We are Steve Olsen (he/him) and Jullián Espinal (he/him) and our farm is Milpa Naturals, on treaty 7 territory just outside of Cardston, Alberta.

Our mentors are Elizabeth and Eckehart from Chickadee Farm Herbs as well as Ryan from Reclaim Organics.

Our goals at the beginning of the season were to make a profit by the end of 2024, create a marketing plan, improve efficiency to cut harvesting and processing time by half by the end of the season, and increase production to the level we need to be profitable. We made a goal to increase chicken production by 50%.

We built a bigger brooder and a third chicken tractor, and we bought a mobile grain storage cart in order to increase our chicken production and save money buy buying feed in bulk instead of in bags. We did end up increasing our chicken production by 30%, from 287 in 2023 to 372 in 2024.

After analysing our herb enterprise, we came to the conclusion that in order to increase our production enough to become profitable, we would have to make a significant investment in equipment and time. We are not in a place where we feel that we are able to make that much of an investment at this time, so we decided to keep our herb production at the same level and focus on producing them for our own personal use instead of trying to make a profitable business out of it.

Our best sales channel by far was our email list. We got a few new customers through social media but the majority of new customers came from word of mouth – our customers recommending us to other people, as well as two partner businesses that shared our chickens to their email lists. In our first year we posted in Facebook groups and got some good response from that.

We are the only farm in the area producing pastured chickens raised using organic practices. I think the majority of our customers are looking for better tasting, healthier, chemical-free nutrient dense local food options. Some people also buy from us just because we are local. We get a lot of comments about how our chickens taste so much better than grocery store chickens, so some people who don’t care about eating organic buy from us just for the taste.

Before Participating in the Business Mentorship Network, we were unsure about the next steps we needed to take in order to make our farm profitable. Through the program we got a better understanding of how to calculate all our costs and labour hours, and how to do more accurate financial projections.

For next year, we plan to keep the chickens as a part-time venture while working off-farm mostly full-time. We plan to increase production to around 450 chickens, which is the most we can do with the current infrastructure we have. We will focus on growing more of our own food and do some experimenting to see what other enterprises we could add in the future.

Our website is milpanaturals.ca and you can find us on IG or FB @milpanaturals