YA Business Mentorship Network – Gathered Farm and Florals

Applications open for Mentees across Western Canada in October 2023. Mentor applications are accepted year-round. Check out the Business Mentorship Network page for more information!

Want to learn more about our Mentees (or Mentors)? Below you’ll find a Q&A where you can learn all about their farm and why they joined the Business Mentorship Network. If you’d like to read about the experiences of other Mentees/Mentors, head to our blog here.

Meet a Mentee: Gathered Farm and Florals

My name is Mackenzie (she/her), I farm 2 acres of land with my partner Alex. Our farm is called Gathered Farm & Florals, located in the regional district of qathet, BC, and we farm on the unceded traditional territory of the Tla’amin Nation. My mentor is Gemma McNeill of Zaklan Farm. Gemma was an amazing mentor, her years of experience has been so invaluable to this mentorship program.

What were your goals for this season and what did you do to try to achieve them?

My goals for this season were to build a profitable crop plan, better tracking of information and achieve financial goals to allow us to rely less on our off-farm incomes. With the help of Gemma I was able to create a crop plan to maximize our profitability while still being able to produce enough variety for our CSA and farmers market. Gemma really encouraged me to stop growing nostalgic veggies and to focus on high-value, quick cropping varieties. Gemma also helped me create ways to track information easily on the farm to keep us more organized and less stressed during the busy farming season.

Did you meet your goals / did it work out? 

With the help of Gemma we were able to achieve many of our goals for this year. It was our most successful year farming, we grew big, beautiful vegetables and turned our first profit in the 5 years we’ve been farming. Still not enough for us to both take the winter off but each year we are able to learn and create more efficiencies and cost saving strategies. For instance we used to buy soil from our local aggregate supply which was costing us $115/yard and this year with the help of Gemma we were able to source larger volume shipments from the lower mainland that cut our cost in half and it is a better quality compost product.

What resources did you find most valuable to support your business during the season?

The best resource of this mentorship was Gemma herself. On top of the big picture strategies she helped me with she was also in my back pocket, just a text or video call away she was there to help us when things came up over the season that we had questions with. To have an expert to consult us when we needed it was so incredibly helpful this year.

What were your best sales channels/avenues?

We have 3 main sales channels; CSA, farmers market and restaurants. Our CSA makes up 40% of our vegetables sales for the year. While restaurants and markets make up the remainder. We also ran 6 events on the farm this year, many long table dinners, a wedding and a concert helped to boost our revenue this year. Something I learned from crop planning last fall with Gemma was that the amount of growing space we have we would only be able to grow around 80-100K in veggies, which is something we roughly knew but she helped me put the number to paper. We have worked hard on creating beautiful spaces on our farm so we could market our farm for tourism as well. We hosted a concert in July that brought 150 people to our farm, kids played, people danced barefoot on the lawn, it was a magical evening. The farm is a point of interest for so many people so figuring out ways to build revenue around it is something we keep working on year after year.

Why do your customers buy from you (what is your unique value proposition in your market)? 

Things that make us stand out on the marketplace are the unique vegetables we grow, things people maybe haven’t seen before like an interesting coloured cauliflower to intrigue them. I think our stand out product is our salad mix. We’ve been saving seeds for purple mountain orach for 4 years now and using the vibrant purple leaves as a salad element which makes our salad stand out in public and people know it is ours. It is the product we have spent the most time nurturing and a product we would love to be able to sell 12 month of the year. We have a 120′ x 30′ greenhouse we built last winter so this will be the first winter of growing in it, we might be naive but also optimistic!

We hear a lot from our customers how much they appreciate the hard work we are doing and to PLEASE keep it up. It sometimes feels crazy to live this life and choose it day in and day out so hearing those wonderful words keeps us going. I also love hearing from first time CSA customers how much better they are feeling after eating all our nutritious vegetables.

What was the most important thing you gained from the YA Business Mentorship Network Program experience? 

The most important thing I gained from this mentorship is confidence. Gemma is always so encouraging of where we are at and our bright future ahead of us. Before this mentorship I felt like we were flying by the seat of our pants, and now I have the tools to forecast next year’s growing season and execute it with well laid out plans. Alex and I are very hard workers so there was no doubt that we could manage the physical aspect of the farm, but we both had no previous training on a farm or agriculture programs, we bought land, started to work the soil, the pandemic hit, both of us lost 80% of our income overnight and that pushed us to cultivate more of our land and start a CSA. I had serious imposter syndrome before this mentorship with Gemma and now those feelings have slipped away and now I know we can do this and do it successfully.

What specific business skills did the mentorship help you develop?

We spent a lot of time working out my quickbooks to ensure it was giving me the information I needed to make better business decisions. Gemma also encouraged us to get a bookkeeper and let those professionals do that part of the business and that would free us up to do what we do best, which is to grow veggies!

How did Young Agrarians Farm Business Mentorship impact your business overall?

Profitability. It was so invaluable. I would recommend anyone in the early days of your farm to apply for this program.

What were one or two big, hard lessons this season you would want to share with other farmers?

Getting a bookkeeper made our business way more legit and with that came HUGE tax bills. Which seems super unfair as we work wild hours and still don’t pay ourselves. But hey the government needs a piece of my flower business too, right??

Disease in a crop is real. We seem to be hit each year with something that we didn’t see coming and have to now mitigate for future years. Our onion crop was growing so well and then we were hit with downy mildew mid summer and had to harvest the entire crop way too early and now we don’t have any storage onions. I like finding natural solutions to these problems. Three years ago we had issues with fire blight in the spring and I learned that horsetail has powerful properties to help with such issues so there I was saving the horsetail as I weeded, made a tea from it and applied it to all the perennial crops that suffered and low and behold the next year it wasn’t an issue.

What were one or two victories, small or large, that you had this season?

We built a big greenhouse that is extending our growing season, we now have the greenhouse full of winter salad elements. We also harvested our garlic and were able to turn those 19 beds into fall/winter crops and we’ve grown the nicest brassicas to date this fal including 5lb heads of purple cauliflower and 10 lb cabbages. This is giving me ideas for next fall that we could run a short fall CSA now that we know we can pull off that growing timeline.

What future plans and goals do you have for your farm and how will you achieve these?

More events. The concert was a huge highlight for our summer, activating a community space for everyone to enjoy feels very important for our small town so more of that in our futures!

What will you do differently next year?

Eliminate certain crops from our crop plan, due to this viability on our land, profitability and marketability. No one wanted to buy kale this year, and this was our last go at trying to grow storage onions, due to disease that I am not confident won’t happen again next year. No more winter pumpkins, they take up too much space and no one wants to buy a 15lb pumpkin for $30.

Share a story of something interesting/ funny/weird that happened on your farm this season.

We have mystery broccoli growing on the field. I’ve struggled with growing big beautiful heads of broccoli in the past so for the last 2 seasons we haven’t bought the seeds and low and behold one of the crops labeled purple sprouting broccoli are in fact regular broccoli and they are magnificents so that’s a fun surprise.

What are you most looking forward to this winter?

Building our new wash station with a salad bubbler and washing machine salad spinner. It was on our to-do this past spring but it took so long for all the components to show up that we ended up putting it on hold until this winter.

Where can we find you online? 

Website: gatheredfarm.com to learn more about our offerings

Follow us on FB and IG @gatheredfarm

This program is made possible with the generous funding support of Vancity, Endswell Foundation and Columbia Basin Trust.