BLUESKY, Alta. – When George and Pat Monner went to the bank for a berry farm expansion, they had an elaborate proposal.
The neatly bound plan projected profits, losses, expenses and trends in minute detail.
But Pat doesn’t think the bankers even looked at the proposal: “Anything in the business plan was irrelevant. They just wanted to know if we both had jobs.”
It’s a bit discouraging, but the northern Alberta couple hopes the emerging berry industry will soon be mature enough to be treated like any other agriculture business when working with banks.
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“If we can get two or three people in Western Canada making a living, then it’s only a matter of time before bankers will treat berry farming the same,” said George.
It’s been 10 years since the Monners planted their first saskatoon bush on the quarter section of land east of Bluesky. It should be possible for them to go fruit farming full time in another two years.
Plan processing facility
Despite the slow financial start, the Monners are still keen on the venture. This spring they plan to build a permanent cleaning and processing facility at the farm. It will include almost $100,000 worth of equipment. The state-of-the art facility will allow them to cool, clean, freeze and package the berries before shipping them to a warehouse in Edmonton.
The building will also house Pat’s accounting business and offices for their two daughters going to school at home. Now, everyone is shoehorned into the farm house.
Looking back, they don’t regret their decision to go into berry farming. It showed more promise than grain farming at the time and George didn’t want to return to the family poultry and grain farm in southern Alberta.
Plants preferred
“It doesn’t bother you so much when a strawberry plant dies,” said George, a farm management specialist with Alberta Agriculture.
They would do a few things differently, though. They planted only a few acres of several different crops the first years. They reasoned if one crop failed they wouldn’t make really expensive mistakes.
“We started slowly and in hindsight we wish we’d started big,” he said.
In three more years they hope to have 25 to 30 acres of saskatoons, chokecherries, raspberries and a variety of other bushes bearing fruit on their farm. Their strawberry patch, however, will be plowed up in the spring. Over the years they have kept track of the expenses and profits of each crop and strawberries were more work for less money, and they required another line of equipment.
Concentrating on bush crops will allow the Monners to use their modified raspberry harvester on all the crops. They can also extend their harvest season and hire employees longer.
They bought the second-hand raspberry harvester from Washington three years ago. It allowed them to harvest their crops when they wanted, not wait in line for the government harvester on lease to berry producers.
“It works as well or better than the government harvester does. It was a brute of a thing that would rip the trees out by the roots,” said Pat.
The Monners were lucky. Last year they were one of the few fruit farms that even harvested saskatoons. The wet, cool season was ideal for the disease entomosporium, which wiped out entire crops across the Prairies.
Instead of harvesting their usual 8,164 kilogram crop, they took off only 2,721 kg. That was enough fruit to cover their farm loan. If it had been a normal harvest it would have been their first profitable year.
Pat is developing her own variety of seedless saskatoon berries cultivated from her grandparent’s homestead south of Griffin Creek. The fruit is bigger, has stronger flavor and seems resistant to entomosporium. They will test one more year to see if this strain really is seedless or a fluke of nature.
Another trial is their pup Ember. It’s a mix of Anatolian, Pyrenees and Maremma sheep dog. Traditionally these European breeds guard flocks of sheep from predators. The Monners hope once the pup knows its orchard territory it will keep the coyotes, moose and deer out of the orchard.
“If it doesn’t work we’ll have two big useless farm dogs,” said Pat.
