Hello, I'm Jordan Marr, and this is Farming in British Columbia, a podcast that always honks when it's corny. This time on the podcast, a conversation with Vincent and Louis Burkholder, a pair of brothers who worked summers for the local sweet corn bara and his teenagers, and ended up taking over his operation. Sort of. I was interested to talk to Vincent and Louis because of the reputation for innovative approaches to the planting, cultivation, and harvesting of sweet corn. We talk about that, how they were forced to pivot from a tried-and-true sales model in their first year of production because of a crown-shaped virus, why they're okay with a grizzly bear taking up residence in the corn patch, and a bunch more. My conversation with the Burkholder brothers is coming up in a couple of minutes. First, though, a couple of responses to my interview with Jane Kerner of the BC Institute of Agrologists from the last episode. Hi, Jordan, it's Annalise Calling from Fresh Valley Farms. I just listened to your latest podcast on why you should care about how agrology is defined, and I just wanted to say how fascinating I found it that the interviewee thought that agrologists needed to be regulated and defined as such, but then she worked in banking, and I was just curious how people with a degree in finance would think about that. Anyways, love your podcast and really appreciate the work that you do in our community. Why should a limited licensed agrologist who maybe is doing this so they can attend to speaking engagements for nonprofits a year, why should they have to pay $600, which is the same fee as a professional agrologist who does this for a living every day? Listener, you too can respond to things you hear on this show. Send your voice memos to 250-767-6636, or podcast@farmingnbc.ca. And now, here's my interview with the Burkholder brothers. This is fun for me, you guys, because literally up to this moment, I've always referred to you as the Burkholder bros or brothers, but now, I get to say Vincent, Lewis, thanks a lot for joining me on farming in British Columbia. Thanks for having us, Jordan, this is exciting. We're going to talk a lot about farming, and you're farming in particular, but I'm curious to ask you this question. Where did you grow up? We grew up just between Chase and Kamloops in Pritchard. Yeah. There's an old wooden bridge, a lot of people know, goes over the river there, so we grew up on 20 acres up on the side of a mountain, our whole lives, so we had all sorts of mountain bike trails on our property, and just generally spent all of our time outside there. So everyone who's listening, I need to establish this, that's Lewis, Burkholder talking, and in a moment, you'll get a taste of Vincent, but so 20 acres in Pritchard on a mountainside or hillside, Vincent, was there farming happening on that property? There was no farming. It was previously logged before we got there, and it was just recovering forest. What did you grow? So our introduction to farming was down here in the valley in Chase, which is just east of Pritchard by 20 kilometers. So Pritchard being east, kind of east, east, northeast of Kamloops by 40 or 50 K on the flats of the valley bottom, and then another 20-25 to Chase, headed towards Salmon Arm and Revelstoke in the Rockies. Yeah, so right up in the mouth of the little shoe swap, Blake is Chase there. Okay, well we'll talk a bit more about geography in a second, but what did you guys, what did your folks do growing up? They weren't farmers. My dad is a heavy duty mechanic, and my mom raised us, and then once we were done being raised, she became a beekeeper. We were never done being raised. How old are you guys? I'm about to turn 30 next week. Happy birthday. I'm 27. Okay, so raised, you mentioned your introduction to farming was here in Chase. As kids, like did you get into doing some farm labor? Yep, child labor, exactly. So we were on the school bus coming into Chase every day for school, and then everyone in this area knows Pete Murray. He was the sweet corn guy that everyone knew. Yeah, so we both started working there when we were pretty young, probably 13, picking strawberries and then pulling weeds, and then eventually we worked our way up to picking corn. Oh, you have to work your way up to that. Yeah, totally. Okay, so we're not going to dwell on this line, but did you like it? Were you reluctant farm laborers, or were you into it? No, it was good. We both had a mountain biking addiction and wanted to make money in the summertime, and it was a perfect first job, and then unknowingly it was our introduction into farming, which was kind of life-changing, I think, for both of us. I happen to have had a mountain biking addiction growing up in cantaloupes. I was pretty close. I'm about 12, 13 years older than you, Vince, but how much of an addiction and what form of mountain biking? Because, to me, I'm going to guess right off the bat that just in the era that you would have been obsessed, it was free riding, was that what you guys were into? Yeah, I started at the bike ranch in Kamloops, and so lots of free riding, and then kind of morphed into downhill racing, too. You guys were racing? Yeah. Oh, cool. Because the race circuit here was very accessible, especially in Kamloops. Yeah. Not that I want to brew tensions this early in the interview, but who was the better mountain biker? Vince, it was. I'll say it. I was older, so I was two and a half years older. What was the worst injury that happened among you? I dislocated my hip and fractured my pelvis and tore my shoulder apart all in one crash at the bike ranch, and then about a year later, I sold my bike and started fly fishing. So my bike bought a boat. Kamloops is also a fly fishing mecca, for those who don't know. I want to talk a little more geography before we get into farming, or really farming geography. People who know Chase will know it for its sweet corn, like it's a real concentration of sweet corn production. Would you say, is there something special about this region in terms of it being particularly well-suited for sweet corn, or is it more like a culture of sweet corn production got going? How do you explain that Chase came to be known so well for producing sweet corn and good sweet corn? I mean, our soil here is very desirable. It's black. People say the only rocks that you find out there are the ones that someone put there. But then you also have this weird thing