Nature’s Route farm has been a consistent figure at the Sackville, Dieppe, and Moncton farmers’ markets since 2007.
Owner Kent Coates has managed to provide his customers with his produce despite the constantly changing environment due to COVID-19.
Owning a farm is always busy, but Coates says that the pandemic has added new obstacles every day.
Meg Cunningham had the chance to chat with Coates about how Nature’s Route has managed to keep working through COVID-19.
M: My first question is How is Nature’s Route adapted to COVID-19 so far?
K: It’s been busy. That’s probably the best description. There’s been a lot of adaptation. Certainly the first two or three months have changed every week, there seemed to be two or three significant changes that required completely revamping the labor planning and the marketing plan. Those were the two big ones that got hit the hardest was our staff plan for 2020. And the other one was the marketing plan and because the farmers’ markets all closed for the end of March and April and May in Moncton and Dieppe. So those were pretty big adjustments that are constantly changing. And we were able to do quite well at setting up systems on the farm and keeping our staff safe. I’m still very happy with the way that’s going. And the Sackville Farmers’ Market, even when it was closed, we kept going to the same location with several of the vendors and it actually worked out really well. And now that the markets are going again, I think that Sackville is the brightest spot of my marketing at the moment.
M: You used to go to Moncton or Dieppe and you haven’t been able to do that at all, right?
K: We used to do both the Moncton market and the Dieppe market on Saturday until March and those markets were both closed for about two and a half months. During that time the Dieppe market and the Really Local Harvest Co Op did run a virtual market on Friday where stock and products were put online and sold during the week and then on Friday, vendors would all come to the market and pack boxes that would be delivered into people’s cars as they show up. So that was actually… it worked okay. It wasn’t the same as the Dieppe Saturday market but between Sackville being so much bigger and with the virtual market we actually were able to sell as much product or a little more products than normal, but it was a lot more work. We had to redo a lot of our planning and strategizing and packaging. We used to package a lot of product at market with market staff and then all I had to get done on a farm. So we just had to change a lot. It wasn’t devastating, it was just tiring because it’s changing all the time.
M: Totally. Do you have a cooperative relationship with any surrounding farms in your area out of curiosity?
K: Well I’m part of the Really Local Harvest Co Op, which runs the Dieppe market, so there’s 26 to 30 farmers depending on the area that are part of that Co Op… They’ve got some great resources there. We’ve got a great executive director, we’ve got great market staff, the market manager is super. And those relationships have been really, really key.
It’s also great to go to Sackville and vend at the same time as Portage Pork and Dixon’s Beef and those other producers, the grocery store type producers that come to the Sackville market that really provide people with a lot of food. We work together with them during March and April when the market was actually shut, and that went really well. Our biggest market day of all time at Sackville was actually the 24th or 23rd of March, the first weekend that things were shut down. We had our biggest day ever. We sold two and a half 2.67 times more than we’d sold the previous March 24 market. Yeah, we had people driving from Bouctouche to buy carrots because the Dieppe market was closed… So that’s certainly been a bright spot. Working with those other producers and both the Sackville Farmers Market team and the Dieppe market team have been super, and I shouldn’t exclude Moncton. Courtney is the manager in Moncton and she’s been really good… We’re currently doing all three markets again, the Sackville, Dieppe, and Moncton. But Sackville, again is the bright spot because the other markets with the social distancing have really struggled to draw as many people but we just can’t, we used that 7000 people weekend that went through in Dieppe and now we’re up to 2000… With a line up out the door the whole day.
M: You were very public earlier when there was talk about whether or not migrant workers were going to be allowed in the province. You were very vocal about that on your social media because you do hire migrant workers every season, is that correct?
K: So I hire seasonal agricultural workers from Mexico. This is the third year and they’ve been a savior for my farm. I don’t think I could keep farming without those men. They’re just incredible laborers. They’re professional, they work hard… they’re professional laborers. So I can hire students, and this year I’ve had super luck with students and other local people. But they’re not professional laborers that have been doing this for their whole life. So I have to spend more time supervising, that’s normal. But that means I don’t get the other things in my business done because I’m the only one that drives the tractor and only one that drives the truck and I’m the only one that does the administration. So all the time that I take away from those other things means that the business is quite limited. So those guys have really been key for my success… Last Friday was the first day of work for my first worker that arrived so I finally did get one but I was supposed to get… two more, I was supposed to get three. And so it’s a challenging year. We have to constantly retrain because we lose people. We started off the season, we thought we had a good team put together and we lost a couple and then we lost another one now and again and when school goes back, we’ll lose some more. So the fall is going to be a stressful time for labor. I know that. I’m still feeling pretty let down by the lack of consultation from the government in this decision, but that’s the way it is.
