The area isn’t for everyone, Charles Forman tells me. Squeezed between three of Canada’s most densely populated urban centres — Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto — farming here is almost eerily anonymous.
Even other farmers across the province or all across the country easily overlook the farming that goes on in eastern Ontario.
Not that the farmers here complain about it. Much of the time, in fact, they’re happy enough to be a kind of island, hidden away on their own.
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But it does involve some special talents, and some special pride.
The rolling land and frequent outcrops of bedrock make the area extremely beautiful, with the region’s lakes making this one of the world’s top vacation havens. But eastern Ontario is home to only 15 per cent of all the farms in Ontario, and a mere 10 per cent of the farms that generate over $1 million in gross farm receipts.
Farmland sells here for less than $10,000 per acre — a potential bargain by Ontario standards. Some land, according to reports, even sells for as little as $2,000 per acre farther from sprawling urban centres.
But it is also extremely challenging to farm, and when visitors try to plot their way to Charles Forman’s farm at Seeley’s Bay, a half-hour northeast of Kingston, they often call en route to ask if they can possibly still be heading in the right direction.
“Coming down our road off of Highway 15, you would think you were heading right into the middle of the Canadian Shield,” Forman explains.
Indeed, when he travels outside the region and tries to describe his operation to other farmers, Forman meets disbelief.
The more you learn, however, the more you become a believer too.
Forman Farms started as a modest 200-acre dairy farm in 1973. Now it includes 2,400 acres of cash crops, nearly 40 acres of field vegetables, a half-acre of greenhouses, a biomass pelletizing operation, land improvement services, custom farmwork for clients spread over as many as 12,000 acres, and a trucking business.
It’s taken the collective efforts of Charles’ wife Christine and two sons, together with a collection of full- and part-time staff to run it all. “We’re spread a little thin here sometimes,” Charles says. “We try to make sure everybody has a job 12 months of the year.”
That ability to successfully manage such a diverse operation anywhere would suggest above-average skills, but in eastern Ontario, it’s downright inspiring.
Southwestern Ontario may think it would be easy, based on the less intense competition for land. But it isn’t all cake. In the east, a lack of critical mass causes logistical nightmares.
“Where we are, we can’t just drive up the road to grab on to a five-tonne buggy of fertilizer when we want it,” Charles says, “so we figured out how to spread fertilizer on frozen ground.” All his lime goes on before spring thaw. He spent a small fortune and did it himself, but every piece of ground he owns or rents is tiled so that he can put anhydrous into the ground before planting with his RTS unit.
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“We have that job all done before everybody else is using anhydrous,” Forman says. Sometimes it means he has to pick up supplies at 2 a.m. but maintaining a 15- to 20-year relationship with the same supplier for all his seed, fertilizer, and chemicals will get him that. “You have to figure out where the loopholes are and how to take advantage of them,” Charles says.
Besides, Forman knows that other farmers can have it even harder. The importance of logistics planning applies exponentially to farmers on the Frontenac Islands, for instance, such as Jason Pyke of Wolfe Island in the middle of the St. Lawrence, closer to New York state than to Kingston.
“It’s harder to farm… period… on an island because all of your inputs in the spring need to come to the island via ferry, and all your commodities in the fall have to leave the island via ferry,” Pyke says. In his case, supplies which classify as dangerous goods like propane and gasoline are only able to come to the island two days a week.
Pyke says competing with mainland farmers for services during peak seasons is also that much more difficult.
“If the feed or seed store can make two or three deliveries on the mainland in the time it takes to do one on Wolfe Island, sometimes they’d rather keep two or three customers happy,” Pyke admits. “We’re fortunate they do their best, but it does add another element to farming.”
Until commodity prices improved in recent years, Pyke says cash cropping alone wasn’t an option to make a decent living on their 600 acres, so they diversified into bison. But it was spreading the family too thin getting to farmers’ markets, even though demand was strong, and there were also safety concerns with such essentially wild animals.
The Pykes now farm 1,000 acres and also rely more on solar and wind energy, and he is grateful to be able to work on the island full time thanks to 300 to 400 acres of custom work for nearby farmers.
“Those who have to work off the island have to be to the ferry an hour before it leaves just to get a space in line, and on a Friday afternoon, when there’re cottagers coming, you could be two hours or more waiting for the ferry,” Pyke says. “It’s a half-day event for us just to go and get parts.”
Pyke says one of the definite drawbacks of farming in eastern Ontario is that there are fewer farm machinery dealerships. Last year that one factor almost forced Graeme and Alex Brown to make a very costly decision on their farm at Belleville, an hour west of Kingston, where they work 1,600 acres and do custom on another 2,000.
“We put a bunch of precision-planting equipment on our planter last year, and we went through last season really getting nothing out of it,” Graeme says. This past winter, while at a conference on the other side of Toronto, he made a casual remark to a dealer about having wasted his money. The dealer wasn’t long in diagnosing that a critical component hadn’t been installed, and offered to come have a look. So now, one year after purchasing it, the Browns finally have their equipment set up right. “I’m positive that precision ag is going to pay back,” Graeme tells me, “but if we hadn’t found that dealer, we would’ve just taken it all off.”
To a degree, Graeme is sympathetic. The saying, “good help is hard to find,” also seems to go double here, he says. “If we don’t get the weather and we don’t have everything come into play, we don’t have the same yield potential. That leads to a lack of willingness to put money into things that might not pay back, forcing retailers into paying low wages and not necessarily having the right support for guys who do want to be on the cutting edge of things.”
But farmers have avoided investing in more than retail services. Brown says he almost had to beg a company to come out and take a sizable chunk of money to grid sample his farm, and still they wouldn’t come until six other farmers got in the line too, just so the company had enough total acres to justify the trip.
Charles Forman says sometimes, you just can’t get any service at all. “When we bought the greenhouse, we didn’t know a thing about it so my wife got on the phone to OMAFRA (the Ontario Agriculture Ministry), who told her they were definitely not coming down this way to ever talk to us.”
Forman says it didn’t matter how many eastern-based greenhouse operations they named, the province’s advisers continued to insist there were no greenhouses in the area and offered zero help.
“We ended up talking to our fertilizer salesman who knew somebody, who knew somebody, who could get us hooked up with a crop consultant that we could pay to come down here,” Forman says, adding that in this part of the agriculture world, you need to figure things out for yourself.
“There’s a lot of things working against us unfortunately, but at the same time, that also works for us because if you are aggressive and business savvy, it leaves all sorts of doors wide open,” Forman says. Necessity has bred some pretty innovative farmers in the area he says, and it has produced a culture of strong farmers. Here, he says, you either sink, or you swim really hard.
