberries and have 3,000 maple syrup taps.
Duheme primarily looks after the orchard and Prevost manages the back end, which has come to mean a lot of paperwork and screen time. From day one, she was quickly introduced to the heavy administrative load that’s behind every farm, no matter the size or scope. They received Canada GAP (Good Agricultural Practices) program certification and also had to create a fertilizer management plan, which must be signed off by an agronomist. These were just the basics, but it was burdensome.
“Any type of business was a lot, but farming was even more, and I didn’t know there were all these additional environmental regulations,” says Prevost.
Even though her educational background was business administration, Prevost says the schoolwork did not prepare her for when she was in charge of a business and the pressure is on 24/7.
“What you study in school is still not enough to prepare you for real life,” she says.
One area in which she has become a relative expert is in procuring foreign workers. When they first began, they employed 34 locals to pick apples for a couple of months during harvest season. In 2018, out of those 34 pickers they ended up with just four, the majority lost to attrition for various reasons.
“That year, 25 per cent of our crop was on the ground because I didn’t have the people to pick the fruit,” she says. “People don’t understand that when an apple is ready to be harvested, it has to be picked or it’s going to drop to the ground within a week or two. It’s very time-sensitive and getting people was very difficult.”
For the following year’s harvest they employed 12 Mexican workers, none of whom quit, and only a few very keen locals, all of whom have since retired.
Their farm is more labour intensive than others, as well. They still rely on ladders whereas more sophisticated farms use platforms.
Now, they manage 20 acres of trees and will slowly turn over the entire orchard to tall spindle. In 2026, they will plant two acres of high-density orchard at a cost of about $40,000/ac. when posts, wire and anchors are included.
Their move to plant certain varieties is very deliberate. They once thought a good apple was a good apple, but that’s not quite the case. Varieties like McIntosh and Cortland are well known but costlier, more difficult to grow with the changing climate and don’t sell as fast. They have cut down 20 acres of unproductive Mcintosh and Cortland trees since starting.
“But planting orchards is very expensive. So, we didn’t plant as fast as what we thought we would, but it’s okay because a smaller orchard is easier to manage.”
It’s clear to Prevost that had they known then what they know now, the orchard would be converted incrementally each year.
“I would have started replanting the orchard sooner to have trees in production by now, because we didn’t start replanting until 2020. We would have better varieties now and more income to stay more competitive.”
She encourages would-be farmers to be resilient, especially if things go south, which is not an if-and-then, but an if-and-when scenario.
“Someone who works with a paycheque, you get your paycheque every week, it is what it is. But us? We can work all year, harvest our fruit, put it in storage and lose everything in storage and end with zero money.”
Beyond that, farmers and managers must get comfortable with the idea that they will either have to hire a person to do all the non-farming tasks or look after it themselves. Even though she knew she didn’t want to work in an office, Prevost admits her schooling has come in handy to manage all the paperwork she’s tasked with.
She does submit, though, that she essentially has a desk job, not a farming job.
“I spend more time sitting at a computer than I get to be outside working in my trees and doing the fun stuff,” she says.
These days it seems as though there’s always one more task to take care of, and her efforts are rarely enough to climb out from under the work.
As the farm progresses, Prevost’s goal is to continue to diversify, possibly secure more maple syrup tap leases and, overall, drive dollars up and hours down.
“My aim is not to be bigger, it’s to make more profit with less effort,” she says.
Les Jardins Glenelm (Glenelm Gardens), Elgin, Quebec
You don’t plant flowers in February, for obvious reasons. It’s also not advised to plant vegetables into heavy clay soil that hasn’t been worked in a century, as farmers Ian Ward and Sarah Rennie can attest.
Now with a decade of farming experience growing vegetables, they attribute their success to hard work, trial and error, and timely mentorship.
They first became curious about agriculture when they volunteered to be a drop spot for a local community supported agriculture (CSA) operation. Ward, who always had a green thumb growing up in Toronto, Ont., was more than open to the idea of producing vegetables himself. When he and Rennie moved into their 1.5-acre property in 2013, the dream was there, they just had to make it come to life.
“I took a season to figure out whether we had soil that could be farmed because that wasn’t a guarantee,” explains Ward.
He grew a couple of test beds, sold the vegetables to restaurants in the nearby town of Huntingdon and had a positive reception. “So, we just decided to keep going and expand and keep growing it.”
When he got serious about growing produce, though, the first issue to tackle was just about staring him in the face. Four-and-a-half foot tall weeds dominated the property along with small scrub brush intermingled among immature trees.
Ward describes the overgrowth as “tenacious” and soon came to realize the problem below the surface was even bigger than what was above. The region is built on heavy blue clay that is as unforgiving as it sounds.
“I made my first few beds with a pickaxe,” says Ward with a grin.
His Italian-made BCS rotary plow, which he describes as a “rototiller on steroids,” is a two-wheel walk-behind tractor used to loosen the soil. The couple became stuck multiple times and Rennie describes both of them being “thrown like a rodeo bull” at various times thinking they had hit a rock when it was just a particularly troublesome lump of clay. “I was hanging on for dear life as my feet definitely left the ground a few times,” says Ward.
A neighbour came in with his machinery and plowed it for them. He estimated the ground hadn’t been worked in 100 years.
The first two years are aptly described as “backbreaking labour.” Some beds fared better than others and Ward contended with the heavily waterlogged soil. Eventually he thought it may be best to tackle the moisture issue from the outside for long-term success. He trenched a line around the property with a backhoe and was glad he did but was shocked all the same.