with this valley, and same with the Okanagan, it's just like a little inland desert in BC. So we do get warmer temperatures as we see today. Yeah. You just really get the heat units here. Yeah. Yeah. So that makes it possible to have a season where you can actually. And really I guess that just really do succession plantings and really nail that and have a real wide range of harvest dates I would guess. Yes and no. To be honest, this is one of the things I want to talk about today is the fact that it is good for BC and it is good for the interior in terms of being a place to grow sweet corn. But our latitude is not conducive to growing sweet corn, and it is difficult to run a business where your harvest season is two months of the year and you're doing a fresh crush. Fresh perishable product. Yeah. I feel like this is about the limit. I've heard that there's people growing sweet corn up around Williams Lake. Ah, soda creek. Soda creek. But it's hard for you to imagine that making economic sense. It'd be tough. Yeah. And any farther north than that, I don't think it's really feasible. Even here, I mean it's very much a half a year gig for us. Yeah it's a good spot to grow corn in BC for sure, but wider perspective, we're really pushing it here I'd say. Okay and so I guess I'll start with you Lewis. Can you take me through briefly how you guys came into farming? Was there a gap between the summer work you did as let's say through your teenage years and then like becoming, yeah, I'll speak for corn barons. I'll speak for myself on that I guess. I took a few summers off from working on the farm as a laborer. I went tree planting for a summer and I just spent the whole time wishing I was back on the farm. I worked for BC Hydro for a summer and same thing I just missed the work I got to do on the farm. I did take two summers off from that but otherwise I've just been here every chance I get every summer I can. And then in 2019 Pete Murray who we were working for he was kind of retiring from growing corn and offered to help us start our own business. Because you had you been working for him every year like that was where every year you were doing your summer work growing up? Yep. Exactly. And so you knew him well? Yep. Kay. Yeah so he rented us some land he loaned us a little bit of equipment and kind of just helped us get going for the first two years and then we transitioned away from his mentorship and we kind of just find ourselves with a farm business in our hands now. Right, right. Okay so let's stop there because I want to bring you into it too Vincent so I get a sense of what your brother was doing. What about you? So one of you has some engineering training or have I just heard that you guys are engineering wizards? What's the... No so I have a similar story to Lou where I worked as an employee for Pete when I was in high school and then right after high school I left and there's a seven year gap there for me for going off and doing a degree and a very very short career in engineering. And then in 2019 I guess spring of 2020 we came back here to start this business. Right. Yeah yeah. And then you had that mentorship from Pete to get going. Okay and now let's just take a leap to today. How much land... It's all leased land that you are on, right? 100% it's kind of one of the unique things about our business I think is that we don't own any land there is no promise of land from the family it's just a business. So it's 30 acres of leased land all on the same street right down, right down the road here, right outside of Chase and we do, I don't know, acreage wise probably 98% sweet corn. Okay so you're on that 30 you're over 25 acres a year in sweet corn production, right? And is it still renting from Pete Murray or are you renting from someone else now? Yeah. We rent from three different land owners. Yeah. All unrelated to Pete. Okay okay. I'm kind of curious to know just in the way you phrased that Vincent that we inherited Pete's equipment and Pete's approaches as you came in to form your own ideas and systems. What were the first things about Pete's approach that you decided to change? Yeah okay so in the first year we leased all of our equipment from Pete and in doing so we inherited his weed control strategies. Yeah. We also leased the same sales location that he had sold from for 40 years. And was that sales location which I know is like roadside stand through a very heavily traffic tourist area in the summer? Is that a major percentage of Pete's traditional marketing? Yes. Okay and it was in our first year as well. Yeah. So for the first season our business looked a lot like Pete's business. Yeah. It had a different name. Which was? Was it the Berkholder Brothers? Berkholder bro's corn farm. Yeah. Okay. It has been since. The things changed very quickly in the second year. So we changed a lot of things about our weed control methods which we can talk about. And we also changed the way we did sales a lot too. We still run that same roadside location but there's been a highway bypass since and it's a very small part of what we do. Did the bypass kind of spoil the sales, the roadside stand? It cut us off completely for one summer. Yeah. Right smack dab in the middle of harvest season. Yeah. And then since then it's a few minutes off the highway now. So it's been pretty dramatically. More of a distant sound out for the person driving by. Yeah. But it was a good kick in the butt for us because when that access got cut off. We bought like a box truck and we started taking into camloops every day and setting up like a corn drive through. Yeah. At gas stations, hotel parking lots kind of just try in places. Figuring out where you were going to get that exposure in traffic. Yeah. Exactly. And we've found a few good spots which we go to every day now and that's really saved our bacon since. Yeah. And the move to doing sales in camloops has been the number one thing that's made this possible. It probably accounts for 60 to 70 percent of our sales at this point. Okay. Well before we move on, I still am not satisfied with the answer to the describe the chaos question. I got the suggestion of chaos. Was it weeds? Was it sales? What was the where was the pandemonium that first year? Well that was as COVID was happening, right? We're starting our business as COVID has happened. Yeah. Oh, so it was just primarily that jolt to try it and tested farming and business model. That we were