Hello, I'm Jordan Marr, and this is Farming in British Columbia, a podcast that wonders if that family of bears on the edge of the forest over there is going to cause problems in the corn in about a month's time. My guest today is Andrew Vogler, who, with his mother, is the co-owner of Chris B organics. Or he was the co-owner of Chris B organics. Andrew and his mom just finished winding it down. They shipped the last of their inventory in May, because they're both ready to focus on other things. This is the main reason I invited Andrew to talk to me. Andrew is only 41, which is pretty young to be retiring from farming. And Chris B organics was succeeding, at least as far as farms go. As I'll explain, he didn't retire because he had to. He did it because he had seen and experienced the strong economic headwinds that many of us in the industry have seen and felt in the last few years, and he decided that he'd rather wind things down while he was in full control of that choice and still young enough that a pivot to something different wouldn't be too painful. You'll hear my conversation with Andrew in a couple of minutes. But first, a couple of listener comments about the last episode, which is about the weather forecast. Here's something from listener Evilina Lange in Vernon. Hi, Jordan. I listened to your weather podcast the other day, and it was fantastic and really made me laugh having hearing Herman and Quentin on there, I thought that was very creative. And I also wanted to share, as a kid, it was, I don't think it was my job. I chose it to be my task because I loved it so much. I got to call the environment Canada weather network telephone line to get the weather report every day so I could report back to my parents on how the weather is and what the forecast is so that we could plan our farm day or I think it was mainly for the hang season. Anyways, it was a responsibility that I loved my nerdy self connecting with the outside world. And Elina just proved, sending a voice memo to the podcast is painless and extremely fun. My friend and colleague Chris Bodner in Abbotsford clearly doesn't enjoy fun, because he sent me a plain old text message to share his weather forecasting recommendation, rather than a voice memo, even after I begged him to. Luckily for all of us, I was able to use a voice emulator so that all of you can hear Chris's message. Here it is, word for word. Jordan, you handsome, handsome, handsome devil. I want to let your listeners know that the best weather forecasting app I've found is the Norwegian weather service, which you can find at yr.no. Apparently Norway uses a bunch of data from public and private stations, including independent monitoring stations people have in their yards plus they are Norwegian so they do things with the crazy level of perfectionism. Jordan, if you don't mind me asking, what is your skincare routine, I'm looking for a new one and you're obviously doing something right, love the show. You too, loyal listener, can achieve immortality by sending a message to the podcast just like Chris and Evilina did, 250-767-6636 or podcast@farminginbc.ca. All right, here's my conversation with Andrew Vogler of Chris Burganix, talk to you at the end. Where are we going to start here? Tell me where we're sitting. Tell everyone where we're sitting. Yeah, right now we are sitting just a couple blocks from where I live with my family. I'm just sitting on the banks of the Vedder River in Chilliwack, so we've got the river here, the water levels dropping, it's just kind of getting nice into its summer flows and we've got the Vedder mountain right behind us, so it's a nice spot to be. Well, Andrew Vogler, welcome to Farming in British Columbia, thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me. So we're here alongside the Vedder River, we're in Chilliwack, you have a home in a neighborhood just nearby. So we're going to talk about kind of presumably the birth, the rise, and the eventual wrapping up of Chris Burganix, is that fair enough to say, is that the business we're talking about? That's the business we're talking about. Okay, well how did it, like you have parents in farming? So we went in farming, the idea came in '08, 2008, I suppose, maybe 2007 actually. Yeah, I was studying at school and there were some health issues with my family, so I wanted to come back home and be closer to home. So that kind of prompted the switch where I could do something with my family. So we started looking for farms together and they moved, they sold their suburban house and then we bought, they bought 11 acres onto my spray. Okay, so we got to really briefly go back a little further then, so you did not grow up on a farm? No, I grew up on one acre, but it was not a farm. Okay. I did not grow up farming. My mother did grow up farming, my mother grew up on a dairy farm. And was that here? Pit medals. Pit medals, okay. So there was some experience in the family there. Yeah, and she's the person who I owned the company. Okay, and you went through adolescence and it sounds like went off to university at that point, were you very interested in food and farming? I was always very interested in the natural world. I got my undergrad in environmental science and then went into UBC and studied law. It was during the first summer of law when I was on a fishing trip where the idea of possibly not falling through and practicing law but studying a farm, this was after somebody in my family got sick. Right. So we can current with the family needs that wanted to keep you closer to home. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I finished law. I did the three years there and graduated. But well, studying there was also working on an organic farm. Right. Yeah. Okay. With glorious organic. You're okay. You're in the summers. Right. Just during the summer. I see. So that was just like some income also. You like the outdoors. It was an interest of yours. You've got it. And we were thinking about farming that point. And you were starting to think about it. Okay. So you had started to have. No, I was trying to get. With your mom. Like your mom had really started to talk this through. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So then how does it go from that kind of thinking about it to like. Yeah. Well, it was a two year process. I wanted to finish school and farm two summers to make sure that was something we wanted to do. Yeah. So yeah, look for glorious, you know, two summers, glorious organics for two summers. I'm curious to know, like, as you start these conversations with your mom, what were you two gravitating towards for your own business model? And was there a relationship with what you saw at a place like Glorious? Either I know I don't want to do that or I know I do. We were still very green getting into it. Of course. Well, yeah. So we figured we'd probably get into the mixed vegetables, just especially at that time that, you know, it's a very low barrier to entry. So yeah, we wanted to get into mixed vegetables. We didn't really know where and exactly what the model would look like. I know at the time I was quite excited about growing the, like, assignment on growing the business fairly large and having multiple operations, you know, the vigor of being 25, 26 years old. What did that mean for you? For me, that meant probably having, I definitely was looking at having a farm on this side on the coast and then another one in the dryer belt, the okanago, no, wherever. And then, yeah, just trying to grow a large, fairly large scale business with, you know, 10s of employees. Right. Quite early on. So quite early on, we did decide we wanted to go mechanize quite a bit. So that was it. Okay, mechanize. What I'm hearing is like, you were not shying away from embracing some complexity, complexity of potentially, even if this is just your idea phase of managing properties a few hundred kilometers apart. Yeah. Tens of employees. Where was that? I don't know. Where was that perspective coming from? Like, was it looking around, you grew up in the valley here, is it looking around at like what you considered serious agribusinesses and thinking like that if we're going to succeed, that's what we've got to do? It probably wasn't, it's probably more ego than that. It probably wasn't really incredibly well thought out, not to say it was the wrong model, but probably just more if I was going to be leaving your career in law, I wanted to do something that I, I wanted, I always wanted to do something that I thought was impactful. So I thought potentially, you know, by being, growing a large organic business, you know, thought I knew everything back then, that you know, they could help to grow the movement in general around North America. And I was really intrigued by the idea of being able to do something that I felt was positive environmentally, but also creating employment. Creating employment. Yeah, cause it's just interesting slightly to me because there's, at least in the circles I have moved in and farming, there's a lot more examples of a young person in air quotes, you know, getting into farming between 20 and 30, taking on half an acre, one acre. And in fact, so what are we in the like the late aughts like 200789 somewhere in there? Is that, is it? We purchased in 10, we started farming in 10, but I was with Gloria's in '08 and '09. Right. So that's right. Right in the cusp of John Martin for TA, one and a half acres bio intensity. Tell me, tell me about the farmland that you and your family bought because I haven't talked to you about this in terms of, was it a good, like looking backwards, good piece of land, the right piece of land to buy? Very, very fortunate, the rebot that we did. We put office on, so with the land we wound up with, we did put office on a few properties, but the land we wound up with is 11 rectangular acres, completely flat, sandy loam, lots of sun, irrigation, ditches all around, we're in the main vegetable belt in the faith of the valley. So we're probably in the largest vegetable belt in the province, it's really us and delta. Okay. So, we didn't exactly know what we needed to produce vegetables, but everybody else was producing vegetables there, so we figured it was probably not too bad of a place to do it. Yeah. What was the reality check if there was one, or what was going well and what wasn't going well? Yeah, we were able to grow it steadily, for about a decade we did on the farmers market. So yeah, we were doing up to nine farmers markets a week. Nine? Yeah. With some employees help then. Oh yeah, lots of employees. Yeah. Lots of employees. We had the 11 acres we bought, we rented out another five properties, so I think we got up to about 25 acres under production, stretched out over like four or five properties. Yeah, so we did that and then started probably about eight years in to move into the wholesale space and then had a family and then just trying to get life a little bit more into control and not have that constant uncertainty that markets bring. So when you started the farm, were you with your romantic partner that? No. Oh yeah, no, I had not met my wife at that point. So I started it as a single person with my parents. And then so I met her probably five or six years after farming. Right. So single guy, single handsome man on the farmers market circuit must have juiced some sales in the early going, you know, like certain kinds of customers that they were choosing your booth. It was more interesting to sometimes be at farmers markets than being on the farm. So what I think I'm sensing is that it got off, things got off to a pretty good start. Yeah. No, I think we got off to a good start. And I think we stayed on a pretty good trajectory given, given our contemporaries. Yeah. And when you say you move to wholesale at some point, do you mean brought it in or really shifted away from farmers markets? So we, our first thing we did was we stopped our CSA and then we wound down farmers markets over the course of three or four years. We exited all the farmers markets and I see a say and then just moved 100% to wholesale. Can you tell me about that? Like why, you know, that's not a, that's not a shock to hear of a transition like that from a farm business of that scale. Yeah. Can you tell me when you first started thinking about transitioning away from CSA in markets, what, why that was just the, the, the back rates of that, yeah, the markets, and you know, when we had to do quite a few markets to have, be able to produce on the land we chose to produce on. So we didn't really have to, but you know, we wanted to produce on lots of land and grow as much food as possible. So therefore we were in lots of markets and yeah, just, just that, you know, staffing markets and the continually needing to be higher, everybody, everybody, however many months you have to be higher your market staff, you know, we needed people who were both looking on the farm and driving truck and trailer into Vancouver and marketing and coming back all weekend and, you know, most people, you hire for those positions only really wind up doing it a year or two at, at most. Yeah. Well, how did the wholesale thing develop? Was there a catalyst for it? Um, I'm trying to remember back and we remember what we just started was we were just starting with just one crop. I think we started in a good way. We just started with new potatoes. Yeah. We just danged out a bunch of like an acre or whatever of new potatoes in the early window in early June and, you know, it was quite happy that, oh, so when I say wholesale, like we've been pretty much dealing exclusively with discovery. Oh, with discovery. Okay. I had a feeling. Yeah. So we never dealt with stores. Oh, very, very little bit. Yeah. I dealt with stores individually. But discovery was there. You had started to form relationships, presumably. Yeah. They came and picked up on the farm. Yeah. We enjoyed the stuff we harvested, the stuff we packed, sold, gone, over the door and not dealing with stuff coming back at the end of markets and dealing with it again. So what, okay. So then, so then we're talking the last, uh, at least five years and focused on wholesale. Yeah. Okay. Easy. And now, and that was absorbing everything you were growing pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. What were some major, from the middle, the middle point of your business onward or even the early to approaching the early middle upwards, like what were some major insights you feel like you made in your farming to, like, make things better, either make things better from a work-life balance or make things more efficient or whatever. Yeah. I would say two things, um, the mechanization, which I can talk about forever, but then the other thing would be just realizing that I don't need to grow 80 crops. I don't, if I'm planting fennel every week, harvesting every week, you know, only moving 10 pounds at nine markets, you know, at the end of the year, you see that it made you 2,000 or 3,000. I could just absorb that by planting an extra two beds and new potatoes and, and so it's only when they're June. Yeah. And just, that's another part of the mixed market gardening thing, especially when you're doing like the CSA or shafts with it are really looking for that adversity. It's like, that eats up a ton of your resources when you're like, okay, but I gotta have some edible full of flowers and I've got to have some fennel and I've got to have some whatever. That's a game. Cucamels. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and yeah, I, I, I had reached like similar observations where it's like, man, I'll just, but the beets are selling so well. I should just, I could easily. What, what am I doing? Yeah. Did you. Cause at the end of the day, like it was my four time job. I never, I have not had another job since I've been farming, um, you know, so it's got to make sense. Like financially like, like I'm not just trying to chase my tail. So when you, when you would streamline your crop plan the most. We even did that. We even did that while we fill up markets. Yeah. Just like how, how streamline did the crop plan get? How, like what was the number of crops when it was at the slowest five? Five. Okay. What are the five crops and maybe you could take us through some insights you made towards with mechanization and agra tech or whatever you want to call it. Yeah. You could share. Yeah. Um, so we, the last two years, we were trying to move towards crops. We stopped double cropping. We stopped trying to push all the windows with weather because we wanted to make sure that we'd get our crop in 80% of the time, not 50% of the time. Because of shortened timelines because you've got a doubt, another crop to do. But we stopped double cropping. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we, yeah. So we wanted to not push it. You know, we didn't want to push it plant in February anymore. Um, because, you know, stuff doesn't grow. Um, and then we wanted to be out of the field by, you know, we want to be out of the field by December. At least for the stuff that can't freeze hard. Yeah. Um, just we've had too many winters where we, you know, tried to do sprouting broccoli or overwintering cauliflower and, you know, he got 10% of your crop in. So yeah. So we went to crops where we spring planted and then ones that all had a decent, um, storage shelf life. Um, so we were doing beets, carrots, leeks, and cabbage. Beets, carrots, leeks, and cabbage. And we think carrots include parsnips. Okay. To be be planted and cultivated, they'd have the same, same practices. All right. Well, can you, can you pick a couple of those and take us through like, just take us through production so that you can highlight some of the mechanization and where you've gained, you've made some insights or just gained some efficiency? Yeah. Um, why don't we start with maybe? I'm going to say yeah. Cause we are. Well, look, I don't know. Is there much to talk about with soil prep or do you want to start at planting? Um, soil prep, the biggest thing we did with soil prep pre plant, um, well, as to side from getting like a, a true plow, just like, like walls, the ground of a mold mold plow. Yeah. Um, we did, we made, then our second year after we tried chisel plowing for a year, um, but the biggest thing we would do pre plant is, um, especially on dryer springs is we would, um, prep the soil and then either irrigate it or let it rain and then two weeks later, prep it again and go through two or three cycles. Just for the steel seed bedding. The gas much benefits. Yeah. Right. Okay. You probably should have done it shallower, but, um, we will. And it's easier to do when you're only cropping once, once you made that move, right? Like now you don't know, cause you just, when you, when you're double or triple cropping, all of a sudden you just don't have those windows to steel seed bed or whatever. Yeah. Okay. So you, a couple cycles, two, three cycles of stale seed bedding. Yeah. Two, three, three. Especially for like the carrots and the paracet. Yeah. For direct seeds and stuff. Um, germany and weeds. Let's talk about carrots then. Cause they're a tricky one. Um, so we got a, um, a vacuum seeder, uh, a wizard, right? A wizard. Yeah. We bought a wizard precision vacuum seeder. Much, much, much better results. Very nice spacing between plants so that you wouldn't get a whole bunch of small carrots and three lines per roll, if, if that makes sense to the listeners. Yeah. So with that, and then, um, put them in the ground, we're planting like two acres at once. And then our irrigation cannons, we had the walkie traveling reels, uh, are set up to irrigate about two acres per pole. So plant two acres of carrots. And then yeah, we'd, uh, we'd frame about six days after, after, you know, six pre, pre emergence. And you know, so are you, are you an advocate for the wizard planter? Yep. I was very happy with that. We used it for two, three seasons and, uh, versus that we had a, um, like a jang, I'd be of the brand, but, um, which is also good with a cost a lot more money. But yeah. Yeah. I, I have one for, I have a wizard set up for my BCS now and I am thrilled. I am absolutely thrilled with the precision I can, I can achieve with it. Yeah. We'd spend like $12,000 a year on seed, you know, maybe even more than that some years. So we try to buy high quality seeds so we get the crop we want. So spending, I don't know, but it was $12,000 on the theater, you know, made, made sense to us on a, on a crop of carrots, how many times do you flame weed? So this is, this is going to be a big, um, uh, tractor mounted flame weeder. We did have one. Um, we never got into it. It was the use when I had purchased. So we never got into it. So I was still backpacking it on two acres of carrots. Yeah. It was a lot of work. Wow. Well, let's move on then. I, so okay. I, I can take a guess at an influence on the decision to wind things down after about 15 years. I might be right. I might be wrong. I still want to talk about it. Yeah. How did, um, how did the, how did GAP certification and safe food for Canadians act factor in to the decision? If it didn't, I don't care. I don't know. I was telling you to tell me how it affected your business. We are GAP certified. Yeah. I would add it to the bucket of, it's another hurdle that is being placed in front of food production without really much