From plate to farm

Picture this plate of New Brunswick food.

Sirloin steak, a bright-green pesto made from garlic scapes and carrot tops, roast potatoes, carrots shining in a maple glaze and a fresh, simple salad. For dessert, a bowl of strawberries in plain yogurt with maple syrup.

Now picture where it all began — the faces, the landscape, the toil and life represented on the plate.

Each ingredient of the meal was grown or raised within a 130-kilometre radius of the Fredericton table where it was served. But that doesn’t tell the full story. For that, we talked to the farmers.

Where the cows come home

At a butcher counter at the Boyce Farmers Market in Fredericton, the sirloin was among the different cuts, from ground beef to New York strip, displayed under a plexiglass divider.

But a farm 70 kilometres downriver toward Washademoak Lake reveals more about where grass-fed beef like this comes from.

Gerard Caissie's farm sits on top of a grassy hill on a little-travelled road in Cambridge-Narrows. Fields of clover and other grasses stretch in every direction at Angus East Organics. Caissie grows more than a dozen varieties to feed his 300 cattle.

He spent much of his life in construction, always wanting to be a farmer.

But it was the death of his 23-year-old daughter in 1998 that pushed him to start Angus East Organics in 2002.

“My daughter was dying in bed, she was dying of cancer,” he said. “We talked about death, many things, and I told Monica one day, I said, ‘I think I'm going to change my career from construction to farming to study why people die of cancer. It has to be related to food.’

“And that’s what I’m doing. I'm trying to produce better food for mankind, something that can heal people.”

Most days, the 68-year-old Caissie gets up at 5:30 a.m. and doesn’t go to bed until 11 p.m.

He walks around his land with a surprising amount of energy, and can talk farming until the cows come home, literally.

“Farmers have to know about almost everything in the trade, from mechanical, raising cattle to knowing how to grow hay, drive machinery. You have to be very, very smart to be a farmer today.”

Calves are born all summer. Caissie often has to search the pastures for a mother to make sure her calf gets the milk it needs to survive. At times, he plays mother himself.

“You’re my baby,” he said, stroking the back of a day-old calf. “That little calf last night, I had to use a syringe to feed him the first time.”

No helping hands

One of the biggest problems of a small cattle farm is finding workers to help manage the herd.

Caissie has six employees but will need more when he opens a processing plant to create value-added products such as jerky.

These days, he said, people don’t often have the practical knowledge of working with animals.

“In the past, everybody knew the signs, how to read a cow,” he said. “Today we depend so much on new technology.”

Caissie sells his beef by the side. It’s processed by a local butcher and sells for $4.50 a pound. His processing plant will allow him to sell in smaller amounts.

Another challenge, he said, is getting financial support from a province that seems ambivalent about farming.

During the drought last year, Caissie spent $50,000 buying hay from other provinces, and the New Brunswick government didn’t do anything to help him.

“I’m not sure why they don’t look at farming as a priority in New Brunswick,” he said. “Food should always be looked as a priority.”

“They seem to find money for everything else except the farmer.”

Yet Caissie is a fervent believer in the value of local food.

“You should know your farmer better than you know anybody else, because food is what keeps you alive,” he said.

Green heaven

As tasty as the steak is, a pungent garlic scape and carrot-top pesto livens it up. The scapes, carrots and lettuce came from Little Eden Veggies in Prince William, about 42 kilometres west of Fredericton.

From the road, it just looks like a home with a large garden, but behind the house is Kathy Boone’s own Eden.

When she takes her vegetables to farmer’s markets, it’s like giving up a child.

“It’s like they’re buying a piece of me,” said Boone, who grew up on a dairy farm.

“I planted that, I watched it grow, I’ve watered it a hundred times, possibly have picked bugs off of it, ordered biologicals for it so it would survive, and picked it and packed it and washed it and loaded it on the truck to take it to market.”

She started growing vegetables as a side project but had to give up her day job to meet demand.

Unpaid labour

She grows from March to December, but her income from vegetables is limited to harvest season.

“There’s a lot of hours put in that you don't get paid for. It’s 24/7. If there's something going on here I can't leave.”

Boone sells to local restaurants and at the St. Andrews Farmers’ Market and Fredericton Garrison Night Market. She also offers customers 22-week produce boxes.

“It doesn't travel in a truck for a week before it gets to you,” says the local food enthusiast. “The nutrients are there. Fresh local food — you can't get any better than that.”

The two markets are on Thursday, which means Boone spends part of Tuesday and all of Wednesday picking produce and packing in her cold-storage shed. She has just enough time to get home from the Saint Andrews market and reload before heading to Fredericton.

