| |
Ten years ago Ron Hamilton and his family bought a half section of grassland near Armena, Alberta to custom graze steers. Working as an oilfield surveyor meant long periods of time away from home and Hamilton wanted to create something on farm that would allow him to spend the summers at home. “We made good money grassing 230 steers on 300 acres. They gained 2.4 pounds per day and in 108 days we realized $20,000. Good money, but not enough to pay the mortgage and live.”
A holistic management course taken during the winter of ’95 completely changed the direction this family would take and within five years Hamilton was able to quit his oilfield job and stay home full time. Instead of taking a drop in pay from his $100,000 a year profession, he was able to net more than that on the farm.
“We are not from a farm,” explained Hamilton, “but my family was plagued with allergies and we wanted organically grown products for our own use. Initially, we thought we would just raise a few animals for ourselves. We came across a book on raising chickens on pasture and the first year grew 85 just for ourselves and friends and family.
About this same time, the Hamiltons attended a seminar put on by a central Alberta farmer offering an opportunity to join a cooperative to sell pasture fed, organically grained chickens to a chain of restaurants. Both the Hamiltons and sister-in-law Dorothy Marshall who farms just forty-five minutes away in Rosalind, Alberta, decided to join the cooperative and between them raised 3200 chickens in the summer of 1997. Just before the chickens were ready to be butchered the cooperative contract fell through and there were a lot of chickens without homes. “We had to work fast to salvage our investment so we bought a walk-in freezer, we put ads in Calgary, Edmonton and local papers and in health food stores,” remembered Hamilton. “That first year we were on the road delivering ten and twenty chickens at a time, both in Calgary and Edmonton and slowly our circle of customers began to grow. Almost immediately, we could see that there was a lot of potential for this type of business.”
While others are buying more land to try to take advantage of economics of scale the Hamiltons decided to sell one of their quarters to build a 40 by 60 foot brooder barn on the home quarter which was completed in the spring of 2001. As a friend of his so aptly stated, “The smaller you are the more innovative you have to be.
The products
This year they will place (grow) 14,000 pasture raised chicks at the Hamilton’s Sunworks Farm and Dorothy Marshall will turn out another 4,000 pasture raised chickens. Two pet pigs by names of Buster and Wilber are credited for the pork that is now raised on the farm. “We raised a couple of pigs for our own meat,” said Hamilton.
“We just used an electric fence and they grazed around the back yard. Now we raise 110 pigs. Pig enclosures that are moved daily house 18 pigs each, while other pigs are kept on an old pasture retained by a single electric tape. The pig enclosure sits on skids and we pull it with the tractor.” The pigs on the old pasture are being used as a tool to rejuvenate the grass.
But there’s more to this pasture raised menagerie. This year on the farm there will be 700 turkeys to sell for what Hamilton calls the recreational season meaning Thanksgiving and Christmas. There is pasture raised organic lamb, beef, ducks and pheasants. Both farms work closely together sharing the production and marketing duties. Ron’s sister-in-law raises the lamb, pheasants, wild turkeys and ducks while Sunworks handles the marketing as well as raising their own products. They import organic feed ingredients from the United States for their own rations and will make and sell about 80 ton of feed this year.
The quota system
There are three basic ingredients to the raising of Sunworks poultry and meat and they are grass, electric fence and water. Mother Nature has been generous with the grass and the Hamiltons manage that grass to gain optimum efficiency. “We haven’t yet fertilized our grass,” said Hamilton, “but we are very careful not to overgraze. We have a 6600 foot pipeline system which is fed by a four million gallon dugout equipped with electricity, a pump and a pressure tank. Every three hundred feet there is a valve on the pipe and we can just hook into the water using a cam lock quick coupler depending on where the animals are grazing.
All the grazing animals on the farm are kept in place with a single wire of poly electrified twine with posts positioned every 100 feet. The poultry is further protected from predators with electrified poultry netting which circles the 50 chicken shelters holding 81 birds a piece. Although the shelters are moved every day, the netting is only moved every twelve days. It takes two persons about a minute to move each shelter and three people about an hour to move the netting. The turkeys are kept the same way but put inside a sturdier mesh enclosure at night as an added precaution. Hamilton laughingly refers to themselves as predator friendly. They don’t kill predators; they just don’t supply their meals.