pretty overwhelmed. I think a lot of farmers had a big boost in sales during that summer. So we were completely overwhelmed with our sales and we were just spending all of our days picking when there's a million other things we should be doing. I mean, we grew a good corn crop last year and we picked every single last call because we didn't have enough corn because sales were really good. We also tried our hand as a lot of other things. As our first year in farming, definitely didn't know what should be our priorities, right? So like we had laying hands, which were a disaster. We had meatbirds, which were a disaster. We had a vegetable garden, which there's, there honestly, what is it? I mean, I know what it is about being a new farmer and it's the enthusiasm and the excitement. And then you add these micro enterprises to a business that would otherwise be a lot less stressful and they all fail because it's like, "Oh yeah, there's another $800 in revenue this year. Thank you." Wow. It was very naive for sure. But at the same time, we were very overworked because of it, but we got to experiment with a lot of different things and a lot of the experiments that we, to do, we've taken forward with us in some way, right? It wasn't the last year we did meatbirds. The ideas we had about how to do, we controlled differently. They did carry forward as well. So yeah, the first year was chaos, but it was fun. I look back on it fondly. Well, I'm going to use that. I'm going to like, you know, I had it on my list to ask you how you guys do as brothers who own a business, own and run a business together. Did it put any strain on YouTube, like between YouTube that first year? Yeah, for sure. But I lived in Vancouver before we came into this and those lived here in Kamloops. And we'd meet up to go skiing once in a while and see each other a few times in the summer, but we didn't really have a relationship, right? Now all of a sudden, we're living in the same derelict trailer and starting a business together. Yeah. But it's been awesome. Yeah, nothing brings two people closer than that, working on a shared mission every day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where the tensions were though, we're probably where we were living together. We started in an abandoned mobile home, which we fixed up a little bit. Yeah. A little bit. I'll clarify that. And then we moved into a 18 foot travel trailer together. So walking space was like, you had to turn sideways and squeeze past each other. Sure. And we were just kind of piled on top of each other all the time, but. Yeah, we lived in that old mobile home, our travel trailer for the last four years. We actually recently just both moved in houses, which is super cool, but it was definitely roughing it for a while in the name of the business. It's been a tense amount of time to spend with your brother for months and months of the year. Yeah, only six months out of the year. And then we can go off our own way. Sure. Yeah. But really, we're doing all the same things we did when we were kids. Yeah. Like we're playing in the shop, we're building, I mean, now they're tools. Back then we were building toys, but it's all the same things we've always been doing together. Yeah. So yeah, it's just childhood continued, basically. What did you charge for an ear of corn in 2019, your best, a premium ear going straight to an eater, not a wholesale? Yeah. So in 2020, our first year of sales, we were selling for $12 a dozen, which was a huge jump. It was one of the first years of inflation. And Pete was like, who do you think you are? Yeah. Right. It went from $9 to $12 that year. You guys decided that jump. We were, yeah, we were just following grocery start prices, essentially. Okay. And not really knowing if people would accept it. And they did. I'm glad we did because it was a good year of sales and we needed the income. Yeah. You debt financed that first year. So I guess you were. But yeah, it's always a funny time in late July, when harvest season is about to start and we have to decide our prices. And the last four years has been different every year, right? Sometimes lower, sometimes higher than 12 a dozen, it's been higher every time. Okay. Actually, maybe the last two years have been the same now. So for, for peak demand, what can you get? What have you, have you gone, you know, what have you charged for doesn't it at a peak time, like a peak demand time when, when it's not over supply or whatever. We have charged as much as 18. For early season. Yeah. That seems to track with local food inflation, I've seen across the board almost at the farmer's market. You know it? Yeah. I think a more typical price now is like 15 to 16 that doesn't, bakers doesn't. So it's, yeah, it's the most expensive corn in town for sure. And how do you feel about that? Lots of farmers I know grapple with like, it's like a cognitive dissonance. It's the knowledge that how hard this work is and that presumably you're not absolutely, you're not raking it in, right, and that you deserve the money you're charging, but also a pressure or a responsibility to like meet some standard of affordable food for people. Like, do you guys struggle with that at all? Or do you feel pretty strongly and confident about the decision to charge what you charge? Yeah. People will compare us to the commodity prices a lot, like the corn they see us save on. But it is two different things, right? This is locally growing. This is growing without Roundup. All these things. So you always kind of have to remind people that it is a different product. And all you have to do is take one bite of it and you're going to see the difference. I'll always hand people a cob just at the drive through it. So just take a bite. Just take a bite. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please. Also, I've been told by another corn grower in the area that, I guess this is a version of putting you guys on the spot, but do you blanket harvest your corn or do you selectively pick to avoid the ears that aren't ready? Oh, we hand pick. Hand pick, but do you have to do more than one pass through a row? How do you handle that? Yeah, usually two or three. Yeah. But that's what this colleague of yours told me is the two picks, but what that does is mean that it's going to keep that quality of each pick really, really high. You're not giving people duds. Yeah. And I think the biggest thing we do for quality is we pick daily and we sell what's picked today. So our target is to pick in the morning from seven o'clock till 10 and then go sell it in the afternoon and come home with nothing. So we don't have to waste it, but also so we don't have to sell any tomorrow, right? You mentioned when you were talking about Lewis, you mentioned when you were talking about people comparing your corn to commodity corn and you mentioned Roundup and how you guys don't use Roundup and I'm curious. So you inherited a mechanical cultivation approach from Pete. Is there ever, like, have you ever been felt attracted to experimenting with herbicide-based weed control? Yeah, like mid-June when you're hoeing days in, day out, you think about it, sure. But we've got a pretty good system that mostly works for us. We are one of our biggest struggles, for sure, and our cultivation system has been turned on its head maybe two or three times, right? We've tried a lot of different things, for sure, and I think we're still improving, probably always will. But no, it's not really not a serious thought to go with GMO Roundup ready, sweet corn and spray Roundup. I don't think we need it. I don't think it's going to be beneficial for a business and honestly our customers expect us not to. It doesn't come up, do a decent percentage of new customers ask you about it? I know so much new customers, but we have, again, we inherited this reputation from Pete Murray of no sprays, and we've stuck with that, and I think it's been good for us too. Yeah, yeah. So you would have to maybe give up too much to even want to benefit from the benefits of a more simplified weeding regime. Yeah, I mean, I'm just so grateful not to have to deal with that stuff too. It's just not in my mind at all. I also really enjoy the way we do it too. It's really fun. Spending time in the shop, working on cultivators, designing new systems for that, and actually being out there, rumbling back and forth and the old farm oil tracker that we use, it's a good time. Yeah, actually spending time in the field, seeing what's going on, what we use our germinating, what strategy can we use, that is the job, and yeah, we would spend a lot less hours if we just blanket sprayed everything, but we're not set up to do it. It's not really in our sights. All right. So I'd like to talk a bit about production. I mean, you guys have been toiling away at this for a good number of years now, and you kind of have a bit of a reputation for being pretty smart about what you're pulling off in the shop and trying in the field and just being innovative, so we're not going to spend a ton of time, but I am interested in asking you guys like maybe if you could highlight a couple of insights you've made, any insights that really, really represented turning points in success or what have you. Very little thing you do you think is going to be the big turning point, right? You always have such high expectations, and then most of them aren't. We had chatted a little bit before about the pre-germinating of the seeds, specifically for the early season plantings. That has helped us big time in the past. And in that case, it's pre-germinating the corn seed so that you can plant it with a little bit of a sprout on it so that it gets a jump on the weed germination, reduces time to emergence by whatever you're aiming for one, two, three, four days, something like that. Yes, exactly. Yeah, not a very common method that I'm aware of, but the idea is twofold. One is just to get ahead of the weeds, like you say, if the seed's already germinating or goes in the ground, then it's going to be up faster before the weeds germinate. And then we're able to hill those weeds away a little easier. And then the other goal is to just have a more consistent patch because you have a control environment to germinate your seeds in before you put them in the ground. The field doesn't tend to be very warm in the middle of April when we're doing our first plantings. So being able to germinate indoors with a heater and humidifier feels like a lot more controlled of an environment. Right. And I've heard another corn grower who likes the idea, the concept mentioned, that like point out that when you drop a sprouted seed in cold soil, it's alive. So it's going to be more resistant to rotting. Have you found that to be the case? It's hard to tell. Uh, this takes actually changing one factor and then running a whole test plot, right? Yeah. And we've done little tests here and there and sometimes there's some natural variances between the different plantings that we're doing that might be side by side on the same day. Mm hmm. And you can go through and count the number of successful plants. But it's difficult and honestly I don't know of much science out of there on it. So we're kind of treading in deep water and guessing as we go quite a bit. And frankly, with some of the new super sweet varieties that are out there, we're starting to get away from pre-draminating just because of all the things that can go wrong. And also you mentioned those varieties are a little quicker to emerge. Yeah, they do pretty well even without pre-draminating. And you compare it side by side with ones you have pre-draminated and there's sometimes a little bit of a benefit, but sometimes you should just like to draw. Once your corn is emerged, what is the first major cultivation tool you're typically dragging through? So we have a little 1952 Farmall Super A. It's an offset tractor and we just permanently have a finger weeding set up mounted to the bottom of it. Two row? Two row, yeah. So everywhere it goes it's got the finger weavers along with it. So that's all we use that tractor for. Mm hmm. We have some tines for our first pass blind cultivation and we'll use that combination of fingers and tines before the corn has emerged. Okay, so when you've got a spike but it's not poking out the ground because you can break those off for sure. Yeah. So if they're still half inch deeper, so that's ideal. So we run that through our first pass. Once it's emerged, if we're not dealing with any broad leaves, then our first pass is going to be when the corn is, or sorry, our second pass is going to be when the corn is about two inches high, three inches high. And we're using the fingers again without the tines to, and we're running pretty aggressive. That's what I wanted to ask you is how aggressive, how close are the fingers overlapping at all? Or they just, like