“We made the right decision because there was water pouring out from the trench like a faucet on full blast,” he says. “All that water would have been seeping into our field. No wonder we weren’t able to drain it properly.
“There were a couple of years there when we realized very quickly that we were not going to be getting the yields that we were seeing in farming books or pulling out $1,000 per bed. It just wasn’t going to happen. We weren’t in that game yet, so we had to grow our market very slowly,” he says. “We worked on our soil, we worked on our own skills, built it up little by little, keeping an eye on expenses, keeping things relatively cheap, so that we didn’t get ahead of ourselves because we knew we couldn’t justify a big investment.”
Their soil continually forced them to use the BCS to keep the ground loose enough to allow for root establishment.
It wasn’t until year four they began to reap consistently good yields and produce a quality product.
“We spent three or four years figuring out how to get decent yields on soil that was too wet,” says Ward. “It was never going to give us the yields that we were looking for when the roots can only go down three or four inches before they hit water. That was an eye-opener for us.”
Over the course of their first four years, they built four unheated, passive solar greenhouses, each 100 feet long and ranging between 20 to 26 feet wide. The first was constructed on skis so that it could be moved relatively easy.
It was in 2019, with four tunnels up and running well, that Ward began to search for additional land to grow more space-consuming crops such as potatoes and squash. A few minutes up the road, local CSA pioneers Jamie Quinn and his wife Nora Johnston were looking to rent out one of their fields, a 2.5-acre plot with pristine soil. They knew the blue clay so well that their farm is named after their mastery of it: Ferme la Terre Bleue.
Inspecting Quinn’s field, Ward remembers plunging his hand into soil adjacent to carrots that was so fine it felt like sand. Ward was beyond excited at the prospect of having soil that was 30-plus years ahead of his in terms of stewardship.
“I hadn’t dreamed that our soil could be that light and fluffy,” he says.
Quinn had modified a plow into straight knives and was cutting the soil up 12 inches deep, which gave crops the necessary breathing room to grow and thrive.
And Quinn challenged him on ideas about row spacing. Ward was open-minded enough to hear him out and he’s glad he did.
“The main thing that I’ve learned from that farm is that I’ve moved from a focus on maximum density to maximum efficiency,” he shares. “In some cases, maximum efficiency does mean taking advantage of the highest density that I can get, but in other cases, it’ll be spacing things out quite a bit to make sure that I can weed them effectively. I never thought I’d grow more carrots on three rows than six.”
Today, the couple grow enough produce to support 120 families through a CSA and they also sell at local markets.
Their tools have changed to a degree, but the BCS is still the number one implement. They also have a 40-hp tractor at the 2.5-acre site, and they use a subsoiler attachment for the BCS. Ward says it’s less efficient, but it’s the right tool, especially considering he can’t get a tractor inside his tunnels.
The subsoiler can make 10- to 12-inch-deep furrows in the soil without pulverizing it, which allows the air to come up, and a good environment for micro-organisms to thrive.
“We’re still using compost but we’re also providing the micro-organisms with the conditions they need to improve the soil for us,” Ward says.
They also acquired a Power Ox, a 3.5-hp, two-wheeled weeding tractor which means they can work two or three rows at a time. It cost him less than $10,000 and is invaluable for what it allows him to do — for instance, he can weed three rows of carrots in a 60-inch bed simultaneously in only 10 minutes and eliminate 90-plus per cent of weeds.
All these innovations, along with mentorship from Quinn and Johnston, have helped their farm immensely. Still, times are tough in 2025, and Ward admits their sales are not where he wants them to be. People buy local for various reasons and at various times, but not all the time. “Local farms,” he says, “don’t need your support. They need your commitment.” He says prolonged uncertainty, which set in around 2021, has made it difficult to grow their market share.
Yet they grow.
This fall they intend to build their first heated greenhouse but even with grants, it will cost close to $100,000. It’s a big gamble, but Ward is confident and plans to bet on himself. He believes he can do better in a heated year-round greenhouse that will measure 100’ x 42’ x 18’.
And after all the hard work battling the clay over the years, Ward has actually come to embrace it. The clay produces a distinct taste that many have come to know and expect from their produce.
“While it is a royal pain in the butt to work with, it does produce higher-quality vegetables, more nutritious vegetables, and more phytonutrients,” he says. “You can actually taste the difference pretty clearly.”
Even though he has “never worked so hard to earn a dollar” in his life, Ward says the massively improved, well-drained soil produces quality crops year in, year out.
He encourages young farmers and would-be farmers to understand their soil before they get too far down the path.
“You can’t underestimate drainage. Vegetables will not grow in wet soil. That’s something that we learned the hard way,” he shares.
Ward also challenges farmers to be honest with themselves about their farm and where the pinch points are and lean into them. Although it sounds counterintuitive, he believes it will pay some of the biggest dividends for the average produce farmer.
“Think about what your limiting factor is, whether that’s time or space and try to maximize your efficiency on that indicator,” he says. “Don’t just assume that because one is working for the farmer down the road, that that’s what’s going to be best for you.
“It’s also dangerous to try to think that you can do everything. It’s really easy to get lost trying to do everything and doing nothing well. Control what you can and make one small, good decision after another. After a while, it usually adds up to a positive outcome.”
So, after 10 years, is he in it for the long haul?
“The biggest surprise for me is that I still really enjoy what I do despite knowing that I’d earn more doing just about anything else,” he says with a laugh.
