Seven years ago Tony Marshall took a trip to Europe that opened his eyes and saved his farm.
During a holiday in Germany, he visited a couple of small agriculture operations where producers were cold pressing their own oilseeds and selling the oil locally.
Before he left the country, Marshall bought his own mechanical oil press and sent it back to his farm near Aldersyde, Alta.
It was the start of a farm-based venture called Highwood Crossing Organic Farm, which converted a struggling grain operation into a profitable small business.
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Today, Marshall and his wife Penny sell a line of 25 organic products, including canola and flax oil, to retailers and restaurants. Their products are available in Calgary, Halifax and even at a vineyard in Peachland, B.C.
The Marshalls have given up their off-farm jobs and are employing themselves, their children and two part-time workers at their “micro-processing” facility.
“It would be very difficult for us to be farming a half-section of ground today conventionally without value-added processing,” said Marshall, who has paid off the farm’s mortgage and has no other loans to service.
“I don’t think there’s many farms today that can tell you they’re not carrying any debt.”
The transition from a subsistence-based family farm to a money-making business required a fundamental shift in Marshall’s approach.
“I spend 99 percent of my time on the telephone and one percent on the tractor,” he said.
Instead of seeding and harvesting crops, he spends his days processing crops, talking to buyers, attending farmers’ markets and paying bills.
A neighbour now farms Marshall’s small parcel of land near Calgary.
Marshall is a poster boy for what a group of academics at the University of Saskatchewan have dubbed “the new agriculture.”
To survive in farming today, you either get bigger or get smarter, said Brett Fairbairn, director of the uni-versity’s Centre for the Study of Co-operatives.
Farmers who produce bulk grain and deliver it to elevators will become the “assembly line workers” of the new industrial grain economy, he said. Those who find a way to move up the value chain will be the entrepreneurs.
But it’s not a simple journey, Fairbairn added. It requires a metamorphosis, an attitudinal overhaul.
Farmers have always viewed the production of food as a noble endeavour warranting adequate compensation.
They say, “I’m a farmer and I should be able to earn a living farming,” said Fairbairn.
“It’s really hard to argue with that on the level of values and on the emotional level. But the reality of the economic system that we’re in is that it just doesn’t work that way. You aren’t rewarded for producing foods, for producing commodities.”
Fairbairn said grain farmers must evolve beyond the growing and harvesting mentality and devise ways to process, package and deliver grain-based products directly to consumers. That’s where the money is.
Gordon Hamblin has been selling end-use products from his Qu’Appelle, Sask., farm for eight years. He got his start in the new agriculture by dropping off a few packages of four-grain organic cereal at a grocery store in nearby Fort Qu’Appelle. It was a hit.
These days, he is selling a line of products to co-ops, health food stores and other retail outlets in Regina and the surrounding area.
They include cereals, whole grains, pancake mixes, barley flakes, packaged pulses and a variety of organic flours.
Hamblin credits farm-direct marketing for allowing him to remain on his 720 acres of land in southwestern Saskatchewan.
“If I wasn’t doing this I wouldn’t be able to make a living on the farm. There’s just no way, ” he said. “I’m not trying to set the world on fire but I’m filling some of the small orders that a bigger operation wouldn’t be doing.”
Hamblin’s processing and packaging plant is an industrial-sized steel bin, measuring 11 metres in diameter, the same type used as an annex on a grain elevator.
Inside is a collection of cleaning equipment, a dehuller and flaker for oats and barley, a cereal grinder, a grain polisher, a pea splitter, a bran separator, flour mills and a variety of scales.
He acquired the machines at auction sales, through classified ads and from places like an abandoned flour mill in Yorkton, Sask., and the old Saskatchewan Wheat Pool elevator in Moose Jaw.
Hamblin estimates he has between $400,000 and $500,000 tied up in buildings and equipment, a debt that has been “looked after” bit by bit as he accumulated the items.
Dean Fraser’s Souris, Man., sunflower plant also had humble beginnings but has grown quickly.
Fraser started out cleaning and bagging sunflower seeds in the back of a semi-trailer parked on his farm yard. That was 12 years ago.
Today, the operation owned by Fraser, his wife and a business partner, is shipping around the world.
“It has jumped in scale immensely. It’s a fairly big house right now,” he said.
In 2001, the business partners took the plunge and built a highly automated plant capable of cleaning and bagging approximately 15 million pounds of seed annually.
The cleaned and packaged seed is sold for human consumption and bird food in Canada, the Middle East, the United States and Mexico.
The new cleaning and bagging plant allows his company, Prairie Sun Seeds, to compete head-to-head with the large competitors in the sunflower seed business.
Some of the equipment in the new facility was salvaged from the old farm plant, which wasn’t modern enough to meet rising industry standards for quality.
“We had to make a decision at the farm either to basically stand down or to speed up and we sped up until our old facility was maxed right out,” said Fraser.
The expansion decision is one that most operations face after two or three years in business, said Kerry Engel, farm direct marketing leader of Alberta Agriculture’s ag-entrepreneurship division.
“They seem to get to the point where they re-evaluate it and it’s, ‘OK, we either really commit or we have to stop now,’ ” she said.
Fraser put the pedal to the metal. He hadn’t planned on building a new plant for a couple of years, but an old Proven Seed canola distribution centre, located a few kilometres from Fraser’s farm came up for sale and the opportunity to buy it was too good for Fraser to pass up. The project was financed through bank loans secured by farm and business assets.
So far, sales out of the new plant have been sporadic.
“Right now we bounce between a psychotic amount of work and sitting on your hands. But that’s a new company in its infancy,” said Fraser.
Becoming part of the new agricultural economy can also have its costs. One of the dangers of moving up the value chain is that the core business can suffer. At best, farm direct marketing distracts from the farming operation. At worst it’s an all-consuming undertaking. Fraser feels he has been neglecting his 2,500 acre farm.
“The farm hasn’t grown a whole lot lately with these other projects but I can see that having to happen pretty soon,” he said.