your finger set up on either side of the corn? Just, yeah. So when they're actually flexed in the soil, they're just about touching. Okay. And that's a real point of contention, I'm sure, for everyone. Right. How tough to go. We go pretty tough because we don't want to hoe weeds. Yeah. That's not what Dr. Hobb is supposed to be, right? And you've lived that dream. By now, five years in, you've lived that dream where at least certain fields, you haven't, there must be the odd field you just haven't had to hoe. You haven't had to go in a manual. Yeah. It feels great. Sure. Yeah. In the summer, when you realize that's the case, yeah. So our second pass is with the fingers, starting to hale them already, even when they're two or three inches tall. That's if we have any amount of grass. If not, then probably what we'll do is we'll make our second pass flame weed right as the corn spiking. Hopefully even before it opens up, its first two leaves does a minimal amount of damage to the corn and kills off the broad leaves. Yeah. So, tractor mount, this is a tractor, I'll tractor mount it. I'll tractor mount it. Yeah. All on the farm. Yeah. On the super rain. Yeah. Yeah. So we've got our first blind cultivation pass, our flame leading pass, maybe. But if there's grass, don't even bother because you're just playing, you're just racing, right? You're racing the grass. So you might as well just go straight to finger weaving. And then we'll do another finger weaving pass, potentially when the corn is about six inches tall. And at this point we'll spin them, we've got round shanks so we can use our finger readers to actually hill. You could use something else to hill too. I see. Right. But we'll make a really gentle hill about two or three inches tall. Right. And then our last pass is hilling aggressively with the low-listen rolling cultivator. Okay. Yeah. And at that point we side dress and we're done. And that low-listen sounds like a pretty crucial step then. That last pass with the low-listen? Yeah. Yeah. So everybody knows the best time to kill weeds is before you can see them when it's a little white hair in the ground. After that stage, basically our only bet is to rely on the corn growing vertically enough that we can make a hill and bury the weeds. Yeah, right. Okay. And that low-listen rolling cultivator will throw quite big hills. I saw the hills. I was pretty impressed with the hills that they could achieve. Yeah. Yeah. Which, that's really nice because faster you go the bigger the hill. So you get your cultivating done twice as fast as when you're doing the little delicate stuff. And then you get to go to the beach. All right. Well, let's leave it there for cultivation, guys, but I mean, what can you tell me if anything about harvest? Anything worth mentioning? Yeah. For sure. Our harvest system is all interlinked. So we have a crew of employees during August, September and a bit of October. And they help us with our harvest and they also help us with our sales. So like I mentioned earlier, one of our big selling points is that we pick our corn daily. So we go out first thing in the morning with the harvest crew. And from seven o'clock to 10 o'clock, we hand harvest a trailer full to go to our stand here and chase, two trucks full to go to our locations and cam loops, and then potentially a truck to go to market. And then as soon as we're done harvest, the same people that harvest, they take that truck and they go and they do sales for the afternoon. So big days for everybody. The quick costume change put on some clean clothes. Of course. Yeah. Thousands of years of corn, we're talking, sounds like. Yeah. How much a day? A pickup. Yeah. Yeah. A pickup with outsides. A large mound of corn. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do we count it? Sometimes. Can we count? Sometimes. Yeah. And the goal there is just that we have a fresh brick corn, you know, picked in the morning when it was cool. We don't need a lot of refrigeration. We get it sold that afternoon and it goes into our customers' fridges that night. And hopefully they eat it that night, too. But we don't try to stockpile corn. We just sell it. And our goal is to come back with zero corn at the end of the day so we don't have to waste any. And so we don't have to sell day old corn. Is that mostly work out? Mostly, except for when you've got a gap between plantings. Yeah. That's the big problem. Being able to stockpile allows you to have some buffer. Do you think it's important that it sounds like you'd really like your trucks to be in the same spot every single day once the season starts? Like, do you think it's important not to miss a day? That's our goal. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. If we run out of corn, we'll miss a day. But other than that, we've got 60 days to make our income for the year. So we're there every day. Right. Yeah. So one of us will usually take a truck to town just to do some sales ourselves, get to know what's going on, get to know customers vice versa. It's a little more glamorous to buy the corn from a burk holder bro, not the burk holder bro employee. I get it. Like, you know, I've seen you guys as smiles, I can understand why sales are a little more juiced when one of the brothers goes into town. Yeah. So one of us will take a truck into Kamloops. The other one of us will stay on the farm, take care of whatever farm stuff happens to be going on. At that time of year, a lot of pest control, starlings and bears are our biggest pests. Normally black bears, two years ago, we had a grizzly bear spending its nights in the corn. I've seen that. I've seen what that looks like. It's crazy. They eat a remarkable amount. So what have you guys, have you guys done any barrier electric fencing or anything? Yeah, electric fencing is first line of defense. But they'll typically just go straight through it. We do a lot of coexisting, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. We have some nice fat bears come October. Yeah. I had a two acre, I was growing a two acre field of, of, of flint corn in a little wet last year and a, and a, call it a family of black bears got a taste for it. And we didn't, it was like a side project. I don't, I live in Vernon, my, my colleague, Tristan Bandwell was overseeing the crop, but he's a, he's a rancher, you know, couldn't, couldn't give it enough attention, didn't expect them to. We lost the whole two acres. They ate, they