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“Realizing we all have to start taking responsibility for where our food comes from and how our food is produced.
Understanding that we need to start implementing sustainable practices and accepting our role as caretakers of nature.”– Jayden Procychyn of Green Earth Farm, Alberta
Young Agrarians is celebrating the eleventh year of the Business Mentorship Network (BMN) program in BC and the third year of the BMN in the Prairies! The BMN offers farm business mentorship to a diverse array of new and young farmers. The mentorship is offered over the course of a year. 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 Western Canada open in October 2025. Mentor applications are accepted year-round. Check out the Business Mentorship Network page for more information!
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: Jayden Procychyn
Jayden Procychyn Green Earth Farm
Mentor: Jocelyn Biggs TK Ranch
Where do you farm?
Green Earth Farm is located near Rocky Mountain House Alberta.
What inspired you to get into farming?
Realizing we all have to start taking responsibility for where our food comes from and how our food is produced.
Understanding that we need to start implementing sustainable practices and accepting our role as caretakers of nature.
Not seeing many others do it, so I thought I would try to set a positive example and help others to see it working.
Understanding not everyone can do this work, so I try to grow extra to give more families a real option to support, so they can actually have a real choice.
If you spend any amount of time seriously researching the current accepted food system, you realize this isn’t really an option, we have to change.
How did you learn how to farm?
I taught myself how to farm just from my imagination, thinking logically about problems I wanted to solve and how I might be able to harness the help of animals and nature to accomplish this.
It’s not even two birds with one stone, it’s like ten birds with one stone if you think the whole thing out properly.
Anything I couldn’t figure out alone I just read about it or check Youtube or search for and find people who can help answer my questions.
I’ve never really known any farmers, I grew up in the city.
What type of business structure is Green Earth Farm?
Corporation. I already had one for a decade so I was able to just transition it into these new avenues and activities.
How much land is under production on your farm and what do you produce?
I built enough gardens, greenhouse, hydroponics, wheat plots, rabbits, and chickens+eggs on 3/4 of an acre to cover what I need plus many other families.
My forest-raised pigs take up about 6-8 acres per year, I keep them moving, they clean the forest floor and repair pastures or dig gardens or whatever I decide they need to work on, and they’re more than happy to help!
There is 100 acres I can develop in the future if I can find the labour and time and capital and ideas.
What kind of land agreement do you have (lease, own)? Are there special relationships that enabled this?
I found some unused, derelict land through family and I do the maintenance and upkeep and improvements. It’s a balancing act. Like a clown juggling while standing on a rolling ball.
I had a number of options I could’ve done instead but this made the most sense.
I don’t own the land, but if I ever had to pack everything up and start over somewhere, it would be easy for me to do.
Did you access any financing to buy land or start Green Earth Farm? Please share your start-up/financing story…
I sold my house and everything I had in Calgary and basically just used my life savings to finance what I’m building.
I do all the due diligence on grants and programs and every funding option I can think of, but so far I’ve just chosen to finance everything myself.
I’m not interested in the usual typical $2 million bank loan farming idea, this is not something that should be done, nor does it need to be.
What types of ecological farm practices and/or responses to climate change realities do you engage in?
Rotational grazing is big. Repairing pastures is simply an unmatched carbon sink and it needs to be heavily promoted. My chickens, pigs, and rabbits can all be employed in this manner using mobile shelters and electric fencing.
It’s better for the animal health, better for the meat and egg quality, and better for the soil and plants. There is no downside to it besides the amount of extra labour it takes, but I’m willing to do the work. I see the benefits every time I eat or go outside and look around.
As the pigs work through the forest pens I set up, I go back through and clean up the deadfall and more or less simulate a forest fire, thus preventing that massive carbon footprint should it ever occur as well.
I’ve built roughly a 1km fire break around the property just using pigs and chainsaws and dragging trees by hand, dragging wood on sleds, pushing it down hills on sleds in the winter into accessible piles I can then use for heat or hugelkulture or biomass or biochar etc.
I’ve got three groups of pigs now so some of them work the forest, some of them work the pastures, some of them dig gardens or wheat plots or whatever else I can imagine.
What informational resources do you use regularly, or have used in the past, to operate your farm business?
I used youtube in the beginning to research as much as I could before doing something crazy like buying 20 pigs, but at the same time you realize this is all n=1 and the experiences don’t necessarily line up on youtube, mostly due to our extreme winters.
I would reach out to anyone I could find who raised pasture pigs and try to set up calls with them to ask questions, mostly I just try to find people with knowledge but it’s quite difficult, almost nobody does this stuff.
At a certain point talking to a farmer in South Carolina just isn’t really applicable to farming in Alberta and they can only answer so much.
You end up just having to learn by experience, by making mistakes, by tracking successes. You have to be good at admitting you were wrong and learn to adapt, sometimes immediately because pigs are running around everywhere.
I am finding more young farmers now, the more you do this and take it to the community, I guess, the more people you end up finding that you can start to build a local community with and help each other out.
There wasn’t anything at first, but it’s getting better every month, I meet a lot of interesting people doing interesting things now.
I’ve never been shy about finding subject matter experts and just straight up asking them for help.
Why did you apply for business mentorship? What are your primary business goals for the season?
Since I never really had anyone to run any ideas by or get any feedback or anything, I just made all of this up on my own, I thought it would be a good time to really get into my systems with someone who has experience.
I built it first and got it going for a couple years, and now it’s time to really look at it and refine it appropriately.
Goals are for people who want to win once, systems are for people who want to win repeatedly.
Every season I get a little better in every area, there’s an endless list of ways to improve, and I just chip away at them each year.
Get better at fencing, at layout, at water, at feed handling, at sales, at marketing, there are just so many areas you have to constantly get better at.
There is always a portion of each season too where you really have to try to improve how you’re going to handle the next winter, you always have to think way ahead and try to build things that will pay off later during the harder months.
What is the greatest challenge you face as a new farmer?
Getting access to markets is difficult.
Just sales in general, you end up having to do a lot of education, a lot of repetition. You almost feel like a beggar sometimes.
There are a lot of unserious people who waste your time or agree to buy but then don’t actually buy, you can’t let that stuff bother you.
The first year I had 15 buyers lined up before I even got the pigs, well, by the time they were ready to eat, not even one of those people actually bought one, I had to find completely new people.
People say they support farmers, but if you flat out give them the choice and option to do so, they often will support the grocery store instead because it is easier.
Finding ways to overcome that behaviour, something they maybe have just done on autopilot their whole lives really, it can be very challenging.
But that’s the game we are in, it isn’t enough to just grow the animals or whatever, you have to convince other people to change and that’s just how it is.
What business tools could you not live without?
Honestly, just a truck. You absolutely need a truck otherwise you can’t do this work.
It doesn’t have to be awesome or new or anything like that, but you definitely need one.
Anything else I could for sure live without and do just fine.
How can we find out more about you, Green Earth Farm and its products?
Green Earth Farm can be found online at greenearthfarm.ca which is something I have to work on and improve this year, but that’s what I have for now.
I have endless videos so I should start a youtube channel maybe but I don’t really know how to do any of that yet.
