Farming Your Values

Stuart and Nikki Oke. PC: Rooted Oak Organic Farm

Stuart and Nikki Oke own and manage Rooted Oak Organic Farm in North Augusta, Ontario, Canada. During Stuart’s years of working on other farms to learn the business, he worked on HMI Certified Educator Tony McQuail’s farm (Meeting Place Organic Farm) in 2010. Then in 2021, Stuart came back and took Tony’s Holistic Management course to deepen his learning.

“I was 19 when I worked on Tony’s farm, and it was one of the first farms I worked on,” says Stuart. “I didn’t have a lot of expectations then and I worked on many more farms after that. Later, I was able to appreciate how the McQuails lived their lives every day, and how they did things like using the testing questions when they were making decisions. Those experiences led me to want to take their Holistic Management course.

“What was clear to me in retrospect was that Holistic Management was a lot more evident on the McQuails farm than other farms. They made the farm part of their life, but the Holistic Management Framework helped them make the farm work for other parts of their life. The mechanisms were in place at the McQuails’ to schedule time off and meet life goals in addition to farm goals.

“We (Rooted Oak Organic Farm) have now been in operation for 7-8 years, and we’ve been really conscious about creating a business that allows for other things in addition to running the farm business.”

It is that conscious focus that have allowed Stuart and Nikki to achieve their farm goals in a relatively short amount of time through exploring creative options to getting access to land for a permanent home for their farm. Likewise, their focus on effective decision-making and financial and strategic planning has helped them create a farm that allows them to live their values and support causes that are important to them.

Access to Land

Rooted Oak Farm Stand. PC: Rooted Oak Farm

Stuart and Nikki were at a very important time in the growth of the business when they took their Holistic Management course in 2021. They had just decided to cooperatively purchase some land with another couple to provide a permanent home for Rooting Oak Organic Farm. “The way we set it up was that we had mixed use of the farm with the other couple,” says Stuart. “They weren’t living on the farm when we first purchased the farm and the agreement was that we needed to build another house within five years so they could live in the house that came with the land after that.  This allowed us time to redo the mortgage so we could divide the land and they would keep the house. They want to live next to a farm like ours and we will pay half the mortgage until we move into our new home.

“There were a lot of dynamics to weigh during this time and a lot of decisions about the house and how to build the business up. What came out of the course was developing our holistic goal and to really use the testing questions around these decisions so we could weigh all those factors.

“We are still building our house so we have been consciously limiting the farm business to maximize our savings toward building the house. We have had to prioritize where to invest our time and money to provide us with the sense of place and physical security we need. There has been a lot of focus on right sizing the business. Taking that course enabled us to see all of these steps more clearly and adopt a value system that supported our goals. We have focused on how to maximize our take home at the end of each day.”

While Stuart and Nikki began Rooted Oak Farm in 2017, they didn’t purchase the property until 2020. The farm is 80 acres, with 60 acres in bush and 15 acres in production. They have mixed vegetable production on around 5 acres annually and then they cover crop on the rest of the production area as part of their crop rotation. They are also trying to thoughtfully manage the bush area as a place of beauty, open space, and trails. The bush area is dense cedar forest and marginal land.

Their annual production cycle starts in late March and into early April as they start seeds in their greenhouse. They try to get all their prep work done so they can hit the ground running in April depending on the year.

They start planting outdoors around mid-April. They can’t depend on frost-free days until May so they are planting things undercover in cover tunnels through May and keeping their seedlings in the greenhouse then. At the end of May they start planting crops out in the field and market their products through their CSA and on the farm, as well as to their wholesale accounts. The majority of their sales are direct to consumer. Their outlets start in May or June and go through to winter time.

June through August is their super busy time, however they are continuing to harvest into October or even February on some of their crops like their greens. They can store around 10,000 to 15,000 pounds of produce which they continue to sell through the end of February. Their on-farm storage is palletized and they keep pallet bins in several different temperature zones to accommodate their winter squash, cabbage, root vegetables, etc.

“There was nothing here when we bought the property, just empty corn fields,” says Stuart. “We had to build everything from the ground up so everything is very purpose built. We invested a lot into appropriate infrastructure because we knew we needed to have a packing and storage facility and the season extension infrastructure to make our business work.

With an investment in cold storage, Rooted Oak Farm can sell through much of the year and also expands their market in the growing season with flowers to offer as well to their CSA and farmer’s market clients. PC: Rooted Oak Farm

“One of our criteria for buying land was to make sure it was close enough for our existing customers so we wouldn’t lose any of them when we moved. We were in 2 farmers’ markets in Ottawa and our CSA was 100 weekly members with a total of 150 members. Since then, we’ve doubled in size and we’ve added an additional city into our market.

“We have wholesale with the local grocery stores that is about 5% of our gross. Then the food bank buys in bulk which brings in another $5-10,000. We used to be about 50/50 between the CSA and the farmers’ markets but now the CSA is more like 65% of our business. The CSA has definitely taken more of a central role of our farm.”

Stuart and Nikki are both full-time on the farm and they also have 2 full-time seasonal employees as well as 2 part-time seasonal employees from May through October. “Labor is a huge issue,” says Stuart. “Staffing is always a concern so we are very intentional about trying to create a positive work environment. This focus comes from our experience of working on other farms. That experience helped us to be clear about what we wanted from our farm, and to have clear expectations of what people will get from the job.

Rooted Oak Farm produces vegetables and flowers on approximately 5 acres a year which they rotate with cover crops to increase soil fertility. PC: Rooted Oak Farm

“We make sure that our employees always end at the same time of the day and that they don’t work late (although we do). We don’t expect them to work long after hours, so they know when they can leave. It’s important not to ask the same of your employees as you expect from yourself. We can right size our expectation of employees for our own happiness. We also pay our employees a living wage. We follow the benchmark set in Canada for that amount. We feel that is important for employee retention and having as much flexiblility as possible by working with people who live nearby. We’ve been able to get returning employees as a result of those efforts.”

Stuart and Nikki’s strategy has been to minimize daily living expenses so they can invest back into the farm and also to put as much money into savings for building their house. “The mission of the farm is to have time to give our energy to organizations modeling the bigger picture changes we want to support,” says Stuart. “It is also to model a good food system. We are also working with organizations like the National Farmers Union to address collective farmer issues and to help develop policies that will influence the issues we care about.

“Climate work has been really important for us. Since we are the younger side, we are very concerned about the changing climate and how that is going to affect our farms and how we can find practical solutions. Also, we know how we’ve been affected by land access issues and we are working on policies to address these issues for young farmers.”

Stuart engages in policy work as a member of the National Farmers Union. He is also a past Vice-President of Canadian Organic Growers and currently represents the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario on the Policy Working Group for the farmer coalition Farmers for Climate Solutions, and is the Eastern Ontario Land Access Coordinator for the National Farmers Union - Ontario. Nikki supports this policy work by managing the farm alone when Stuart has to travel for this work.

“Conceptually the Holistic Management practices resonate with us because that is how we live our lives, with conscious focus on our values,” says Stuart. “It was not a stretch to integrate these concepts into our lives, and it has helped us make thoughtful and intentional choices.”

When asked what his advice would be to a young farmer, Stuart said: “Give yourself some grace and go easy on yourself. Everything can’t happen all at once. This is a game of years, not of months. Develop slow and thoughtful growth and profits more in the medium and long term so you aren’t wasting money or failing at things that you maybe you shouldn’t have done.”