M: Sure. So how many staff do you have on at the moment?
K: We have a lot of half-day, a lot of students are working half-day solo work from one to five. So the biggest days you’ve got 10 to 12 people working, the smallest days we have five or six. And that includes that I have two seasonal workers one will leave in a month because he arrived in January and they’re only allowed to stay for eight months. So he leaves early September. And then Louiz just started work last Friday after his quarantine. So I’ll have one seasonal worker in the fall.
M: Can you tell me about how, from your end when you hire folks who are coming from out of the country, they do have to quarantine before they’re allowed to work. So how much of that are you involved with?
K: So I have to have a plan approved by public health in New Brunswick. And Service Canada is also monitoring that and they’re doing random virtual inspections during quarantine times. So my plan went something along the lines of me picking up my worker at the airport… I actually installed a complete vapor barrier between the two compartments in the vehicle so he was able to sit in one part of the vehicle and I was able to sit in another part of the vehicle. So never closer than six feet together. I drove him directly to the house he was quarantined in and I gave him food. I provided food for two weeks. I checked in on him twice a day, I had to provide all the sanitation things that public health required because he has to sanitize the house twice a day while he was quarantined and he has to take his temperature twice a day when he’s quarantined. So he’s got a checklist of all those done, and then public health actually came and provided a COVID test for him. And that came back last Thursday negative, and Thursday was his 14th day of quarantine. So he started work on Friday. So yeah, it also required an extra water sample for the house and also required an extra house inspection for the house by public health. So it’s fairly involved. So the other aspect of that question is that I also had to find other accommodation for the worker that was here already. Because he’s been here since January. He didn’t have to quarantine so I actually had to purchase other accommodation for him for the two weeks. And I provided him a car to drive back and forth every day.
M: So pretty involved in the quarantine.
K: Everything about COVID has been involved. And the challenging part is, it’s often changed. You get your plan in place, and then there’s a new imposition. There’s a new plan…a new criteria that has to be met… I tried to think forward as much as I could and I made a really strict plan the first week which enabled us to keep going to a market and selling vegetables to people in a safe way. So when the New Brunswick plan came out about two months later from WorkSafe, New Brunswick, it was very long and involved but I had all my bases covered. But I still had to go through the process of checking and making a couple little tweaks in my plan, so just those things take a surprisingly long time. You spend a whole day easily just to review a document.
M: Really? Which is changing week by week, it seems.
K: Which changes week to week and I don’t get paid for reviewing documents, I get paid for selling vegetables so I can’t produce vegetables because I spent the day when I supposed to be planting carrots. If I spend a day reviewing a document then it really trickles down quite deep.
M: Sure. I’m switching gears a little bit here. COVID-19 has highlighted the pre existing issue in this province, which has to do with food security. And as a farmer, do you have any thoughts about your role in food security?
K: Well, that’s the reason I started farming in 2007. I felt quite strongly that I wanted to produce good quality food that encourage people to have a healthy lifestyle and eat well. But I also felt that we really weren’t doing a good job of growing our own food. And I don’t think the statistics have changed very much… we’re still somewhere in that 15 to 2% of what we eat is actually grown in New Brunswick, and whether or not 15 or 2%, it doesn’t really matter. It’s drastically different, but it’s still so grossly wrong. We typically have a great climate to grow so much food. We grow surplus potatoes, we grow surplus cabbage, but everything else we’re shipping in to eat. I always drove by Sackville for years on my way, I was living in Halifax and I’d grown up in Sackville, I know that there are enough people in Sackville to provide a living growing vegetables. So I still feel very strongly about that. Certainly the global economics of producing food at an economical price is a challenge when we’re competing with other areas of the world. The reason that these seasonal workers can come here is because I pay them in an hour, they get paid more than they get paid in a day in Mexico. So all of the food that we’re bringing in from away, a lot of it is produced under those circumstances, and it’s really hard to compete on our price point with our cost of living here.
M: Sure. It’s super dry this summer. Not that I have to tell you, I’m sure, how are you coping with that?
