Martock Glen Farm is the kind of operation that small-is-beautiful, eat-local urban residents rhapsodize about.
The central Nova Scotia farm’s rolling hills, apple orchards and exotic animals make for a picturesque setting. It’s a bit like Old MacDonald’s farm, only with emus, elk and yaks.
That, along with the high quality of its meat, has everyone from trendy Halifax chefs to the local Slow Food chapter singing the praises of Wayne Oulton and his father, Mike.
Which is great, but the question is: does this small-scale, old-fashioned type of farming pay off?
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Wayne Oulton says it does.
“We don’t pay ourselves too much income, but it makes a living for us and there’s an awful lot of perks we get from the farm,” he says.
“And it’s better than raising 100,000 pigs a year and losing money on every one.”
The Old MacDonald era ended long ago when farmers decided they could make more money by specializing in one or two areas, use the latest technology and get bigger. Oulton and others like him are working the other side of the ledger – getting paid more by catering to consumers’ diverse tastes.
The fiscal framework of such operations isn’t always easy to see, but Oulton pays close attention to the fundamentals.
First: Have a core business. For the Oultons, it’s the meat shop that Mike started 29 years ago. It routinely attracts 200 customers from nearby Windsor and even a few from Halifax, 60 kilometres away, on any given Saturday.
“My father’s decision to start the meat shop and cut out the middleman was really critical for us,” Wayne says.
Second: Keep up with the consumer, whose preferences are always changing.
“You find out a lot when you get it directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak,” he says.
“Maybe they recently saw a cooking show that featured quail or bison meat, and they’ll say to me, ‘you know, I’d like to try that.’ “
Third: Diversify. Oulton breaks his operation into three “enterprise groups” beef cattle, sheep and 15 species of exotic livestock. Each has to be profitable.
Fourth, fifth and sixth: Do your homework, start small and see if it works.
“I started in quail after restaurants told me they were having trouble getting it,” Oulton says.
“So I tried a few to figure out what my cost of production would be and if I could make money.”
Oulton also wants to know who his competitors are.
“Before I got into deer, I looked at the market, and it turns out that Canada only produces 20 percent of the venison it consumes. So it seemed to me there was a market opportunity there.”
Sometimes he gets lucky. After he started raising quail for meat, he found there was a market for quail eggs, a trendy item that fetches $4 a carton.
Now, if the mention of $4 a dozen eggs has you calculating how much you could make if you had few thousand quail hens, you’ve missed the point.
If quail eggs go out of style, then there’ll likely be a special on stewing quail at Oulton’s Meats. But by then maybe yak meat will be hot again (right now, he’s down to one breeding pair.) There’s always something coming into fashion.
And don’t confuse fashion with fundamentals.
The foundation of Martock Glen Farm is a well-thought-out and executed business model, and one that Oulton says is not unique to his farm.
“I know several families in our area that are taking an approach that is somewhat the same as what we’re doing,” he says.
“I know one family that has 10 sows and 50 cows. You can ask, ‘how the heck do they do it?’ But they do. That family has put three kids through university, so I’d say it’s working.”
Glenn Cheater is editor of the Canadian Farm Manager, the newsletter of the Canadian Farm Business Management Council. The newsletter as well as archived columns from this series can be found at www.farmcentre.com.
