A company that hopes to eventually farm up to a million acres of First Nations land in Saskatchewan and Alberta expects to harvest 13,000 acres in its first year of production.
One Earth Farms Corp. president Larry Ruud said custom operators planted the company’s 2009-10 crop at three locations in Saskatchewan.
Harvest work will also be contracted out, but the company still plans to recruit First Nations farm workers to operate machines and perform farm related tasks.
“We’ll move in that direction more so next year,” Ruud said. “We needed to have the time to go into some of those communities to put in place a recruitment strategy so that we could properly recruit people, and we knew weren’t going to do that overnight. We’re building the recruitment strategy and the plan for that as we look ahead for 2010.”
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Ruud didn’t say where the company’s crops are located and didn’t identify the First Nations bands that have entered into land lease agreements with One Earth Farms.
He said the company has turned down land lease opportunities because it is taking a cautious approach.
Sprott Resources Corp., a Toronto-based company that invests in natural resources, established One Earth Farms earlier this year. It announced in March it would invest $27.5 million in the new venture.
At the time, company officials said One Earth was aiming to manage at least 50,000 acres in its first year.
Ruud said the 50,000-acre target was not intended as a minimum target but as a maximum.
“When we were asked how far we would go this year, we said we would go up to 50,000 but would definitely not look at anything more than that this year,” Ruud said.
He said reaction among prairie farmers to One Earth Farms has varied from skeptical to supportive.