benefit. I'm not, I don't mean benefit to the public. I don't mean it's not a good thing to do to be clear, but I mean, it's another cost. It's another hurdle put on the producer and we weren't really seeing money on the other side of it. Right. Do you think, so presumably the, I mean, I've looked at this issue of it and like the, the primary public good is the argument that it makes food safer for Canadians. Yeah. Do you think that given, but all this stuff comes with a trade off, as you've just pointed out, there's an enormous cost. If you think about the food system as a, as a whole to implementing this and maintaining it and forcing, essentially forcing farmers, at least who are selling into wholesale markets to have it, do you think that public good is there? I think at the scale we were operating on and I think it is there. I think it is there. I think that the middle sized farm is going to be gone if it's not gone already. And so, I think it, I think it is good for traceability, you know. Like do you, let's start with your farm. Yeah. We went through the process. Yeah. It's a big process. A little, it's, one thing that GAP is biased towards is like, it's a little easier for a farm with five crops than a farm with 20 crops. Right. A lot easier. A lot easier. I've heard that. Do you, did it, were there rev, were there revelations for you in going through the process? Like, oh, this actually, this actually made us, we were, we were growing safer food because of this stuff. There were. And just, there were, for sure, just one of the simple things they said is put, you know, put your sprays, your pesticides or whatever, not on the ground floor because then if you flood it won't get washed away in the flood. Yeah. Put it on the second layer of the shelf and you think, oh yeah, it's a good idea. But just, yeah, there was, there was some small little things. A lot of eye rolls, of course, but that's the nature of any certification process, I think. One common criticism, one common eye roll, as you call it is, is the kind of critique or allegation that this is really a lot more about reducing liability for the, for the, for the, for the mainstream retail system than it is about keeping Canadian safe. Yeah. Nobody wants liability. So yeah, they're going to push it off to whoever they can. Ultimately, for a farm of your scale, I can't imagine it was like a real financial burden. Like it's, it adds a cost, but you can, you know, at the same time, discoveries starts requiring it. Presumably you can work that cost into a pricing. There's no choice. Yeah. There was that old leaf. Yeah. That will leave the, leave the space. Right. Right. Oh, go back in the markets, which was not an option. Right. So we, we, like if it was, it was not an option for me to go back to the market. So once seafood for Canadian skim out and gap became more, more demanded, then it was either do it or leave farming. So we chose to do it over the last few years. Can you expand on what you just said about the medium farm, almost being almost gone? What did you mean? Cause I, I, I kind of sense you don't mean that small and medium farms are all gone. It's, no, I don't know. I just think, I think if you're going to do gap and if you're going to do that stuff, then you do it. And if there's too much for cost for you, then you need to stay small, like it's really hard to be able to. So it's, it's putting, it's putting pressure on that medium scale where you might not be big enough to have to make the investments to be gap certified, for example. You don't, you're, you're too big to mess around with 10 markets a week and, and a CSA and all the rest. Yeah. That's kind of what I'm thinking. As you said, as you alluded to, this is not the case that like you started a farm, you, you know, you were unrealistic. It was a lot harder than you thought. You struggled. You know, you never made money, you, you, you, you kept it going as long as you could. And ultimately you, you failed that it's not the story you're telling. The story you're telling is you got fired up about agriculture. You had a good partner in your mother. You did this together, you launch, you figure it out and, and you haven't been specific about, you know, how successful it was, but it sounds like you were making a go of it. Yeah. That's my impression. Yeah. And that, that continues more or less to some degree to now and yet you've made the decision to wind it down and I'm really curious to know your, like what, what, why. Yeah. Well, that's fair. One thing I think interesting agriculture specifically is everybody thinks it's supposed to be forever. So one of my current pet peeves right now is everybody telling me that they're so sorry that we're writing it down, but one doesn't say the same thing to somebody when they switch careers. Yeah. That's a good point. But because I'm a business owner and it's a farm, everybody thinks I have to pass it down to my children and then they have to pass it down to their children. Yeah. That's just kind of a bigger picture of things aren't forever, even if we try to sell off stuff that they are. But more specifically just as we continue to make these investments and we just continue to increase our productivity, you know, we were still getting enough margins, but the margins kept getting smaller, prices weren't really going up for us. So we just over the last seven years, we saw a whole bunch of costs downloaded on to us and really no bump in, no bump in prices going up. So, you know, just, I just seeing that trend continuing that just turned 41. So, you know, kind of wanted to make a choice where we had it, well, it was our choice. So, you know, we could have pushed and kept going for a number of years, but, you know, margins are still getting smaller. I was just going to get older and less employable or less able to pivot into something else. So the timing is good. It sounds like a business decision and you recognize that the timing might not get better than now. You wait five more years because you're not sure and it might not be as easy. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and we haven't stopped because, you know, interest rates are going up. That's not why we stopped, we didn't have to stop because of that. But, you know, it's going to be another cost that's going to go up. And then, you know, like all farmers, we've been dealing with a lot of uncertainty. We've had a lot of climatic uncertainty. We were a part of the floods two years ago on Symmas Perry in addition to all the other heat dome events that we've all had. So it just didn't, and even like as we made it as simple as possible, I was really able to reduce my hours of work, which was fantastic. But two things I wasn't, but I was, I still had no certainty about when I had time off. Yeah. So I still couldn't really book a week long campaign trip with my kids because I didn't know if I was going to be able to plant what week it was going to be wet or what week it was going to be dry. Yeah. So like, you know, I'm sure vegetable farmers are listening to this and understand that. So even though I had a lot more time off, wholesale