CALGARY – At first glance, there’s little to distinguish Terry Willard’s acreage from those of his neighbours in the urban sprawl that is relentlessly spreading west of Calgary.
Granted, the house is a bit smaller than the others and a set of solar panels and two sleek, modern windmills do look out of place.
But the three greenhouses aren’t much bigger than what can be found in any urban backyard and the long, narrow black mounds could belong to any gardening enthusiast with room to spare.
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When he moved here 14 years ago, Willard did so for the same reasons that drove his neighbours – an urge to flee the big city and a desire to live in the country.
“For the lack of a better word, it’s almost like a gentleman’s hobby farm more than anything else,” he said.
But Willard isn’t just another lawyer, doctor or stockbroker looking to escape the rat race.
He is the owner of Wild Rose Wholistic Clinic, a large natural health clinic in downtown Calgary where 15 practitioners practise such healing arts as herbology, homeopathy and acupuncture.
And Chiron Farm, named after the mythical centaur who was Hippocrates’ teacher, is more than Willard’s country playground. It provides many of the herbs that are used to make the medicines prescribed at the clinic.
It serves as a teaching farm for students studying herbal medicine at the Wild Rose College of Natural Healing, a natural medicine school of which Willard is the major shareholder.
It performs product research for the Wild Rose Herb Co., a herbal medicine manufacturer and distributor in which Willard owns shares.
And it is a source of seeds that Willard sells to commercial herb producers across the Prairies.
He is the first to admit that the farm is not his most profitable venture, taking a backseat to the clinic, school and herbal medicine manufacturer.
“(The farm does) have some true commercial enterprises all the way along,” he said. “We just haven’t streamlined them to actually make a profit as well as we could.”
Be that as it may, Chiron remains dear to Willard’s heart. From early May to late September, he reduces his schedule at the clinic, where he is the senior practitioner, and spends four or five days a week at the farm.
“I’d rather spend time there.”
It’s easy to see why. The farm is a peaceful place, with Willard’s five employees quietly going about their business tending to 150 kinds of organic herbs.
“It’s certainly not big business. It’s certainly not big tractors,” Willard said. “It’s rototillers; an intensive garden.”
With only five acres and no room to expand, the farm will continue to experiment with what he calls the “intensive landscaping thing,” figuring out how to grow more plants on the same amount of land.
Despite the windmills and solar panels that allow the farm to stay off the electrical grid for most of the year, Chiron is very much a low tech operation. No computers open and close windows in the greenhouses and no fancy irrigation systems keep the gardens watered.
“Mostly we try to create large amounts of heat sinks,” he said.
“So we’ll have barrels of water and rock, and all that kind of stuff. We’re very interested in alternative technologies, but low-tech alternative technologies.”
In some ways, a small farm makes perfect business sense. Many of the herbal medicines used at the Calgary clinic don’t require large fields of production.
“Sometimes you only need 10 plants to produce five gallons of herbal formula.”
The farm is also well suited to experiment with new herbs, something the Wild Rose Herb Co. is too large to tackle efficiently. It can grow the herbs in small batches and process them with what Willard calls crude grinding equipment in the acreage’s barn. If he likes the results, he may continue to produce the formula on the farm and limit sales to the clinic, or he may ask the herb company to procure a larger supply from commercial producers and get it processed in a facility in Penticton, B.C., for distribution across Canada.
This intricate network of businesses began in the early 1970s when Willard was studying environmental biology at the University of Calgary. He wrote a paper on local edible medicinal plants and his professor encouraged him to write a book on the subject.
Taking the advice to heart, he moved to the woods, bought a teepee, and lived off the land. From there he met a medicine man to apprentice under and eventually began teaching his own classes. He earned a PhD in health science, opened the clinic and college in 1975 and started the herb company in 1982.
When he decided to become a herb farmer in 1990, he had no agricultural experience, other than working the occasional weekend on other people’s farms.
“It was definitely from scratch,” he said. “But you know, over the last 15 years or so … you get to learn a lot of little tricks, and that’s the fun part of it.”