The production
The pigs in the pig shelters finish in five-and-a-half months. They are fed grass and an organic ration of barley and soy. The steers are bought at 700-800 pounds and between the grass, hay and grain will be ready for butchering at approximately 1100 pounds. The chickens are finished in eight weeks, turkeys 16 weeks, ducks 12 weeks and pheasants at 18 weeks.
|
|
|
|
|
|
The processing
Lakeland Poultry in St. Paul, Alberta and Double Z Farms the butcher at Strome, Alberta process the Sunworks Farm products. From boneless, skinless chicken breasts, to sausage, chicken wieners and their kielbasa, all the products are made without egg, wheat, dairy, mgs, nitrates, sodium erythrobate and sulphates, just certified organic meat.
The marketing
Roughly ninety-five percent of the sales come through two farmers markets, one in Calgary and one in Edmonton. The markets are held weekly. The Edmonton farmers market is year round while the Calgary Blackfoot market begins the first weekend in June and ends the first weekend in November. Calgary is a three-day market and the Hamiltons share a stall equipped with refrigeration with a farm couple that sells organic beef. Ron’s wife Sheila leaves home at 4:30 a.m. Friday and returns Sunday night after selling about 1,000 pounds of chicken, lamb, pork and duck. Ron and his daughters, Shae and Erin, and Sheila’s mom Joan Greenwood, take turns selling at the weekend market in Edmonton.
The Hamiltons have produced a brochure which outlines their farm philosophy and how they raise their products and distribute between 5,000 to 6,000 brochures a year. Said Hamilton, “People are eager to meet a farmer face to face. The latest survey said that 80% of the people surveyed said they feel the most trust buying directly from the producer in a farmer’s market setting.”
The customer base is all over the board. Hamilton says he has a Calgary customer that was a vegetarian for years because of severe allergies but now eats meat and poultry purchased from their stall. While an overweight cigarette smoking customer in Edmonton buys the chicken because he likes the taste. “There are three things that make people buy,” says Hamilton, “those are taste, ethics and price. Many people have tasted a farm-raised chicken and remember how good it tasted. The second thing many customers talk about is how concerned they are about how chickens and other animals are raised. Lastly, they ask about the price. We don’t display the price on our products at the market stall. The potential customer picks out the meat and then we weigh it. A whole organic pasture raised chicken sells for $3.25 a pound in Edmonton and $3.50 a pound in Calgary because we have to travel further to Calgary and stay over two nights. Our certified organic eggs sell for $3.50 a dozen. Did I forget to mention that we have 600 hens in range houses with roll-away nesting boxes? They work out well because in the winter time we don’t have broilers in the barn and we just put the hens in there.”
The economics
Last year Ron sat down and penciled out all the inputs and the amount of time spent looking after each group of animals and from a per hour basis calculated the return on each animal. The best money made per hour was with the turkeys and the least coming in at $5.00 per hour was the ducks. He said, “We had 300 ducks and the return wasn’t enough to continue. If we grew 5,000 ducks it would be a different story but now my niece is raising the ducks as her own project and has already sold most of the big ones to a café in Calgary. The chickens return $34.00 per hour and the pigs a little more. This return is all profit after feed costs and facilities.”
Ron and his wife Sheila, together with 19-year-old Shae and 17-year-old Erin, handle all the chores and marketing. This summer Erin worked away on a market garden to gain experience so her friend Matt took her place on the farm. Erin and Matt plan to grow two acres of certified organic strawberries next year.
The farm philosophy
The Hamilton family has proven that a small farm can be a very viable operation. Said Ron, “If there is no money made on the farm the children aren’t going to stay. I’ve read many farm publication articles that half-way through will have people saying, ‘we don’t encourage our children to stay on the farm.’ Look at the average age of the farmer in this country and tell me there isn’t a huge opportunity for young people to farm. They don’t all have to farm quantity – some can farm quality and that’s what we’re about. There is room for both types of farmers. Our business plan for this year was twenty-two pages long with charts and graphs. You need to know where you want to go and how you’re going to get there. Our plan was to gross a half-million dollars on the farm this year and we’re well on our way to accomplishing that.”
Hamilton observed that there are 43-million chickens grown in Alberta a year and only 30,000 to 40,000 grown in a range system. To him, that means a lot of room for growth. He doesn’t believe everyone has the will to take on a farm venture such as theirs but some farmers, producers, acreage owners and the like can band together to form a cooperative and supply range fed organic products to their own communities. He said, “Who says the local hospital or old folks home has to get their meat or eggs outside the community. Why not get a group of hen owners together and open a grading station to supply them with eggs? The opportunities are there for the taking.”
For more information on Sunworks Farm go to www.sunworksfarm.com
|
|
