INNISFAIL, Alta. – A farm diversification experiment started in 1986 has turned into a success story for Rod and Shelley Bradshaw.
Owners of Beck Farms, the couple moved away from grain and cattle production to grow vegetables on their Innisfail area farm. They earn enough to support the family and they embrace new growing and marketing ideas.
“Every year we try to learn a little bit more,” said Shelley, who hosted a farm tour group from Red Deer County this spring.
When they married, the farm consisted of grain and cattle. There was not enough available or affordable land in the area so they explored other ideas and with two partners decided to grow carrots. They are now sole owners and the original farm has been split with Rod’s brother, Gordon, who took over the purebred Angus cattle operation.
Read Also
Nutritious pork packed with vitamins, essential minerals
Recipes for pork
They farm about 500 acres of grain as a part of a rotation. To save money they gave up all their equipment and have the grain side custom done.
The vegetable operation includes 35 acres of carrots and eight acres of kohl crops including five varieties of cabbage, three types of cauliflower, two broccoli varieties and kohlrabi. They also grow dill and beets as well as an acre of parsnips.
Until a few years ago they had 200 acres of seed potatoes, but a bacterial ring rot infection with its subsequent three year quarantine period made them abandon that effort and concentrate on other vegetables.
Using seed imported from New York, Shelley plants Nantes carrots with a special air seeder while kohl crops are transplanted from seedlings grown for them by neighbour Leona Staples.
The Staples and Bradshaws are part of a five family co-operative called Innisfail Growers, which was formed to sell their fruit and vegetables at farmers’ markets from Sherwood Park to Calgary.
The major sales venue is the year round market in Calgary. It is open three days a week and as many as 30,000 people per day pass through.
“It’s a real challenge to place fresh produce there year round,” Shelley said.
At the height of the season, vegetables are picked and sold within 24 hours and this year they were able to supply bagged carrots until May.
To fill the gaps, the growers also offer freezer lamb and beef, firewood and homemade pickles produced in Shelley’s commercial on-farm kitchen. She makes honey mustard, carrot pickles, rhubarb relish, crabapple jelly, soups and ready-made coleslaw.
At one time the Bradshaws grew more carrots and dealt with wholesalers placing Beck Farm carrots in IGA and Co-op stores. Selling direct to customers turns more profit so they can grow fewer acres of carrots.
This is a labour intensive business because much of the sorting and packing is done by hand.
The carrots are washed, bagged and packed in a special facility on the farm. They also built special cold storage to keep the carrots at 1 C with 98 percent humidity.
Some years are more difficult than others. Last year the rainy weather produced tasty carrots, but they were covered with mud. About 15,000 gallons of water were used daily to wash them. The wastewater goes to a settling pond and later the topsoil is dredged out and put back on the land.
Finding good help is a major problem every year.
So far they have hired eight Canadian workers and two Mexican labourers come each year. More people are needed. It is seasonal, assembly line work requiring long hours. The Mexicans do the fieldwork, hoeing rows of vegetables, hand weeding and pruning.
The agronomics of growing vegetables is an ongoing lesson.
Carrots are planted from the last week of April to the middle of June.
This year the Bradshaws added green plastic mulch around some of the cabbages to control weeds and to maintain consistent soil moisture and temperature. Weeds in the carrot rows are sprayed or hoed out because the harvester won’t work in a weedy field.
Root maggots are a problem so chemical control is used when the plants are young. They switch to biological controls later in the season.
Other pests include gophers. This spring, the rodents ate 1,500 new transplants that had to be replaced.
Despite the hard work, the Bradshaws’ two teenaged sons are hooked on farming and plan to return after they graduate from the Olds College horticulture program. They look after the kohlrabi and sell it at the farmers’ markets.