and, um, recognizing that I did prior to it, it was still completely out of my control when that time off was. And then the other thing, as we transitioned to wholesale, which I liked, and we had much less employees and relied more on seasonal workers, um, I also just had less people around the farm and I was getting lonely professionally, lonely in a professional way at least. And um, very much looking to have co-workers or at least other people that I'm working with going forward at the post, uh, you know, farming, new slash can be a bit of a lonely go. Sometimes so. Yeah. So look, I, um, I want to go back to one of your first comments on this, on this thread that you've just, we've just started pulling on feel like it's interesting. I feel like there'll be some listeners for whom you're touching a bit of a nerve in the sense of this, this persistent idea that with farms, the farms are different than other businesses and you can't stop. It has to be a forever thing. And I think that's somewhat true in terms of how a farmer's thinking. I think it's because unlike a lot of other businesses, it's, we're, we're more prone to winding it into our identity and, and we're passionate about it. And so I, you know, and yet I think there's probably farmers listening who might be in the same facing the same economic wins that you just described, but are more in the category of people who are like, wouldn't, or have a lot harder time thinking about just making a rational, a rational decision. Yeah. I've had these conversations with lots of people. So yeah. Definitely the case. Do you, does that just say, do you have a different relationship with farming in terms of how you tie it up with your identity? I've tried to. I've tried to. It probably was too tied up to my identity early on. And I didn't really see that as I, you know, I came to not see that other healthy thing. I was never the landowner, which always is going to be a part of it. Yeah. If you, you know, you might see it a little bit more as your identity. If you, you know, if you're born on the land and live on the land and on the land. Yeah. I tried to, I tried to move away from seeing it as completely my identity over the last five years or so. May I ask? Yeah. How your business relationship with your family members that are involved has gone? Is that, has that played any role? Has that stayed decent or has that been joined? Yeah. It's a challenge, but it stayed over the course of the 15 years that stayed productive. Yeah. Yeah. And it's just, it's just me and my mom. I also just want to ask another thing you mentioned in making this decision is just like cost getting downloaded and margins getting smaller. So I kind of got, I have a couple different directions. I want to go. At least in organics. Well, I know. Okay. That was one of them during high inflation. Let me, let me, let me ask you about like talk about the aspect of that was that of, of, of, of specifically there was a time where we're starting, I'm starting to hear farmers who are in organic agriculture argue that like the margins they used to expect are shrinking. They are. So you're confirming they are. I think so. Okay. I have not, you know, well, what we've been dealing with inflation now for three years, food costs have gone up extremely high for people, got a, you know, you can only spend a dollar once. So, you know, families have to make choices and it's a fairly easy move to go from buying an organic character, conventional character. I see. You, you are interpreting it as at least partially as substitution, right? Like a classic economic substitution that when times get tight, what, you know, there's more people are going to just go for the conventional carrots because or take your kid out of soccer. Yeah. Right. Right. Sometimes you got to make. Okay. It's not like I don't, I think from my conversations, conventional prices have gone up more during this inflationary period. Yeah. And I think organics have stayed flat with a goal of maintaining market share. Can we talk about market share? I'm wondering if you have any like insights about whether, whether the organic sector has done a sufficient job together in, in maintaining those margins. In other words, maintaining market share by like, sorry, I'm going to be a bit convoluted here, Andrew, but it's like, you know, we, we as a sector have been under a little bit of pressure from competing notions of sustainability, like regenerative. And I, I, I'm in this sector and I, I, my, one personal opinion I have is that as a whole sector, we, we maybe have been resting on our laurels. Like I think that a lot of the work that happened in the 80s and 90s to like build this consciousness around organic and its reputation, maybe, maybe a little bit now there was this period following that in the odds, like onward of, of a little bit of like, I don't know, just taking our eyes off the prize and like taking for granted that those margins were going to be there. But then that became a local conversation during the arts, probably. You mean, you mean, a hundred mile diet, so that the separate from organic, right. So, so you're saying that may have taken a bite out of the, maybe I wasn't far, I wasn't in the industry of the 90s and stuff. So I haven't, I haven't looked at general, you know, trends, but, but yeah, I think it's much like you're talking about regenerative taking some of the shine, you know, local agriculture also has taken some of the shine. Right. So almost seeing that notion of like supporting local as your main, as your main, uh, lens through which to like guide your purchasing, of course, people of course, but you see it as at least to some degree in competition with certainly, yeah. Interesting. Well, it's all, it's all, yeah, you know, it's all competing for customers limited attention that they want to pay attention to where the pumpkin came from, how much time does somebody want to pay attention to, you know, the average person, like, you know, that was one of the things with organics. One thing with organics that I found and this comes back to mechanization is I think part of the cost increased with organics is also in part just due to the scale. Because the industry is such a small portion of the overall produce game in North America, you know, whatever percentage it is, it's small. You just can't get the efficiencies because it's just, even if you're the largest beat, producer, organic beat producer in Canada, you're still small. You're still pretty small. Right. Yeah. You're still smaller than the 20th. But is, are you, I don't know, I might be getting you wrong. Are you baked into that? Are you implying though that because the overall share of the market is small, that maybe, is there starting to be for certain crops, say, too much competition among organic producers? Like, does that factor in? Like, how does supply of these products factor in versus, because we've been mainly talking about demand? Let's start with your relationship with Discovery. Have you felt, have you felt, have you been in position? There would have been times I'm going to guess where they were taken