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.
Applications open for Mentees across Western Canada in October 2023. Mentor applications 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 all about their farm and why they joined 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: Seed of Life Farm
We are Krystyna Delahaye (she/ her) and Jason Stashko (he/him) and we operate Seed of Life Farm in Surrey BC on the unceded territories of the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group ,Stz’uminus, sc̓əwaθenaɁɬ təməxʷ (Tsawwassen), sq̓əc̓iy̓aɁɬ təməxʷ (Katzie), Semiahmoo, Kwantlen, Á,LEṈENEȻ ȽTE (W̱SÁNEĆ), Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla, S’ólh Téméxw (Stó:lō). Our mentor is Gemma McNeil who previously farmed for a number of years on this same location operating as the Zaklan Heritage Farm.
What were your goals for this season and what did you do to try to achieve them?
The greatest goal for this business mentorship was to have a more set structure for our farm business. We wanted to be better organized, make better decisions based on a budget and overall take our farm to the next step of growth. For this we had set a few concrete goals that include setting a better employment strategy, focussing on addressing our production weakness of fall production and field maintenance, and working on the idea of setting up a physical store at the farm.
Did you meet your goals / did it work out?
In general we made great progress for all of our goals. We quickly came to realize that the farm store might have to wait for next year, so it will become our winter project this year. We successfully employed 2 students, hosted 4 practicum students for 4 weeks and learned how to manage a crew. There is still lots of work for us to learn how to teach properly, but in general we were happy with our employment situation. We had a very great fall, managed to plant lots of crops on time in the summer to be able to sell in September and October.
What resources did you find most valuable to support your business during the season?
The discussions at the beginning of the season with Gemma were very beneficial to guide us in our business structure. We took a lot of her advice on field management, planning and prioritization. Other great resources were the podcasts we were listening to during our work hours, which brought us many different perspectives, ideas, tips and tricks to make our season better and to help us think of all the different ways we can run a farm business. We also exchanged a lot with the farming community, when we had some questions about crops or crop management methods.
What were your best sales channels/avenues?
Farmer’s Markets were definitely our best sales channels this year. We formed a collective of farms at the market and we personally attended 2 markets on the weekend in Vancouver and also had our veggies sold on Wednesdays at the Downtown Farmers’ Market through the collective. We have chosen to keep our CSA small, so it might not be our best sales channel but it is still a great income early in the year and is easy enough to squeeze in our busy week.
Why do your customers buy from you (what is your unique value proposition in your market)?
We seem to have a good amount of traffic at the market, customers appreciate that we put a big focus on selling crops that we consider the tastiest, they also love the diversity that our stall provides. We have a wide range of items for sale from veggies to fresh cut flowers grown on our farm with the addition of fresh fruit from the Okanagan. Our stall is inviting, we use lots of baskets and wooden boxes which gives it a warm feeling. Some customers do their weekly grocery shopping with us, a big step from previous years. It means to us that they appreciate the variety and value our produce.
We have a couple of Italian people that buy a lot from us and one day they said out loud “your tomatoes taste like real tomatoes, like the ones we have back home” I think the other customers shopping in the stall at that moment took that as a confirmation that we grew some pretty great tomatoes!
What was the most important thing you gained from the YA Business Mentorship Network Program experience?
Through the mentorship we first found great support, on the business structure side but also a lot of the emotion level. It was amazing to have our mentor, a more experienced farmer, being so understanding of how hard things can be, how hard we can be on ourselves and offering many different ideas on how to make our lives easier.
The mentorship offers great workshops that are very helpful at the beginning of the season, and it is great to meet with the other mentees and talk about our businesses and our challenges. We unfortunately didn’t participate in many meetings with the other mentees, but for the ones we were able to attend, it helped to hear from others’ experiences.
I think that overall the mentorship helped us to get better at critical thinking and decision making, overall organization and data collection as well as developing strategies to solve problems.
Our participation in the BMN had a very positive impact on our business. We needed help to better reflect on our farming and project for the future and the mentorship seemed to have a great impact on our business. Even if not all the aspects were solved or taken care of this year, we feel better prepared for the years to come.
What were one or two big, hard lessons this season you would want to share with other farmers?
It is one thing to want to employ farm hands, but transmitting information, explaining ways of doing and following up with employees is a whole different story. Being a good teacher doesn’t come naturally for everyone and while wanting to be a fun and flexible boss, it is still so important to communicate the needs of the business and to know what is important for us to see happen on a daily basis.
One other thing we found hard when planning was to cut some crops, to better focus on growing others. Early in the mentorship we did the exercise of looking at each crop we had grown last year and decided if it was a “success” or a “failure”. Some crops were less successful or required more management and others didn’t bring in as much revenue as others. It seemed so heartbreaking for us to cut some beloved crops, but we decided to follow the advice given by our mentor to try and focus on a more limited amount of crops for the season, and it worked. We perfected the management of these crops and we can now decide if we want to reintroduce what we left behind.
What were one or two victories, small or large, that you had this season?
Jason was very focused on crop care and weed management. In other years planting and transplanting were the main focus, we were great at putting things in the ground but not taking all the steps necessary for these crops to be truly successful. So many peas were poorly trellised, so many weeds would be taking over the crops… This year, instead, we took extra care with the fertility of seedlings and field crops, trellising, frequent weeding, and it paid off. Grow less but grow better!
What future plans and goals do you have for your farm and how will you achieve these?
Our future goals include much more data collection, which we did this year but not as thoroughly as we could have. Our goal is also to shape our year to come, by planning even more than we used to. We were skipping a lot of steps in the planning and the mentorship helped us to understand that there is much more that needs to be done than the crop plan. When our mentor asked us to make a schedule for the year, it almost seemed like an impossible task, but we kept that in mind all season long and I think we have better tools for structuring the planning for next season.
What will you do differently next year?
Next year starts this year. What we will do differently next year is to start preparing for next spring right now. We also now have so many more notes and ideas of how to shape our next season, because we started to think, reflect and note what we would like to change for the next season.
Share a story of something interesting/ funny/weird that happened on your farm this season.
At the beginning of the season our rototiller broke and it forced us to finally take the steps towards no-till farming, which we had been thinking of doing for a while. It ended up being an amazingly fortunate thing, I don’t think we would have dived as much into it if it hadn’t been for our tiller needing repair.
What are you most looking forward to this winter?
Rest, working on personnel projects and hobbies, and of course the excitement of planning next season to do it even better!
Where can we find you online?