YA Business Mentorship Network – Rocking T Farms

June 27, 2023

Young Agrarians is celebrating the ninth year of the Business Mentorship Network (BMN) program in BC and the expansion of the program across the Prairies! The BMN offers business mentorships to a diverse array of new and young farmers. Through one-on-one mentorship, peer networks and online workshops young farmers develop the skills necessary to operate ecologically sustainable and financially viable farm businesses.

We are Scott Todd and Alena Amstutz, the owners of Rocking T Farms.

Blake Hall from Prairie Gold Meats is our mentor.

Rocking T Farms lies right in between Wildwood and Mayerthorpe AB, about 1.5 hours west of Edmonton on Treaty 6 territory.

Scott grew up in Saskatchewan to a New Zealand mother and a Canadian father. His families on both sides were farming grain or sheep, so it would be fair to say that farming is in his blood even though he grew up in town. After 10 years in the oil field, he made the jump to horse training, cowboying and working as a farrier. One of his ranch jobs took him to the soil health conference in Edmonton in 2017. Realising that there were more ways to get into farming than to inherit a farm, regenerative farming and soil health became THE daily topic and goal. 

I grew up in downtown Zurich, Switzerland. In an apartment building, animals and plants were limited to an imaginary zoo and to succulents that would all eventually die. After spending 3 months in South Africa on a horse back safari ranch for my English studies, I realised that my heart lay with horses, all animals and dirt under my fingernails. 

Scott and I met in Kamloops, training under the same horse trainer and the rest really is history. After a few years of training horses, we started to rotationally graze our training horses to manage our grasses and really, that was the moment we were hooked for forever. We added pigs, sheep and chickens to the mix and soon had to find more land.

Scott took the Regenerative Agriculture 101 course, and currently I am back in school for holistic nutrition. Youtube, school, books and as many people as we can get a hold of are our sources for all the knowledge we can ingest.

It has been a steady learning curve, but we now own 160 acres. Our main product is pastured pork. We are finally getting our chicken numbers up, so pastured eggs, as well as pastured broilers and some beef, are finding their way onto our farm. Our goat numbers are steadily increasing to provide us with meat, milk for our soap, and we are working on putting them to good use to graze down weedy areas for neighbours.

The main goal above all has always been soil health, so cover-cropping and no-till gardening are important parts of our practice. All our animals are rotationally grazed, and bale grazing is an important part of the system during the winter months. Increasing biodiversity, fixing water and nutrient cycles, absorbing carbon and growing top soil, all the while producing nutrient dense food that goes above just being tasty, but goes back to the original meaning of food as a healer, are our every day goals.

While we are working hard at learning more about soil, growing and the human body every day, our business skills are marginal. If we could, we would just share all we grow. The reality, however, is that we would like to be able to both stay on the farm full time and still pay our bills. We realised our marketing skills as well as our ability to sell our products are nowhere near where they should be.

It was perfect timing when we found the Young Agrarians Business Mentorship Program. We decided to apply to make sure we can keep selling our product directly off the farm and don’t have to start going through a middleman to distribute our goods. We know we need help with our marketing strategy, because we’re really good at giving our pork away for free and not so good at marketing it and selling it for what it is worth.

We are also working hard to finance ourselves and not having to rely on operating loans and government grants. Some days this is easy, other days it is hard as we are still in the ‘putting infrastructure in’ phase. We have lots of things already in place, now it comes down to fine-tuning what we’ve got; organising the chaos and putting ourselves out there in a professional way.

This season, we will keep on proving our numbers, get more organised, tighten the ship and keep putting the infrastructure in to make this journey sustainable as well as enjoyable so we can do this until we’re old and grey and beyond. We truly love what we do; the intensive management keeps us from having to go to the gym or the tanning salon, the food we grow keeps us out of the doctor’s office and once we have our marketing and sales down, we’re planning to stay out of outside jobs as well. 

You can find Rocking T Farms right here in Wildwood AB, or online here (a fair warning, selling our story really isn’t our strong suit, so please enjoy tacky posts at your own risk. I will say the piglets and goat kids are cute though): 

Website: rockingtfarms.ca

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rockingtregenerativefarm/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rockingtfarm/?hl=en