A baking, poultry and produce business is earning extra income for a Saskatchewan family while providing valuable life lessons for their children.
Janet and Kevin Groat and their children, Andrew, Janaya, Jeffrey and Seth, all play a role on the farm at Ethleton.
That role has increased since the family’s home-based business began four years ago and sales tripled for Janet, an avid gardener.
A former counsellor with a degree in psychology, she started Groat Farms to allow her to stay home with her school-aged children and provide extra income.
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“It teaches them a valuable lesson and teaches them to work for what they get,” Groat said.
The oldest two receive wages that help pay for sports, school and church activities that include a Christian rock band. This focus reflects how Groat was raised by her parents, Lorne and Vivian Larson, who help with weekly baking sessions in the farm house kitchen.
“The business mushroomed and she needed help and we came to her rescue,” Lorne said while removing cookies from baking trays as Vivian checked the oven.
Groat uses an expansive kitchen to prepare fresh produce during the growing season and buns, bread, pies and cookies year round for local consumers. She adds specialty items such as chocolate trays at Christmas and also handles catering jobs.
The children provide the labour, feeding the 150 naturally raised chickens and 30 turkeys and picking produce on the four-acre home site that they rent. Eight kilometres away, Kevin’s parents, Edward and Jean, maintain a half-section farm growing peas, wheat and barley, some of which is ground for Janet’s baking.
The family keeps ahead of weeds by transplanting produce started in a greenhouse into the garden. That also helps them get the jump on the competition, providing fresh produce early in the growing season and spreading out the picking the season.
In addition to vegetables and pumpkins, they also sell wild berries picked by the Larsons.
“Three days of picking and they’re sold in 30 minutes,” Lorne said.
They all agree the home-based food business benefits from busy lifestyles, working families, a trend to eating local and a large rural senior population.
“I don’t come back with a whole lot of anything,” Groat said of her trips to the Melfort Farmers’ Market.
Added her father: “Seniors say it’s cheaper to buy a tray than buy all the ingredients.”
The family also markets its poultry, grain and baking through its website at www.janetsbaking.com and by word of mouth advertising.
The scents of ginger, cinnamon and yeast fill the kitchen but fail to tempt the bakers at work this day.
“You make so much, you don’t want to eat it,” Groat said.
She said the business was a natural choice for someone with a big garden, which she has enlarged twice since she started.
Lorne handles the gardening fieldwork, while Vivian, who maintains 136 potted plants in her own gardens in town, manages the greenhouse with her daughter.
The Groats chose their farm site because of its access to good water and irrigation from a nearby creek. They buy chicks from the Melfort Co-op and bulk buy supplies from a Saskatoon wholesale store.
Kevin built a warming oven, created the website, maintains machinery and helps with chores. A professional agrologist who works full-time as a regional manager with the Saskatchewan Assessment Management Agency, he keeps himself organized with his BlackBerry.
“There’s a lot on my to-do list.”
Citing his relationship with God and his family as his top priorities, he said: “I make time for the things that are most important to get done.”
The labour intensive business of farming, raising a family, off-farm work and a looming retirement for the senior Groats, who have farmed for 62 years, mean changes on the horizon for the operation.
The Groats plan to take a year off from the poultry and rent the grain farm, but anticipate at least another four years of market gardening.
While life moves at a hectic pace for the Groats, they take time away together every year.
“That’s the beauty of being employed like this, we can just take off to camp with our fifth wheel,” Janet said.
