Farmers are famous for their ability to tough out bad times, but Francis Allard knows the benefits of being open to change.
Allard grew up on a vegetable farm near Saint-Roch de l’Achigan, 40 kilometres north of Montréal. He didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of his father, Mario, but he also wasn’t keen on being stuck behind a desk, either. So after earning a degree in mechanical engineering, he started looking for alternatives and discovered willows.
“I wanted to try something new,” says the 31-year-old.
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“At the time, biomass was very promising. There was a lot of talk about second generation biofuels, and oil prices were rising very rapidly, so it looked like a very good opportunity.”
Allard and his friend, Olivier Payette, launched Agro Énergie in 2006 by seeding 50,000 20-centimetre-long willow cuttings in neat rows on 10 acres of his father’s farm. Those little sticks grew like mad: in just three years, they were five metres high, with each acre yielding 10 to 15 tonnes of willow to be dried and chipped into a renewable green heating fuel.
But before that first harvest, the world changed.
“Each year we expanded our acreage,” says Allard. “But then in 2008, there was the big crash, both in the economy and in energy prices.”
Then came fracking, which sent production of natural gas soaring and prices plunging. Natural gas is the heating fuel of choice for greenhouses and industrial buildings, which is the market they were targeting.
“We’re still doing projects with biomass and its potential is still very good,” he says. “But with natural gas prices so low, it’s difficult to get a quick payback with biomass right now.”
At that point, it would have been tempting to grind it out and re-double their efforts to convince potential customers that willow biomass was their best long-term choice.
But then a new opportunity — or rather, a partial one — came along. To their credit, Allard and Payette were smart enough to recognize it and nimble enough to seize it. Allard got a call from a company selling a new type of noise barrier. It wanted willows for the outer covering of a fence containing sound-absorbing mineral fibres called rockwool.
“I was not so excited about just supplying the raw materials,” says Allard.
“But because I have a mechanical engineering degree with a specialization in industrial engineering, I thought maybe we could do the whole thing and have a value-added product.”
So in March 2009, Allard visited the Danish company PileByg, which has 20 years experience building willow-clad noise-abatement barriers, a more visually appealing alternative to those concrete walls you see along busy highways in urban areas. The young Québecois was warmly received and negotiated a deal to become PileByg’s North American distributor.
Les Écrans Verts was born and began selling and building noise barriers as well as living willow fences, a green alternative to regular fences.
The company’s name in English is Green Barrier.
It was a great opportunity, but it also meant putting biomass on the back burner for a while.
“We were basically starting a new company,” he says.
“The product was very different, the market was different and now we were dealing with city planners, landscape companies and architects. It was a very different world.”
This time, their timing was perfect. Noise pollution is a growing issue: people are less tolerant of it and less willing to accept barriers that look like “prison walls,” Allard notes. So business is (quietly) booming for Les Écrans Verts. It now has 10 employees during the construction season, is expanding into southern Ontario and plans to enter the eastern United States within a few years.
Biomass has a bright future, but Allard says he couldn’t let his belief in it blind him to other opportunities.
“An entrepreneur has to be flexible,” he says.
“The vision you start with can completely change five years later. This is life. Maybe in five years, we’ll be someplace else.”
The recent good times have prompted many farmers to retool their businesses, whether by aggressively expanding, adopting a high-cost, big-yield production style or entering new areas such as custom work or direct marketing local food.
As long as it works, great. But if the economic landscape suddenly changes, toughing it out could be the wrong choice. The right one? Being open to new possibilities.