everything. Like they could, you know, there was no question that they were going to be able to absorb. Is that still the case? I'm happy to ask a bit about this company. I don't want to get too much into their business because they have business issues that they, every business has to deal with. Yeah. There were times where we would take everything, but it's also always crop specific. And being with a wholesale house like that, and presumably the same with other ones, is a lot of it is dictated by what's happening in the California growing space and in the Mexico growing space. Because the store that are purchasing from these wholesale houses, you know, they have to put a box of, you know, a bunch of carrots on their shelves, they have to put 10 bucks on their shelves once a week. So, you know, they have the option every week to choose which farm they buy it from. So if something happens in the prime growing, in the prime vegetable spaces in California or Mexico, if they have something go down, like if something doesn't work in one of those bigger farms, then all of a sudden every single box we can produce is on the door and they wish we could have 10 times as much. But then they have oversupply in those growing places. They slash the prices. And then so the prices of that broccoli, box of broccoli coming across the line just dropped by 15 bucks a box. Yeah, right. Yeah. So then it's hard. Yeah. So then it's hard to, we even have to slash our prices as well or just see products sitting there. Yeah. Right. Okay. So there's a decent degree of volatility in. Yeah. And some stuff is incredibly stable, price-wise, and then the more perishable stuff is quite volatile. Okay. We are found. So let's jump over to just like costs being pushed down to you in general. Like what do you want to highlight is what that has been kind of the hardest. Look, everyone listening understands that we've been through a real tough time for inflation for costs for cost for cost for farmers. Yeah. And the cost inflation that I'm talking about, like the thing I'm going to say, they aren't necessarily things they disagree with, but they're just realities that, you know, we've had minimal wage go up every year. We've had sick days just got added. We've had two statutory holidays added since I started farming. So that sick days and two statutory holidays, that's seven more paid days after the year. Seven. I mean, and in practice, are you finding your, your staff, one way or the other, they end up needing those sick days? Oh, sure. Yeah. So it really has turned into like six or seven more days a year. Yeah. And that's, that's the cost, right? Obviously. Plus what was a minimum wage in 2010 would have been around 11, 12, 13 bucks an hour. And now it's, what is it now? I don't have employees anymore. Yeah, I know neither do I. Uh-huh. I don't know like 16 now, is it? Yeah. Something. Yeah, not, I, I don't disagree with those moves, but, you know, but it's a cost. And, and then there's no resulting, like we're not in a, we, we've not been in the position where you can just like, oh, now we're going to increase the cost of our box of carrots because you're feeling, you're feeling the price pressure. Yeah. Because the other growers from North America aren't. Yeah. And we can only be so much, our box of carrots can only cost so much more than another box of carrots. Yeah. And then just a very simple cost that went up, you know, just like boxes, you know, our boxes went from like $4 to $6. Yeah. So like even all the other costs being, if you, if all the other costs that stayed the same. You're now making $2 less on every box of carrots you ship. Period. If, if none of the other costs went up, which obviously they did. Yeah. So, you know, and that's two, two dollars and maybe a margin, you know, it's $10. So they just took 20% of the margin, like, you know, like. Can you, so you've taught, you've touched on labor. Can you talk about the move whenever that was to, to try out, um, temporary foreign workers? Yeah. Happily. I had initially been morally against it. Kind of, as I've been an employer for the last many years, I kind of saw more the benefits of it, both from an employer and from an employee perspective. Um, yeah. We transitioned to, we bought in the market from Jamaica because we wanted, um, fluent English speakers. Um, yeah. Yeah. So we bought in workers from Jamaica for, I believe, seven years. Um, and yeah, we really, we, we really got it to begin with. Well, this was, again, I just thought it seemed, at that point in time to me, it seemed exploitative. And it, I think that would, yeah, I think that would be the main one. Um, I, I don't have that moral qualm anymore, but. What changed it? You, I mean, I'm going to guess that you made the decision, maybe, maybe at first you had to kind of just sit with them, the moral discomfort. Like maybe you weren't fully, fully converted over, but maybe you just had to make it. Yeah. Well, just the, you know, the demands of working in a vegetable farm, doing the, picking the harvesting and the washing and the weeding, you know, it's a very tough job. And, you know, it's just not realistically going to find consistent Canadian staff to do it. It's not, it's not, uh, and I don't, you know, people that are living in this country, as either citizens or as permanent residents have many more options. So realizing that need of it and then also just from, uh, it felt exploitative to me to be bringing the, to be bringing people in, but also, you know, the world is always how we want it to be. And, um, you know, for, for the people that are coming in from Jamaica, they, uh, this is a very good economic opportunity for them. And they sending all, they're sending all the money back home, which I think, wait for the Canadian economy, but they're sending all the money back home and they're really getting ahead by coming here. Um, and if you, there's no reason that they need to be mistreated, um, if you don't mistreat them. And you feel you've done a good job. Oh, yeah. We had our workers kept wanting to come back that year after year, so they kind of choose if they want to come back the next year and they all did. And I was going to say something about, I, I just wanted to clarify that on the, it's not great for the Canadian economy to be sending all that money back. There were remittances back home to Jamaica. I don't mean that overall it's a negative thing because if we didn't have those workers coming from Jamaica, then we wouldn't be making as much money per acre on our farm because we just wouldn't have the workers. It's not realistic to think you'd get away from seasonal workers and just half Canadians. Like that's not a real thing. Right. That's like an imaginary every, every, every industry is short in workers. I don't think this is going to change your, the argument you just made. I think, I think one thing that comes up when we have these conversations is yeah, but part of the reason is farmers aren't paying enough for the work that they want people to do. However, as we've just kind of gone through, it's really tough to pay a lot higher. There aren't, there aren't