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YA BUSINESS MENTORSHIP NETWORK – Skwishtin Ranch
Posted on October 27, 2025
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“This year we had 3 goals in mind: for the farm to become self-sustainable, meaning to break even on our finances for the fiscal year; to make an excess of $1,000 minimum; and to maximize our time efficiently to balance house and farm life. We have achieved our goals in that we will end the year with approximately $4000 in the bank and have changed some livestock and farm practices to be more time efficient.”
Young Agrarians is celebrating the twelfth year of the Business Mentorship Network (BMN) program in BC and the fourth year of the BMN in the Prairies! The BMN offers a year-long farm business mentorship to a diverse array of new and young farmers. Through one-on-one mentorship, peer networks, and online workshops, new farmers develop the skills necessary to operate ecologically sustainable and financially viable farm businesses.
Applications for Mentees across Canada are now open! Mentor applications are accepted year-round. Click below for more information and to apply.
Meet a mentee from the current cohort and learn about their farm and why they joined the Business Mentorship Network. Want more? Head over to our BMN Blog for more mentorship stories.
Meet a Mentee: Skwishtin Ranch
We are Skwishtin Ranch, a small family farm run by myself, Kaitlyn Strasser, my mom ValMarie Braun and our 3 Littles. Our mentors are Clay and Jesse Walker and they run Whiskey Creek Ranch in Hanna, Alberta. We are located in rural Cold Lake, in the MD of Bonnyville.
This year we had 3 goals in mind: for the farm to become self-sustainable, meaning to break even on our finances for the fiscal year; to make an excess of $1,000 minimum; and to maximize our time efficiently to balance house and farm life. We have achieved our goals in that we will end the year with approximately $4000 in the bank and have changed some livestock and farm practices to be more time efficient. This was also the first year we sold out of all meat products within the first week of messaging our clients, and our cows were sent a little older, and a little bigger, and we have a lot of very happy families with full freezers for the year.
Issues? The drought has made it hard as we ended up feeding hay in July and needed to account for more than planned. We did run into some issues with dairy cattle as mom’s favorite milk cow had aborted her calf late in her gestation. She struggled to come back from it and ended up with mastitis as well. We bought a milk cow back without testing her first as she wasn’t gone a whole year. She had a nasty bacteria in one quarter and ended up being quite sick. We had to cull them both.
All of our customers rave about the quality of our meats – tender, juicy and absolutely delicious. It is very flavorful, and most children will actually eat our beef now that families have switched from store bought to farm raised. It’s amazing. They also compliment our services, how wonderful we are to deal with, and we always make sure everyone walks away happy.
Our lessons were hard this year. It’s hard to breed for quality if you don’t start with quality animals and feed them well. You really have no control over what happens to these animals once they’ve left your farm, so be careful about the kinds of people you sell to and deal with, especially if you’re putting a lot of time and effort into raising quality animals and training. Mom trains milk cows, which takes a lot of time, love and commitment. Getting that cow back in such rough shape was really hard on Mom.
We had quite a few clients who purchased breeding stock from us as well as potential beef return this year looking for more heifers or beef. The breeding stock is new so the repeat clients were a wonderful surprise.
Sadly, life sent us a number of curve balls this year and we didn’t use the YA Mentorship to its full capacity. It was hard to juggle everything. We are still hoping to have the discussion about risk management with our Mentors but if anything, we learned that we are not alone (even though it feels like it sometimes). We feel we have a good set up here, fine tuned now due to the Walkers. What we really need is to set up Risk Management and this is our long-term goal.
What are we looking forward to this winter??? Spring, of course!
You can find us at https://www.facebook.com/share/1CtbX3nFrC/ When life isn’t spinning like a top, we update this page regularly.