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 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.
Application intake for BC mentees is now CLOSED.
Limited seats available for AB, MB and SK mentees – APPLY NOW!
Mentor applications (paid position) 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 more about one of the 2023 cohort and their experience of the year supported by 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: Rocking T Farms
We are Alena Amstutz (she/her) and Scott Todd (he/him) from Rocking T Farms. Our farm is just north of Wildwood AB, about an hour and a half west of Edmonton. We are on treaty 6 territory.
Our Mentor for the Business Mentorship Network was Blake Hall from Prairie Gold Meats.
What were your goals for this season and what did you do to try to achieve them?
Our main goal for Rocking T Farms was to increase sales, get our marketing down and to just clean things up a bit.
We did increase our sales, mainly through referrals from our customers. We tried to be a little more present on social media and share content we are more comfortable with. We started a quarterly newsletter to share more in-depth thoughts and things that are going on on the farm.
Did you meet your goals / did it work out? What went well this season relating to your goals? What didn’t go as you expected and what did you do instead?
We did increase our sales without having to advertise a whole lot. We definitely slowed down on our social media during the summer and are just picking up again. Our newsletter has gone out twice so far and we reminded ourselves that it didn’t have to be perfect and we can always get better at it. We weren’t able to clean things up and organize everything as much as we would’ve liked, as the summer and fall just got insanely busy and it was all we could do to keep up. In the end, we decided to do the best we can and that would have to do this year. We did lay important groundwork for next year, though.
What resources did you find most valuable to support your business during the season?
Hands down our customers! They have been recommending us left right and centre and without them, we would have never been able to increase our sales as we did. Where we weren’t able to advertise ourselves, they advertised for us and it was and is the humblest experience to have so many people rooting for us and what we do.
What were your best sales channels/avenues?
Most of our sales were customers referring us to their friends, family and work colleagues. Social media has also generated interest and helped us with our sales. We mainly used social media to inform our customers whenever there was beef or pork ready to be bought.
Why do your customers buy from you (what is your unique value proposition in your market)? What was the best piece of feedback or praise you got from a customer?
We realised that most people have actually never tasted truly pasture-raised pork. Our pigs are rotationally grazed all summer long, and being on fresh clovers, grasses and bushes every day gives them a unique flavour, to a point where we had one customer buy 2 pigs at once, as they prefer the summer pigs to our winter pigs. This also led to our decision to no longer butcher pigs in the winter and just raise summer and fall pigs. Other inspiring feedback we got was from a customer that wouldn’t eat pork at all, but has now been converted to the dark side and regularly asks for our hams and bacon.
What was the most important thing you gained from the YA Business Mentorship Network Program experience? What specific business skills did the mentorship help you develop?
Awareness was one of the main things we gained from the mentorship. Just being aware of what we are comfortable with, how we like to approach things, what our customer base looks like and how to reach them where they are at. In some ways we put a lot more pressure on ourselves to perform better, in other ways we took a lot of pressure off of ourselves and let things be good enough without it having to be perfect all the time.
How did Young Agrarians Farm Business Mentorship impact your business overall?
It helped us get more involved in our business. Before, we would often just let things play out the way they played out. This year we tried to be a bigger presence, push for sales less and education more. We tried to put ourselves more out there by doing a give-away to people that were affected by the fires in our area, we started the newsletter and tried to engage more with our customers. The business is still chaotic, but through the mentorship we started feeling more comfortable standing behind what we do.
What were one or two big, hard lessons this season you would want to share with other farmers?
Don’t do too much and ask for help! This summer we grazed just about 50 pigs, 200 broilers, 160 pairs of cows at a neighbour’s place and 5 cows on our own place, our kids got yearling ponies that have to be halter broken, we had a big garden and Alena is going through an intensive program in holistic nutrition. We had family visiting from Europe, which is always wonderful but also adds to busyness of our lives. Every now and then, we were slightly overwhelmed and it was hard to just keep going when the end of season was still over 2 months away.
If you do broilers, be prepared! We tried raising them like we would any of our chickens and that did not work. We had 25% loss, and the ones we had just would not grow on the ration that we provided. We really didn’t enjoy them a whole lot and will probably switch to a different breed next time.
What were one or two victories, small or large, that you had this season?
Repeat customers hands down! People that bought half a pig last year and are buying a whole one this year. Customers and friends that bought 1 pig last year and bought 2 this year. People that didn’t like pork at all and are now regularly putting it on their menu. Neighbours’ kids, that, instead of sneaking candy, sneak bacon and sausages. Those really are the things that keep us going.
What future plans and goals do you have for your farm and how will you achieve these?
We would love to produce more beef. We increased our sales from just 1 quarter last year to 6 quarters this year. This isn’t paying a whole bunch just yet, but for us it was a huge step and we would love to build on that. We want to keep going with our pork and produce as high a quality as we can for as good a price as we can. We will try and increase our presence a little on social media with a focus on education and pair it with Alena’s holistic nutrition knowledge. We would love find a partner to build a proper market garden and we still haven’t given up hope that one day we will have enough eggs that we could actually sell some.
What will you do differently next year?
We are going to try and slow down a touch. No more school for Alena, so Rocking T Farms and the business will be the main focus.
Share a story of something interesting/ funny/weird that happened on your farm this season.
My, Alena, personal favourite story was this fall. For my birthday, Scott got me a cow that we hoped I would be able to turn into a family milk cow. She was in with the 160 pairs we were rotationally grazing just down the road from us. She was incredibly cute and always very friendly. Come sorting day when all the other cows were supposed to go home, we separated her from the herd to bring her up to our place. She was having absolutely none of it. She started charging people on foot, on horseback and in the end tore down the fence. Quite obviously, she had absolutely no interest in being a milk cow, so she went home with the rest of the herd. It was quite impressive to watch this pretty little cow turn into an absolute man-eating beast.
What are you most looking forward to this winter?
Having all the animals in the yard in one spot, no moving fences all over the property and being done with butchering for a bit.
Where can we find you online?
You can find Rocking T Farms on our website or on our social media channels here:
Website: rockingtfarms.ca
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rockingtregenerativefarm/