no people though. You just have to look at demographics. Every industry is short. So if the workers, the farmers all of a sudden hire an extra 30,000 people, well then now they're coming out of the, the hospitality industry and now the hospital like. And so then we just don't have enough working age Canadians, you just look at the demographics of our country. It's not. Yeah. It's real straightforward. If you look at it, like, I don't mean that like rudely or anything, but just like, it's kind of like a geography thing. Like the mountains are here, you can't re-stop that mountain from being here. We have an aging society. Yeah. So, but if we can just, just for this conversation agree that it is possible to have a system of temporary foreign farm workers in place that is, that can avoid exploitation, right? How do you think our system is doing on the whole? So you believe you've done a, you've acted with integrity for your workers on your farm. You've highlighted some of the pros and cons of structuring this part of the economy this way. But how do you think our system does on the whole? But I'm just talking about the farming aspect of it. You know, not the Tim Hortons worker, but temporary foreign farm workers. I would say that for my interactions with other people's workers, which is, you know, not extensive, but, but some, somewhat, I would say it is a lot better than its reputation. And of course, like in every industry, there are bad actors, like, but I don't think that's necessarily, they are a bit of a vulnerable population. But we have had very stringent housing inspections. The Jamaican liaison has a lot of interviews with them and with us, you know, stuff is very much out in the open. So you feel as an employer of Jamaican farm workers, that you have seen the accountability process. And that is you feel it's robust because one accusation is that technically on paper, there's an accountability regime in place, but that there are problems with it. For example, the person who comes to inspect interviews that Jamaican worker in front of Andrew. That's like, that's never been the case with us. Okay. They've always put them aside. Okay. I can't say what they can say. Sure. I'm only, I'm only asking you on your experience though. In case of us. And that is the responsibility of the Jamaican liaison. Yeah. That's the responsibility of their consulate. Well, I've looked in this issue a bit. I don't think it was supposed to be. I think that is. Also, I should say, yeah, I don't know. The other one. I think our system was supposed to take care of it. Whatever the Canadian oversight of the system, it was never supposed to be the Mexican consular official who's going to come out to the farms or the Jamaican consular official. This is partly happening. I'm not sure. Okay. I don't know. Yeah. But regardless, you've got someone coming to check in on things. Oh, yeah. And so you're feeling that accountability. And at least with the people we dealt with. Yeah. I've no experience with the Guatemalan consulate or anything, but we've only dealt with the Jamaican consulate. Right. Out of Cloner. Right. So that's my experience. Are there, is there anything you would like if you were going to rally for change to the system and let's just get away from the exploitation concern just from your point of view as the employer? Good. How would you like to see the system change? I think the system needs to change and it will change where somehow, I don't know the mechanism, but somehow if we're going to, we're very much going to need to get the seasonal workers who can work for more than one farm during a season. Okay. So that's a massive thing. Okay. Tell me why you're saying that. What do you mean? Why is that? Because people have short seasons. So if you grow hops, you need people to come for three weeks to prune all the runners. In April. Right. But there's a minimum weeks that you're allowed to bring people in and the cost is the same regardless of if it's. Right. So you only need someone for three weeks. It's just not, it's not going to happen. You've got a housing available for them. You've got a vans ready for them, so it doesn't make sense. And not pretty much every other one of the workers I've spoken with, and this is a case from other employees I've talked to, the workers want to be here for as long as possible. Right. Because they're making a lot of money. They don't want to be here for. They don't want to come up here. You always had people wanting to come back to our place because they were there for like six months. Yeah. They're not here for ten weeks. Right. For a fruit pick or whatever. You're offering them just steady farm employment or a lot more steady. Yeah. Okay. So you're making an argument for more flexibility in the system to allow farmers to say work together or to, or to allow workers to move from work to work job to job so they can have a six month stay if they want. I would say if you want there to be horticultural production in our province. If that is your goal. Yeah. If that is your goal. Then that's a pain point that we need to solve because they all, they are labor intensive. Okay. So sorry. I now that's related to another workers rights question for the, for the workers themselves. So I'm going to go back to that. Okay. We're going to move on to a new topic anyway, but one, one, one thing that advocates for those workers are asking for and the workers themselves I think are asking for is the concept of open permit. Yeah. So as a guy who thinks that you have workers who are pretty happy, that despite that, do you, would you have an objection to offer an open permit meaning they're here on some kind of contract with the government. But if they're not happy with you, they can go seek work from another farm. In agriculture? Sure. It's limited to agriculture. Let's just, that would be interesting. I've never heard that proposal. Yeah. I've heard it where they can work anywhere and then you'll be in the same situation where. Right. You get the point or that the goal, the goal would be to reduce exploitation by, by having farmers feel like if they don't treat workers well enough, they can move elsewhere. But then you have all the housing concerns. Yeah. Because then all of a sudden. Who's paying for the housing? Who's paying for the housing? Now all of a sudden, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of, there's a lot of, I don't know why everybody thinks they don't get paid minimum wage. They do and they get free housing. Like it's, it's more expensive to hire something, somebody in from overseas and it is to hire somebody locally. You do it because they are there on Monday morning and they're there on Tuesday morning and they're there on Wednesday morning. Right. That's why you do it. It's, it's not cheaper, but you do it because they show up and they do the work month after month. Yeah. And come back the year after a lot of these, a lot of the ones that you're going to talk to have been coming up for like 10, 15, 20 years and they're choosing every year to come back. So. So. Andrew, what I like to ask farmers this question, what is farm