ate two acres of it. We, I don't think you could get enough attention. I mean, you got to be out there all night chasing the mountains. Yeah. I go out in the evening and chase five out of the field and then I leave and I'm sure they come straight back. Sure. Laughing at you. Yeah. Laughing at you. They know what they want. They know how to get it. They got the conservation officers involved when the grizzly bear was hanging around. Did you give them a talking to, you mean, to really? Yeah. His, his point was you can be upset that you have a grizzly or you can be happy that it's going to keep all the black bears away. So we went with the latter. We were just happy that there's only one bear. Yeah, one grizzly instead of five black bears. Right. Yeah. Usually we were able to exist with them. Last year, we actually lost a patch and didn't get to do sales for a few days because of it. But for the most part, you can, you can work with them. What about Starlings? I am curious. I had some Starling issues last year. Any, like any, any success in dealing with them? That's a nightmare. It is a nightmare. Yeah. They're smart. We use drones. Yeah. We use shotguns. We use propane bangers. And that's the combination of those three helps, but you just got to be out there. You got to be in the field and leaving every afternoon to go do sales is kind of the worst thing you can do. So we lose some and we try not to sell bird-pecked corn, but sometimes that's the reality. And you can maybe train your customers a little bit about some of them. Yeah. Yeah. Either one or both of you had any of the kind of setbacks or failures that made you hit some form of rock bottom? Like, has that happened yet? Have you ever, like, has something ever happened specifically or in general that has made you question doing this? Have you? Yeah. I mean, I've been crying in a field before, for sure, just some level of overwhelm. I don't have, I have a real enthusiasm for farming. I like problem solving, but I also don't, in certain areas of farming, I just don't have the best instincts. I'm from a non-farming background, and unlike you, I don't have that engineer's brain. I don't know if that's one or both of you. It sounds like it's kind of both of you. Ah, I think you're being modest is from what I can infer, but I, so I just have had lots of, I have had lots of and regular setbacks that I really take to heart. Like, I really, I felt pretty terrible about myself. And so, link to the question is, another way of asking the question is, like, I'm just curious to know, like, I really feel like I encounter two types of farmers, just like, a really just self-assured, confident type and a real, much less so type, you know, like more prone to second-guessing his or herself. And I'm just wondering, I guess, which kind of farmers you are, and whether there have been moments where you got real down on yourself, hit some form of rock bottom, just whatever. Things got dark. Yeah. Good question. I think we've been pretty lucky, like, there's never been any disasters. No tragedy in the last four years, but I think it's certainly been a challenge to grapple with the fact of this being our jobs. Going to make this a full-time year-round job is not going great, and we certainly still have to go figure something else out in the winter. I guess what helps is just knowing that there is other things out there, too, and we're not tied to a piece of family land or something. We're not committed to this at all. It's just a job when we're trying to do well, but it's just that, you know, it's not our legacy or anything. It's just, we're here running a business. And trying, too, and seems like a lot of times, having a good time amidst the craziness and stress. It seems like you guys have fun solving problems. Yeah. I mean, there's lows for sure. Working all day, 60 days straight for harvest season, it's hard on you. I've cried in the field. I've slept in the pouring rain in the field, in my rain gear, in the mud. Why? Why? Yeah. Fall into sleep? Sleepy. Just got sleepy. Sleepy enough is like, "I'm just going to do it here." Yeah. But honestly, I think most of my rock bottoms have come in the winter time when there's not work to do. I think farming is what keeps me sane. And farming just fits that bill kind of perfectly for me. And I'm going to kind of segue into a related topic, which is like, you guys don't own land. And it sounds like, "Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no near-term plans to change that." Nope. I don't see a future. So you are farmers who lease land like me. I am curious to know where you have set your benchmark for economic or financial services. It's not your own success in that context, because when you own land, you just finish highlighting Vince that there's benefits to not owning your land, and you're not like that connected to it, and it ultimately allows you choice in your life later on or whatever. But when you own land as a farmer, to me, the benchmark is different. A successful farm can simply be paying the mortgage down and watching that land increase in value and essentially building wealth that way. It's not the case for you and you and me, and I'm just wondering what constitutes a successful year? Again, not the value stuff, not the boy that sure was a rewarding year. I mean, financially, you don't have to be any more specific than your comfortable being, but where do you set that benchmark? And just to be really direct, are we talking like, well, if we each make 30 grand, 100 grand, how do you set, because you're not building wealth in the land, presumably? So we've been really of the mindset that we're building a business, which has the potential to grow and create solid, consistent income. Your first number was bang on. I think we take home 30 every season, each. Which is great, and that's an average, good years and bad years out of a small sample set, but the idea has always been we're improving every year and we're spending less and less on equipment every year, because we're actually getting set up to operate without leasing equipment and that'll improve. So I'm really grateful that you just put a number on it, because not everyone wants to talk about it. So 30, when I was a market gardener, was about the best I achieved in a year, and I didn't have many years like that to be frank. And at this point, you guys are still, as far as farmers go, quite young, and so that's like I can see