K: A lot of late nights, a lot of watering. I can water between half an acre and one acre at a time. I got 17 acres of vegetables. It takes the full eight hours to water. There are a few fields that I’ve just kind of left that aren’t as critical or they have water right now but we’re moving the machine once, twice, sometimes three times a day. And my pond’s getting low. I was really lucky. I said, I’m growing all my vegetables on my farm this year. I’m not not growing up the road on my father’s farm at all this year. So I want to make sure I make my pond bigger. So in the first week of April, I made my pond four times bigger. And it actually never got full because since the middle of April, we’ve only got 40 millimetres of rain. So we started pumping out by the early May we started pumping water and we’ve been pumping water nonstop since and and the pond is, I’d say we got two to three weeks of water which hopefully will be enough.
M: So you pump water. What does your watering system look like if you don’t mind me asking?
K: Okay, well you’re in danger of me going into too much detail but I’ll do my best. I have an electric water pump at my pond. It puts out about 60 gallons a minute of water. It goes through an underground water main that comes straight through my farm and has a hydrant every hundred feet. And from the hydrant I can hook what I call a hose reel. So it’s a sort of four foot diameter. It’s got an inch and a half hose on it and it goes out 450 feet. So I hook water on the hose reel, pull a hose reel out to the end of the field and there’s a big sprinkler that goes 100 feet wide. And as it waters it actually rolls itself back up. So at the end of the day, I’ve got the 100 feet by 400 feet of area watered
M: Just to wrap up a little bit here, what are you working on now? Do you have any plans or projects you’re working on?
K: Well, there have been so many changes and right now I’m actually just finishing the install of a trailer hitch on the truck. When Sackville did so well in March, I knew that there would be demand in Moncton and Dieppe, so I actually bought a larger truck to take more product. Ironically, I haven’t needed it yet but this is the week we’re starting to have more products so we need to get the trailer hitch put on the truck so I can deliver product in both Sackville and Moncton and Dieppe all at the same time. So there’s been a lot of little projects like that adjusting to be able to make the most of the business in a hard year because my labor is going to be so much higher than it certainly was in the past. I know that I need to sell as much product as I can. So we’ve actually started home deliveries in Moncton on Fridays as well, we’re doing the virtual market Friday, we’re doing an open market at Dieppe on Friday or doing the Dieppe markets on Friday, and the Sackville market on Saturday. So that’s taking a lot of my focus is to keep the website updating the social media thing, trying to be a little more on top of that one than I certainly was in the past because it’s not my, my forte, it’s not where I like, not my happy space. But without going to market and seeing 7000 people a week, I kind of need to be able to get my message out somehow. So those have been some focus. I’ve got some great staff. We’re trying to keep everything going in a straight line here. We’re almost there, half done weeding the storage carrots. So there’s lots of weeding left and that’ll go into potato harvest early September.
M: Okay. Before I hit pause here, is there anything that we missed or that I haven’t asked you about that you feel should be shared with our listeners and our community?
K: The overall message that I still feel very strongly for this season is we need a long term solution for labor in New Brunswick. For me in the short term this season, agricultural workers from Mexico are a fantastic solution. But certainly if, like the premier suggested we have lots of people that are not working in New Brunswick, if we’re going to change that, that’s a long term strategy that’s going to take several years to develop and some mindset changes and some values changing. So that’s that’s a big message. We’re not out of the woods on that one. And certainly, my biggest fear for the seasonal agricultural workers, ironically, is not the workers coming here to Canada, because when they come here we have a very stringent system to catch a COVID-19 case before it gets into the community. But what about when they go home? The guys have to travel on an airplane, they have to get to Mexico City, they have to take a bus for 10 hours. Once they get to Mexico, they’re at high risk in that transition zone from here to there. And when they get there, they’re in a remote village in Mexico with very limited healthcare resources and their young children and their parents. So that’s a big fear of mine. Like how this is not a great solution. We’re doing our best….we’re gonna have a lot of discussions before he goes home to make sure that he’s got some ways to stay safe while he’s traveling. But that’s a big concern of mine.
M: Okay, good point. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with me and talk about this.
K: No problem. It’s kind of shady out at the truck behind this trailer hitch.
M: Hey, well,it’s as good a place as any I guess.
Coates also says that Nature’s Route started collaborating with Codiac Organics, an urban farm in Moncton, this spring.
Codiac Organics sells Nature’s Route products at their store while Nature’s Route sells their tomatoes at the Dieppe Market.
