The market farmer

Can small farms survive? With $140,000 in sales from a few acres, Jean-Martin Fortier insists his can

It was early January when I clicked through a farm website and saw the page where Jean-Martin Fortier listed his upcoming workshops. His late-March workshop in nearby Montreal, with space for 50 people, was already sold out. “Neat,” I thought. “People in the city are paying to listen to a farmer.”

But is he a farmer?

Or, as I came to wonder, does that question really miss the point?

After watching him on video, it’s no surprise that Fortier fills the workshop. He has a stage presence that you might not guess from his photographs.

It’s a combination that connects with people. He’s young, articulate and charismatic with a touch of self-deprecating humour. (In Paris recently, he jokingly told his audience they might need a translator to understand his Quebec French.)

His book about his farm, Le Jardinier-Maraicher, has sold 16,000 copies since its fall 2012 release, including an incredible 6,000 outside of Quebec. With 5,000 copies making a book a best-seller in Canada, this is astounding.

When I ask Fortier about the 10,000 copies sold in Quebec, I wonder out loud how many farms there are in the province. He stops me and explains that it’s not just farmers and aspiring farmers buying his book. “It’s your average Joe,” he says. Consumers, too, want to hear Fortier’s farming story.

Small farm business thinking

Fortier’s book is a personal narrative that tells readers about his journey into farming and then shares his model for success. What’s unexpected is that Fortier has found success where many farm commentators say he shouldn’t — on a very small family farm.

“We challenge the belief that the small family farm cannot stay afloat in today’s economy,” Fortier says in the book. And at a time when many people worry about job security, Fortier says that unlike employees of large companies, “I have job security.”

For Fortier, staying very small has been a big part of the recipe for success. And being small, he says, need not mean small income. Nor must growth in income necessarily come from a bigger operation.

On their 10-acre property, called Les Jardins de la Grelinette, he and his wife Maude-Helene Desroches farm 1-1/2 acres. “To grow better instead of bigger became the basis of our model,” explains Fortier. He contrasts this to the conventional model to “extensify” production over a larger area. While mechanization is often seen as the way to get higher profit, he says it doesn’t have to be that way. “Instead,” he says, “we opted to stay small scale.”

To illustrate why he believes in intensifying production as opposed to expanding the land base, he tells readers how, when first raising crops on one-quarter acre of rented land, he sold $20,000 worth of vegetables; and then the next year, with the same space, $55,000 worth of vegetables, i.e. more than double.

The following year, with his own farm and 1-1/2 cultivated acres, he sold $80,000 worth of vegetables — a figure that climbed to $100,000 the subsequent year. As we later chat on the phone, I find out that this figure is now roughly $140,000.

While Fortier is not opposed to mechanization, he says expensive machinery doesn’t necessarily make farming more profitable. If two options give equally good results, cost is his deciding factor. That has meant eschewing a conventional tractor and opting for a small, two-wheeled “walking” tractor. Aside from costing less than a conventional tractor, it allows the intensive spacing that he favours. Less emphasis on machinery, he says, means most of his operating costs are inputs, not machinery.

“We’ll have 10 rows of carrots instead of three,” he says, explaining the benefit of not having to tie in crop spacing to conventional, tractor-drawn equipment. That means more yield from the same space, reduced costs for material such as row covers, and less labour for tasks such as mulching and weeding. In addition, he grows a succession of crops to keep the land producing.

Fortier emphasizes that revenue is only part of the equation, saying, “Revenue minus expenses equals profit.” He keeps a careful eye on expenses and does not buy into the notion that good profitability requires high costs. “Our market garden demonstrates that high profits can be made without high costs,” he says, adding, “Our low-tech strategy kept our startup costs to a minimum and our overhead expenses low.”

Sell smart, grow less

To bolster the revenue side of the equation, Fortier sells some of his produce directly to consumers, keeping profit that would normally go to retailers and distributors. The way he sees it, when he doesn’t need to give retailers and distributors approximately two-thirds the value of his produce, he can grow one-third as much and make the same profit.

Fortier is a big believer in having an identifiable logo. In the local supermarket, which sells his product, his logo appears next to his produce. “At the local grocery store, customers swear by our products, which they recognize easily,” he says.

Maximizing revenue also means adding value. It can be as simple, he says, as leaving the tops on carrots. Bunched carrots with leaves usually fetch more per pound than bagged ones. He also considers the revenue a crop can bring in and how much time and space it requires. By doing this, he has determined that greenhouse cucumbers are four times more profitable than turnip, and that a bed of lettuce brings in as much as leeks, but in half the time.

Practical idealism

Neither Fortier nor Desroches are from a farm background. After graduating from the McGill School of Environment, they went on a two-year journey to the U.S. and Mexico, working on small farms. “I had found practical idealism,” he says in the book. Returning home, they rented land and started their first market garden.

The couple wanted their own farm, but knew that buying land meant the business would have to bring in enough money to cover payments on land, buildings, and house, and also raise their family. They eventually found their current farm in St-Armand, Quebec, south of Montreal, in 2004.

Fortier’s favourite tool — the antithesis of mechanization — is the broadfork (called a grelinette in French). This tool, he explains, allows deep aeration without inverting soil layers. “We named our business after the tool because we found the grelinette emblematic of manual, ecological and effective organic gardening,” he says.

Fortier pays a lot of attention to soil biology, which he says helps replace some mechanical labour. “Our objective has always been to create a cropping system that strikes a balance between yield, long-term fertility, and efficiency,” he says. To do this, he practises minimum tillage, growing in permanent raised beds.

He points out that many people get into organic farming for philosophical reasons, but he says it’s still a business, and it’s important to treat it as one. “I would not be too hasty in brushing aside proven solutions from experienced growers, even if they do not seem ‘ideal,’” he says. For example, while he likes the concept of no till, a lot of crop debris in the market garden is impractical. So he’s found a middle ground, using shallow cultivation. For him, no till is an approach, not a doctrine.

Garden or farm?

Fortier says he calls himself a market gardener to emphasize that he works with hand tools. But some people have trouble seeing him as a farmer, not a gardener. One bank loan officer declared this was not a real business — a real farm — and him not a farmer.

In the conclusion of his book, Fortier, who is 35, says he feels privileged to find such a satisfying calling so early in life. I later ask Fortier whether he would do anything differently if he were to start again. “Yes, for sure,” he says, but adds that he’s very happy with the way things are now, and that getting here was a learning process.

His story about food and farming is reaching a lot of people. After chatting, I head back to the website and then to his Facebook pages: 2,100 “likes” for the farm, 2,400 for the book. Then I spot a November 2013 blog post saying that the French edition was No. 1 on Amazon France’s bestselling list of gardening books.

The English language edition, The Market Gardener (www.themarketgardener.com) was released in early 2014. Stay tuned.