stewardship or environmental stewardship on the farm mean for you? What does that look like for you? What are your values around that? Taking the economic stuff aside from stewardship because that's obviously everything plays into that. Yeah. I would say, yeah, try not farming a manner that if you were going to continue to farm that way for 50 years, that the farm would be as productive as it was when you started. So whether or not that's like top soil of attention or that's the main one that comes in mind right now for me, but I am going to bring the economic element into it. I'm curious to know as someone who, you know, clearly that matters to you, the stewardship aspect, like how frequently, if at all, did economic pressure get in the way of your stewardship goals? Because to me as a farmer, I find there's a constant tension between my aspirations at stewardship. Yeah. And the realities of like slim margins. So for me, it was always a big thing to remind myself as time went on that a farm is not a park. By default, you are controlling as a vegetable farmer, at least it might be different in the food garden. As a vegetable farmer, you are controlling what is happening on the ground. So you asking how the economic, sorry, did you ever, did the economic pressure ever at times or regularly compromise your stewardship goals? Not in so much that I saw the land there to produce food for people. If I saw the land there as primarily habitat for swallows, which are my favorite birds, then certainly. So people need food. Right. Right. Like we have to accept, we have to contextualize stewardship in a context of, look, we're going to be, if food production is the goal, then you have to accept some levels of types of some compromise. Yeah. Because you're going, like we're eight billion people, we need to take resources to feed people. I have a seven year old son and we often chat about these things and with this many people, it's not like we're going to go back to gathering from the forest tomorrow because it's not enough nettles for everyone to go around. I know, but there's an interesting argument that I see made among academics who think about these things online and the argument is actually, you know, Jordan and Andrew, your organic farms are statistically less productive on a yield scale than conventional farms. So why don't we, why don't we convert yours back to swallow habitat? Like why don't we farm on less land and use, like, so you've- Oh, why don't we convert it to conventional farm? Basically this exists in the hypothetical, but it's kind of interesting because as you said, we already have to make compromises in agriculture, right? Like that hurt the environment. So there is an argument made in the circles, like in food talk circles of like, theoretically, if you could cap, like we'd be better off if we actually embraced more intensive, more destructive practices, but achieved it on a lot less land rather than having, say, organic farms that are less arguably destructive, say they build soil a little bit better or maintain more swallow habitat. But ultimately, where there's too much destruction happening just to have the farm in the first place. It's just an interesting conundrum I've been trying to wrap my head around personally. Yeah, yeah, and I think with all these things that all depend on what do you want to measure. You know, I would say that our land is most certainly as an organic farmer, most certainly better for biodiversity than a conventional farm. Was it better for carbon emissions, I would say no, because the amount of time that you have to cultivate your plants, we have to weed weekly, and we were doing it on machines, and going back and forth and harvesting again and again back and forth the field, I would argue that we're doing more emissions than a conventional farm. Because they're just third making with, say, if they're using herbicide as their primary culture, like weed control, they're making less passes with their equipment. With a huge boom. Yeah, and also not disturbing as well as much. Yeah, but the biodiversity is more certainly lower. Yeah. So, you know, what are you valuing? What are you valuing? Right. Anything commonly believed about farming that you think is a myth or any misconceptions you want to bust? The main thing that really comes to mind is that when you're a farm, and you're the farm, and you're making income from that farm, and you are making enough money to actually purchase another farm, then first and foremost, through our business. We were talking a little bit more about farming as a lifestyle or people farm because they grew up farming. I think we are seeing less and less of that, and I think also as generations of farmers, you know, a lot of the farmers that came to BC were immigrants. And then as now that the generation of farmers, the ones that have stayed on our third or second or third generation, we are seeing that generation really, the ones that are staying in agriculture are really pushing forward with business standards, with operational standards, with standard operating procedures, because that is what the world is demanding of us. Okay. And I mean, do you see that as, as, I mean, I'm sending you're saying that's a positive thing. I think it's positive that we have people willing to take that on, because I think if we didn't, we would just have less food production here in the province. Right. I think, and we would be importing more, because I don't think the alternative would be then all of a sudden everybody becomes really small, and people all of a sudden don't shop at grocery stores. I think it would just be easier to bring in food from away, and people continue to shop at grocery stores. So is this the last year you're going to grow cash crops? I'm not growing cash crops. There's nothing this year? No, no. That's, we shipped our last, we shipped our last shipment out in May. I see. Okay. Well, congratulations on 15 years with the farmers in San Andrew. It's a very positive thing to be doing something to you and imagining what world, you know, all of a sudden one thing about agriculture is you have to be in that same spot all the time. Yeah. And it's really hard to take on other walls, so I'm really excited to see what else is going on there in the world, and, you know, realize that I could have a job for a year and then maybe have a different job in there. Yeah. Well, I wish you well. I look forward to bumping into you at some point and to find out where you slotted yourself first. Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast. Okay. Thank you, Jordan. Let's shake hands. That's for you. Sure. On the record. On the record. That's it for now, everyone. Thanks for listening and talk to you in two weeks, hopefully on time, when we're going to learn about the regulation that governs the practice of agrology in BC, and why the definition of agrology in that regulation may cause problems for farmers who give advice to their colleagues. Bye for now. Whatever, we have a lot more in common than all our differences would suggest. Thank you. (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
