Greg Burton and Tessa Kautzman established Willow Farm last year, making it one of the newest vegetable farms in the Tantramar area.
While Willow Farm is quite new to the area, it produces enough for them to sell at the Sackville Farmers’ Market and for a weekly CSA subscription.
I got the chance to check in with Greg Burton about their first year as full-time farmers, and how COVID-19 has influenced them as a family and business.
M: So this is your first year is that correct?
G: True. Well this is our first year selling our produce. We did a season last year with basically no infrastructure that was supposed to be just for fun. And I think at times it was fun. But this is our first year actively selling.
M: So this was a bit of a weird first year just with COVID-19. So how has that been going, all things considered?
G: Well, to be quite honest, I don’t know how much it’s really affected what we’re doing farm-wise, other than maybe feeling a bit more isolated than than we otherwise would. We’ve still been able to sell at the market. We’ve still been able to run a small CSA. And given the amount of work there is to do on the property and on the home that we purchased we spend a lot of time here anyway. So honestly, in that regard, I don’t think it’s affected us. We don’t feel like it’s affected us too much. In fact, in light of COVID, there have been movements looking at food security, specifically in fruit and vegetable production in New Brunswick. And so in a weird, cynical way, it’s almost been a boom for the business to be starting a vegetable production business at this time.
M: Sure. We live in a rural area with a couple of farms around, now you’re located more so in Dorchester than Port Elgin way. Do you have a cooperative relationship with any surrounding farms?
G: Yeah, so we’re in Middleton in between Dorchester and Memramcook. And there are no real farms like ours that we know of in our area. There are a couple smaller farms that are active to varying degrees on the other side of the Memramcook river and Memramcook, and there is one larger berry storage crop farm. But there aren’t many farms like ours where we are which is one of the reasons we chose the location we did. We have a kind of informal cooperative relationships with some local growers who aren’t necessarily actively farming as a business. And so we’ll do things like you sell people some of our produce at a discount for their value added products. Or maybe, we’re looking into the possibility of buying some produce from another local grower, which is stuff that we wouldn’t have so we can sell it at market to beef up our table and in exchange either buy it from them or trade them for some stuff that we have that they don’t. So that’s kind of like a cooperative relationship. And then we have worked a bit with Sarah and Jett of Sweet Soil farm, helping them sell maybe some of their excess when they have it.
M: You’ve mentioned this briefly already, but COVID-19 has highlighted that this province, among other provinces, has an issue with food security. As a farmer, what are your thoughts about your role in food security?
G: That’s a big question for me, the simple answer is related directly specifically to our farm. We like the idea of serving our local community. We live in a place where access to fresh fruit and vegetables is limited and so we are making it our goal to to improve that access to fresh fruits and vegetables. The issue of food security in New Brunswick is I think, a larger question. And sometimes I feel as though there’s a lot more nuances in the discussion, I think, given the topic lately. I mean, as far as our farm is concerned, we’re interested in supporting our local community. And I think that was always the goal, regardless, before COVID as well. I guess the simplest way to put my personal opinions about issues of food security in this province is that they were there before COVID. And they have to do with systemic issues pertaining to the way that we produce and distribute food by and large. So maybe COVID has helped highlight some of those, those issues. But, I’m not sure that any of them really changed because of COVID.
M: Okay, thank you. Um, did any of your projects have to be put on hold because of the pandemic?
G: We’re personally financing our business. We also have a lot of repairs to the house that we bought that we have to do as well. There were some government programs that we were hoping to access to continue repairs to the home that we weren’t able to access that were put on hold partially due to COVID. So some of those, that money that we might have been able to spend on farm infrastructure has to go into the home and that kind of thing. But ultimately, we were able to accomplish most of what we had set out to accomplish this year, regardless of the pandemic.
M: It’s been a very dry summer this time around. How have you been coping with that?
G: We’ve been coping okay. But that’s one of the major issues for us as a new farm in general, let alone how dry it’s been, is water usage. So we have one well on our property and it serves as the home. And it’s the only place that we can get water. So we’ve been… we’re really at the limit of how much water we can use. And we collect rainwater as well. We’ll be doing more of that and we hope to collect more than twice as much next season as we’ve been collecting this season. But even then, it won’t cover our needs. And like I say, on our house well, we’re pretty much maxed out as far as what we can do. So we’ve been doing things like watering on a rotation, so just watering less, trying to water consistently but on rotation and definitely, like less water usage overall. So yeah, so we’ve coped by implementing some strategies, but it’s been difficult.
M: What are you working on right now on the farm? Do you have any future plans?
G: Yes, lots of future plans. We accomplished a number of projects this year. We built a high tunnel, kind of organized our processing area… You know, we’re really starting from scratch… kind of started the beginnings of an irrigation system. And in the future, we have other infrastructural projects that we’re hoping to get done and in fact that we need to get done if our goal is to scale to a business that can support two full time positions. So yeah, right now, most of our focus as far as things that we’re working on are figuring out how to finance infrastructure issues and solve our water problem. And those are things like building cold storage, potentially another tunnel, building. This season we were seeding our transplants in our house. And we want to move away from any farm being in the home. No farm in the home is what we’re trying to achieve. A separation between the farm and house. So seeding facilities that will help us take better care of our seedlings and achieve better germination and that kind of thing. Yeah, so all those projects are in the works, but they’re all very much still in the planning stages. And we can only afford so many of them at a time. There’s one government program that we can access to make that… to make some of those happen. But it’s a program that was newly refurbished and is incredibly popular and right now there’s, you know, intake was full and there’s a waiting list even for projects that are going to happen next year. So we’re hoping to apply for that in next year’s intake for projects that are going to be accomplished in 2022.
That was Meg Cunningham checking in with Willow farm co-owner, Greg Burton.
With grants and government funding in the works, Willow Farm is making long-term plans.
Burton and Kautzman are glad to have one part-time staff member on the farm for the summer, which allows more time for new projects and taking care of their seven-month-old baby.
To check out Willow Farm’s produce or to just to say hello, you can find them by the basketball courts at the Sackville Farmers’ Market every Saturday.
By Meg Cunningham