why that's satisfying and respectful, and you're trying to do better. Is there a future benchmark you want or need to hit? The reason I ask is because Tom Henry is a farmer on Vancouver Island, and he started the publication Small Farm Canada, and we talked about this years ago when I was just getting going and farming, and how that 20 or 30,000 is just fine as a quite young farmer. But at some point, he was talking about the mixed veggie grower, who at some point, in their late 30s or 40s, they just get tired of driving a 20-year-old hondai that breaks down a lot. And the romance fades away, so I'm just curious in knowing, do you bother thinking ahead and thinking that whereas 20, 25, 30 is totally acceptable now, and good for you guys, just a few years into your business, that you're pulling that off, and you have many years ahead of you. Do you bother to think much about how you might feel at 40 and 37, or 50 and 47? I think about it a lot, maybe in a bit more of a general sense, that I really try to spend a lot of time thinking about the life that I want to live and the work that I want to do, work's going to be a big part of it no matter what, and do I want to choose a job that I really enjoy, like farming, which isn't going to make near as much as another job that you can't go get, maybe. But what's the balance there, right? And I think that should be a big question for everybody in everybody's life, and this is not really much different. Yeah, it'd be sweet to make more, be more comfortable, it would make me less scared to have this be my job and have a family, or be able to take risks, all sorts of things. But there's a limit there, too, though, right? I don't want it to just consume me just because I want to make more money. Yeah, I think the possibility of buying a cringe to farm is out of reach. I can't imagine that happening. Exceedingly out of reach, it just seems, right? Yeah. You think that if you're working full of time and towards building a business, like a farmer should be able to buy a house, too, right? So that's where I would, I guess, like to get our business to, is to the point where we could afford to pay a mortgage. Sure. Even if it's on a residential property near your leases. Just a house, yeah, yeah. Just have some housing, some secure housing. Yeah, that'd be sweet. Just living in a travel trailer for four years, houses are on our minds, right? So you're approaching the five-year point of your business. If you look ahead the next five years, what are the biggest, what are some barriers or concerns you can identify about realizing, scaling up, finding more success, all the good stuff? What has got you the most anxious or concerned, as you look ahead over five years, say I have five-year time frame? Weather, staff, sales. Sales are big in my mind. Why? We retail 95% of all of our corn, so the Camos market has been great and is growing every year, but there's certainly a limit there, and our business model of operating out of essentially like gas station parking lots is good lucrative when we're doing it, but it's always someone else's property, someone else's permission. So if one or two of those opportunities dry up, then it's hard to maintain or even grow, right? And, Lewis, you said weather, care to expand. Have you had any shocks, any weather shocks the last few years? Yeah, the heat we're dealing with right now, I mean, this has been a part of every summer. Maybe forever, but I'm hyper-aware to it now. We had the fire out here in the shoe swap last year, which was obviously associated with that extreme heat that we had. That affected the whole community. As far as our business goes, we went from being healthfully staffed, like 10 staff members, doing good, and then the day that fire blew up and everyone got evacuated, we went down to two staff members for a week, 10 days. So I think a lot of us are feeling in the interior anyway, or feeling a lot of, it just adds this layer of the unpredictability of what's this summer going to be like. It just adds that extra layer of anxiety and dread, hey? Like I felt some dread headed into this season about, and it's going comparatively okay so far. The fact that we're maybe going to get to August before the fires start is like a real leg up on a good number of the last few years, but I don't enjoy that extra layer of anxiety now that I can't help but feel as we head into a new season when so much affirming is already unpredictable. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody feels it. We're not alone in that. We're just hyper aware to it. We rely on the weather to cooperate. Guys, I wanted to ask you whether and how you think about the topic of reconciliation with indigenous people in your work as a farmer, because I believe I'm quite certain we're on unceded territory. You kind of have, you have a somewhat unique, the fact that you don't own and you just lease land probably comes into play here, but I'm just wondering if you think about it at all. For sure. Yeah, we're on unseated so quite make land here. And I mean, number one thing, I guess, is respect for the land, right? That's what the indigenous people are always saying. Protect the land, keep the water clean, take care of wildlife. And we have a responsibility to do that as stewards of the land, right? We are constantly just imagining what this place would have been like previous to it being cut up into squares. Chase Creek used to run through these flats. You can still see the creek bed right through all the middle of these farms. And then when the railway came through it diverted to creek and dried it all up for farmland. So yeah, we have a big responsibility to acknowledge that. I guess what I'm just wondering, I think trying to contemplate reconciliation in terms of an end goal is very overwhelming, but like in terms of baby steps, like my own experience is that it's just a really hard topic, it's really hard to conceive of how do you in a physical sense, like you literally describe the cutting up of land in the squares. I think it's really tough, especially in the physical sense. We've got this amazing piece of land here, which has changed forever into farmland. And it feels inaccessible as ever. Not only is it just cut up into farms down here, it's cut up into a lot of estates, frankly. That's a lot of expensive horse sanctuaries with mansions on them in the ALR. And how do we even just allow normal people to live here again, let