Young Agrarians is celebrating the tenth year of the Business Mentorship Network (BMN) program in BC and the second year of the program 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.
The application deadline for mentees across Western Canada have been extended to November 13th, 2023!
Check out the Business Mentorship Network page for more information!
Mentor applications (paid position) are accepted year-round. Apply here!
Check out one Mentee’s story below and how the BMN made a contribution to the success of their farm.
Want more? Head over to our BMN Blog for more mentorship stories.
Meet a Mentee: Northern Light Acres
We are Northern Light Acres.
I’m Olivia and my husband Steve and our kids farm a mixed livestock operation. We also breed pedigree Pembroke Welsh Corgi dogs on 6 acres. We are on a small acreage NW of Olds, Alberta. Our mentor is Jordan Allen of ClaireLee Ranch near Cochrane.
Season Goals
Our goals for the season were to gain knowledge on farm books and work on the nutrition needs and health concerns in our flock of sheep. We have for sure gained knowledge on the health of livestock and nutritional needs to increase fertility. We hope to see the benefit of that come January when we start lambing. We still had a lot of challenges with random weird diseases….one cow was a hermaphrodite, one developed hardware disease and we had to butcher her, and we lost one of our twin calves to diarrhea. For our sheep, we bought some new ones and they all got some weird eye infection and went blind. We treated them and they are ok now, but sometimes we have to wonder how to be profitable even when disease strikes.
Farm Resources
Resources we found helpful were the kitchen table sessions where we could just bounce stuff off of other farmers, and also our mentor was helpful to talk to. We have been successful in getting our business registered and are still deciding about filing for GST registration. We have until January to get that sorted, so once it gets to be cold outside, we will sit down and work on the books again. We are taking a Business Bootcamp that is starting next week, so maybe that will kick our butts into gear to do better.
While in the Business Mentorship Network, we learned about some software programs YA and other mentees use, our problem is they are just so expensive due to monthly subscriptions and we don’t have any income coming in to pay for stuff yet, we have basically given all our income to vets, contractors and hay sellers this year.
Season Challenges
We do have faithful egg customers who appreciate our free range farm eggs, but our hens have dropped down to only a few eggs a day and we are not able to meet their demands at the moment.
We buy hay for our sheep at $215 a bale and that lasts them one week. We got around $100 per lamb at the auction so raising them and all the work only pays for one bale of hay once we sell 2 lambs. So, we have learned there is not any profit to be made in raising sheep at the scale we are able to do it at and with the amount of land we have. Perhaps if you are able to find butcher with openings and sell to private buyers it could be viable. We have found that there is up to a 4-month wait list at any inspected butcher and you can’t sell uninspected meat to the public. So even though we had some amazing finished lambs, they went for almost nothing at the auction as there is nowhere to butcher them and we can’t afford to keep feeding them at the crazy price of hay right now. This has led us to downsize our flock.
Looking Forward
Going forward, we are hoping to have a good turnout of our January lambing and get much better prices if we can find private buyers. We also just found a farmer that will sell us bulk barley which is about 30% cheaper than buying it in bags at a feed mill. We can’t do anything about the price of hay so it’s still hard to anticipate any real profit unless we can find a butcher that will take them as soon as they are ready.
We think our future goals will focus on custom lamb packages to private buyers and pre-booking butcher spots months in advance so we are not scrambling. We are looking forward to winter lambing in our nice new barn.
Our mentor helped us to learn about off-cycle fertility induction in sheep using implants so we gave that a try and hope that will result in January lambs which will be finished out for the spring demand. It will be nice to be out of the wind and snow in our new barn. Maybe I should quit my job as a nurse and open my own inspected butcher shop! There seems to be a real need for one in our area.
We are hopeful with the dog aspect of our business. We just bred our female and are expecting puppies in 2 months if all goes well. We have been waiting almost 2 years for a litter from her so we are very hopeful. Babies always make it all seem worth it.
How can we find out more about you, your farm, and its products?
The only place you can find us online is our facebook page, just search for “Northern Light Acres”. Working on the skills to make a webpage 🙂
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1660373967563771/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/northernlightacres/?hl=en