GUELPH, Ont. – It didn’t take long for Peter Johnson to discover he would need to do more than deliver organic salad greens to restaurants if he was to become a successful farmer.
That’s how the Vermont native started his business on four acres of cleared ground.
Little more than a decade later, Johnson and partner Meg Gardner net $250,000 a year from almost $1.5 million in sales on their 220 acre farm at Craftsbury, Vermont, 50 kilometres from the Quebec border.
“Pete’s Greens started with nothing, no financing. We basically self-financed our expansions,” Johnson told the Guelph Organic Conference in January.
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“There’s very little worrying about debt. There’s enough risk with farming anyway.”
He credits marketing diversity for their success.
The farm is a mix of good bottomland, grazing ground and nonagricultural sections.
There are now 50 acres of vegetables, 30 acres of cover crops, 80 acres of grazing ground for pigs, chickens and cattle, 1.5 acres of greenhouse space and extensive winter storage. Space on the bottom floor of their old farmhouse has been turned into a commercial kitchen.
Four profit centres generate the cash flow.
The community shared agriculture (CSA) initiative, launched three and a half years ago, features two 17 week programs and an 18 week program.
It has 200 to 350 subscribers, depending on the season, who pay $45 per week. Shares are delivered to several pick-up locations.
“We find the CSA is the easiest way to sell food,” Johnson said. “Usually it’s the first thing farmers come to.”
The on-farm store brought in more than $56,000 last year, Gardner said. It’s open from June to mid-October with sales conducted through a self-serve, honour system.
Sales at the seasonal Saturday farmers’ market net $3,000 to $6,000.
Restaurant sales remain an important part of the business, despite misgivings.
“Sometimes restaurants go out of business and have owed us money,” Johnson said. “If restaurants are a big part of your business, deal with a lot of them.”
Regular restaurant deliveries also allow Johnson to pick up waste grease. After a multistage settling process, 5,000 gallons a year are used to heat greenhouse space.
The farm spends $300,000 buying supplies and paying six year-round staff and five or six seasonal employees. Experienced workers earn $15 to $16 per hour and as much as $20.
A major capital expense was the cost of renovating an old dairy barn to wash, store and pack crops
Johnson also makes substantial investments in gently used or new equipment, including a small excavator used to turn compost and for construction, and three tractors, including a 100 horsepower John Deere.
Field crop management is straight- forward. A chisel plow and disc harrow are used for primary tillage, while cover crops and compost, which is a combination of dairy manure and waste dairy feed, as well as chicken manure and mined sodium nitrate, provide most of the nutrients.
The primary tool for weed management is a tine-weeder, which works well on the farm’s loamy soil. It is used two or three times before planting at 10 mph, which covers a lot of ground and reduces weed pressure.
A Sutton Seeder is used to plant greens, 16 rows to a 36 inch bed. These are harvested once with either tractor-pulled or hand equipment.
Johnson said the farm’s winter CSA program is popular with customers. This past January one of the weekly shares included corn meal, goat cheese, cabbage, frozen pizza dough, dill pickles, sprouts and greens, frozen tomatoes, two types of potatoes, turnips, onions and garlic.
The winter program is delivered through a combination of stored root crops, greenhouse production, a grow room for sprouts, freezer space, supplier alliances and the commercial kitchen.
“We’ve only been doing large amounts of stored crops for three or four years and we have tons to learn,” Johnson said.
The farm put up 250,000 pounds of root crops last year, bagging them unwashed for storage. They are stacked to the ceiling in storage rooms where humidity and temperature can be controlled.
Apple sauce, chicken stock, pureed squash, sauerkraut and pickles are prepared in the 900 sq. foot commercial kitchen using two large-capacity cookers, a 40 gallon steam kettle and a 40 gallon tilt skillet.
Johnson has bought used tractor-trailer freezers for frozen storage. Coated with spray insulation, they’re a cost-effective option.
For sprout production, a system of radiant floor heating and overhead lights were installed in an old hen house. The seeds are first soaked and then spread on trays of compost. They take five to 12 days to grow, depending on the seed type.
“Usually, we’re getting about 350 lb. of shoots out of there each week,” Johnson said. “We’re able to wholesale 100 lb. at $8 a lb. Each of our winter shares receive a half pound a week.”
The farm has several types of greenhouses, heated and unheated, moveable and permanent, which can grow a wide selection of greens and other crops during the winter.
The moveable greenhouses are 35 by 200 feet, which Johnson shifts lengthwise using two, 40 h.p. tractors equipped with winches in a 20 minute operation.
The greenhouses are changed from hot weather to cold weather crops at the end of October and then back again in the spring.
One winter strategy involves placing greenhouses over sites where heat pipe has been buried 16 to 18 inches deep and 18 inches apart for even heat distribution. Johnson uses a subsoiler for the job.
Radiant heating has been installed in concrete floors and forced-air heating is also used.
Johnson said Vermont has seen a rapid growth in the “locavore” or “buy local” movement over the past three or four years.
“There’s now probably 30 CSAs, if not more, in Vermont, a state with just 600,000 people,” he said.
“We all try to tell our own story.… Our scale has helped us. We’ve been able to hold our price and in some cases reduce it a little. I don’t mind being known as being a little more expensive, as long as we have a reputation for quality and service.”