alone give it back or take it back to a estate where it was. For me, it's a really hard thing to grapple with even just working this land. I feel, in some ways, really grateful that I don't have to live with owning any of this land. Do you need in terms of moral complexity of it? Yeah. I'm a little bit caught up in the middle of this hall too, because my girlfriend is from this gauntlet band. Her parents are protesters and I'm always going back and forth between here and there. I mean, they're super welcoming of me and they're stoked that there's people growing food locally here. But I'm just kind of struggling to walk the line. Is it much of a broader conversation in this farming community? It's not in mine, not directly. I would say it is not here either. I feel like there's a lot of racism in this town. I know there is. I think what we can do, just as members of the community, is go to events, learn some place names, get to know people, foster good relationships. As farmers, we have a good opportunity to trade. We always do big trade vegetables for fish every fall. Just opportunities to work together. Just rebuild some of that trust that we lost. Yeah. But it is a difficult thing to grapple with, especially with the land that we're on, which Lewis mentioned was totally different than it is now. You struggle with it every day, working this land, using it for a purpose totally different than what it was intended for. It's hard to see how that gets reversed, frankly. I don't see a future where we're able to get back to the state that it was in. But at the same time, it's something you still have to grapple with every day is what we've done to the land and what continues to be being done to land all around us, up and down this valley. I'd like to also touch on the ALR, again, because you lease land. Are you anything you'd love to tweak about the ALR and how it works and what that means for you? I've got this hot take that I think that the ALR is going to disappear in the next 50 years. And I am not sad about it. If the parcels of land down here in our neighborhood got turned into smaller pieces where people could actually live and maybe just have a small garden, I would be happy about that, because it's not really the case. It's a lot of, you know, they're small parcels in the grand scheme of things. But when you look at this valley, they're big chunks owned by wealth people and a lot of people are getting left out, I feel. So I don't know, I feel like that the trajectory we're on, there's going to be less and less support for the ALR every year. Is that why you think it won't be around eventually? It's because there'll be dwindling support for it. Yeah, I think that there's a lot of romanticism around, you know, keeping farmland, and that a lot of it is just tied up in people's notions of what farming is or was. And I think as people just want a place to live and our population grows, and once people realize what some of this designated agricultural land is being used for, they're going to stop supporting it. And I think the ALR has benefited from people not paying attention to it a lot. So factoring into your point of view is simply like, yes, the land's being preserved, but you're seeing lots of evidence of like, okay, for a wealthy person to sit on it and do nothing with it. Maybe I'm over some fun in your point of view a bit. But like, that weighs into your frustration with it, right, that yes, we're not developing it, but we're also the way the way the ALR is structured, it's just, it's not like we're making productive use. Meanwhile, there are people need places to live. Yeah, I feel like these big parcels with imagine on them are good for tax breaks, but I don't think it's really good for the general public and the ALRs meant to serve the general public. The first one to that is, I've always been, I've said this on the podcast before I believe, it's just that I really wish they would increase the minimum amount of production that has to happen in order to qualify for a farm tax break. Like I just think it's like laughing low, like that seems like a pretty simple fix. A start, it might not get all the way to what your point, the point you're making, but simply that it would incentivize actual more production, you know, because on like a 10 acre piece of ALR land, it's like show us that you're doing $2,500 a production or something silly, right? Right. Easy. Easy. Yeah. And it would force people to use it for food production, right? You don't have to sell your piece of land, you just have to at least just have to find a burr, a colder brother, get him over there to take a look. Yeah. Yeah. Guys, I've really enjoyed talking to you. I really appreciated you having me out. It's like it's a real privilege of arranging these interviews, is getting to see some of these operations. And I was just really impressed by what I see you guys. I think, you know, you're like four or five years in and you're kind of killing it. And yeah, it's just, it's really impressive. Thanks for the tour and thanks for the conversation. Well, thanks for those kind words. It gives me encouragement to keep going. Yeah. Yeah, a glass question, how do you open a feed sack? Have you figured it out? I, I snip, I snip and pray that it's going to be the one that goes purr, it just doesn't always do that. Yeah, I think they could put like a little bit of pink paint or something on the right bottom. They should do that. Yeah. Because I, I only, I'm like at a 50% success rate. So. Really? It's been years since I got it right. Oh, you mean you also have this problem? I can't. This is really reassuring to me, as a guy who's always thinking, he's just uniquely, you know, you're not alone in anything. Oh, that's nice to know. Thank you so much. So thank you so much, Lewis Burkholder. Thank you. Thanks guys. Thank you. Yeah, it's almost 40 degrees. Let's go jump in the river. Sure. Okay, that's the show. Thanks to Vincent Lewis for hosting me at their farm in Chase. It was the first interview I ever did that ended in me stripping down to my underpants. Calm down. It was to go for a swim and they were relatively modest boxers. Okay, boxer briefs, 250-767-6636 to send a voicemail to the show. Thanks to Vanessa Simur for the show's intro and outro music. And remember everyone, we have more in common than all our differences would suggest. Bye for now. Bye. [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]