The mother of two manages the three greenhouses and half-acre farm on her own, with a little help on heavier jobs from her husband, whom she affectionately calls her “maintenance man.”

She grows a lot, including greens, potatoes, garlic scapes, carrots, Swiss chard and beets. Her greenhouse is a patchwork of different shades of green, with heads of Salanova lettuce that could almost pass for roses.

On Tuesday nights, customers gather in her yard to pick up their produce boxes — which cost $20 for a full share and $10 for a half — and catch up on neighbourhood news.

“When you buy something in a grocery store, the person who grew that will never know you, whereas when I sell something at the market or to a restaurant, I’m providing food for people that I actually know.”

Lusciously local

Nothing says New Brunswick summer like a dessert of strawberries.

The strawberries for this meal came from Jemseg River Farm, about 60 kilometres east of Fredericton.

Five years after he bought the land ringed by trees overlooking the river, Michael Carr found out his Loyalist ancestors had been granted a piece of it.

He doesn’t know if they ever farmed the land, but Carr has farming in his blood. He grew up on a dairy farm in Sussex.

Started in 2009 and certified organic the next year, the farm produces vegetables and some small, luscious fruits like strawberries.

Carr’s organic approach stems from his belief that chemicals aren’t needed to grow good food and from a childhood encounter with pesticides.

“We were crawling around on equipment, as kids do, and I stuck my head in the sprayer for the apple orchard, and it was not a pleasant experience,” he said.

Carr uses tractors from the 1940s to cultivate close to the plants, which is helpful for farming without chemicals.

Big competitors

Despite the constant hard work, profitability remains a challenge for a small farm, Carr said.

“We’re competing with mass-production farms,” he said.

Carr mostly sells directly to customers at farmers markets and through some small stores.

He’s tried selling to larger grocery stores but found it often wasn’t worth the trouble. Sometimes the produce still had to go to Nova Scotia to be processed.

“There’s so many middlemen in the business and they take the big cut,” Carr said.

Small-scale producers often can’t justify the cost of certifications and licences required by larger grocery store chains.

“We’re losing access to those markets,” he said. “And it's becoming more and more difficult. There’s new regulations.”

Farmwork is also mostly underpaid — another reason farmers are scarce, Carr said.

“We can’t afford to pay a lot, so we can’t attract people who might make a career out of farming, might eventually become farmers themselves.”

Farmers generally earn money only during harvest season, but they work year round, ordering seeds, bookkeeping and maintaining equipment.

Small farms disappearing

The 2016 New Brunswick census of agriculture reported the number of farms in the province declined by 14 per cent from 2011, more than double the six per cent decrease nationally.

More than 80 per cent of the decline comprised small farms with annual gross revenues under $10,000.

Meanwhile, New Brunswick only produces eight per cent of the vegetables it consumes, according to the province’s local food and beverages strategy.

Carr grows almost all of his own food, a luxury he sometimes takes for granted. When he sits down to his Thanksgiving dinner table, he thinks of the community built around his farm.

“There's hundreds of families [that] are eating something that we grew that night — could have been carrots or potatoes — and some people’s Thanksgiving dinner might be mostly our produce, so that feels good.”

No extra ingredients

Yogurt makes an interesting backdrop for bright red strawberries, completing the dessert.

This yogurt came from Hetty Smyth of Armadale Farm, a small farm just past a covered bridge in the rolling hills around Sussex.

Smyth, a mother of four, grew up on her family’s dairy farm wanting to be a vet. But 12 years ago her parents decided to retire and were going to shut the dairy down if no one wanted to take over.

Smyth and her husband, Ian, took over production of cheese, butter and yogurt, and her brother took over the farm.

Armadale Farm makes cheese, yogurt and butter. Smyth and her husband manage production and sales with the help of one employee.

Cheese is made every morning, then stored away to age for several months before being packaged and sold to consumers. Yogurt and butter are made fresh each week.

The cheese is handmade in small batches without fillers or additives. Armadale butter costs $10 a pound, the price you pay for fresh food without shelf-stabilizers.

Armadale produces about seven wheels of cheese a day. Larger processors take in larger volumes and can make cheese for less.

“Our customers are really great and appreciate the value of having a local handmade cheese without any extra ingredients,” Smyth said.

But more consumers should realize how important local farming is to the economy, she said.

“Buying something that was made in the U.S. isn't going to help our economy here at home, it’s not going to help build your community that you live in.”

Smyth said farmers are passionate about what they do, and you can taste it in the food.

“That’s so important to shop local and buy local. You know where your food comes from, you know where it’s produced, and to me there's no better way of living than that.”