Alternative farmers are an eclectic bunch, but even in that group, Gert Janssens stands out as different.
The 38-year-old is a city guy from Belgium who became an economist to finance his “naïve” dream of raising cattle, Tamworth pigs, sheep, poultry and honey on a small farm in Québec.
If you want some out-of-the-box thinking, Janssens is your man.
“I always wanted to farm,” says the native of Antwerp.
“I don’t know why. I’m a city boy, right? But a lot of people believe alternative agriculture could save the world. I know it’s a naïve notion, but that was the idea we started with.”
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He met his wife, Sarah Hui, while travelling abroad, and they dreamed of farming in her home province of Quebec. The tricky bit was figuring out how.
“I knew I’d need a lot of money to farm, and that farming wouldn’t pay enough,” says Janssens. “So I went back to school to be able to farm.”
The couple scrimped and saved for a dozen years while Janssens earned his masters degree in Belgium. A faculty position at Montréal’s Dawson College allowed them to buy a 400-acre farm 40 kilometres east of Sherbrooke, and in 2011 they started Ferme D’Orée.
Having worked so hard to get started, Janssens jokes he is almost fanatical about finances, rigorously analyzing each enterprise.
“People in alternative agriculture tend to be newer to farming and, in general, more aware of their costs,” he says.
“A lot of farmers say, ‘well, it’s not going too bad.’ But they’re not counting all their costs. So they’re working a lot and making very little, aside from the appreciation of the farm.”
What he admires about mainstream operations is their efficiency.
“Conventional farms are way more productive, way more organized, and way more efficient.”
However, they also have a fundamental problem, Janssens adds.
“A large group of farmers are selling commodities to a few companies with a lot of market power. They’re buying fertilizer, seed and machinery from a very small group of very big firms, too. So they’re in the middle, getting squeezed like a lemon, and they have to grow all the time to survive.”
In contrast, Ferme D’ORee has many customers and they pay premium prices because the farm, although not certified organic, doesn’t use chemical fertilizers, pesticides, hormones or antibiotics. Its business model also relies on economies of scope, the lesser-known cousin of economies of scale.
“Economies of scope is when you use the same process to do two different things,” says Janssens.
There’s a production aspect to this line of thinking, such as pigs rooting (and fertilizing) old pastures to prepare the ground for reseeding.
But the big payoff is in marketing.
“We deliver all kinds of meat to our clients. They don’t have to go to us for beef and someone else for pork or chicken.”
And because customers are buying a lot at once, Janssens can distribute his meat at drop-off locations with two evening runs once a month.
Production is still small: 25 calves, 150 lambs, 100 pigs and six barrels of honey last year.
But the farm is profitable and revenue has doubled every year. Further expansion is planned.
“Small may be beautiful, but it will not remain beautiful for very long if owners are not aptly compensated for their hard work,” he says.
“The main thing for us is to follow the client base. As it grows, we add product. But we always run out because we’re too scared to grow too fast.”
Janssens and Hui have created a different way of farming by asking two key questions: what is my ad-vantage and will this still be a winning strategy in the future?
Janssens pays as much attention to the future as the here-and-now. That’s a smart strategy for any business.
