Ferme Brylee—
Transitioning a Small Diversified Farm in Quebec BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS
B
rian Maloney and his partner, Lise, raise grass-fed beef, “meadow” veal (the calves spending all summer with their mothers on pasture), and lamb on their farm near Thurso, Quebec. Their farm is called Ferme Brylee, and has been in Brian’s family for several generations. Brian has been farming here for more than 40 years, and started with a dairy. “I am not a machine guy, so early on I decided I didn’t want to drive a tractor. Buying and repairing machinery was not my thing. With our dairy I was learning about grass management, so after we got our small herd built up a little more we made it into a seasonal grass dairy. This idea was unheard of in Quebec,” he says. “It wasn’t really a new thing; I was just doing what my grandfather did. By most people’s standards we went backward instead of forward,” says Maloney. He developed a crossbred herd of Ayrshire and Canadianne Jersey that did well on grass. “We did the grass dairy until 2002. I had Farmer’s Loan but at that time we lost our export contracts. During the years we had the grass dairy we’d been allowed to bid on contracts for our surplus milk, which enabled us to work fairly well within the quota system. After we lost the export contracts, I was pretty certain that I wouldn’t be able to go back to milking cows year round,” he says.
Making Decisions Holistically
“That was when I took my first Holistic Resource Management course, in 1996. [Certified Educator] Ed Marsolf from Arkansas was doing a three-day course in New York, so I went there for the three days. It became very clear to me that simple goals, such as my physical health, and the health of the animals
6 IN PRACTICE
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July / August 2018
and the soil were all very much inter-related,” says Maloney. A farm functions and depends on seasonality. “If we start in the springtime, that’s when the soil is coming alive again. In nature, that’s when the babies are being born, so that’s when we were calving,” he says. Seasonality affects people, too. “It doesn’t bother me working sunup until sundown when days are long; I have a lot of energy and we work hard all summer long. Then as fall comes and the days get shorter, my energy reserves
Darragh, Lise, and Brian Maloney go down and by winter it’s quite low. I wanted to have everything in sync—the people, the land and animals—to where everything is working together. This is why we chose not to go back to milking cows 365 days a year,” he explains. “The Farmers Loan weighed into this, so we sold the dairy. The cows went to one of my friends in New York State who was expanding his herd .We were lucky that we got rid of the dairy cows right before the mad cow problem,” says Maloney. “But seeing how easy it was to export cattle, I then bought a bunch of Ayrshire heifers, thinking that maybe I could get back into dairying or send them to my buddy in New York. I was doing well with the Ayrshire heifers and things were going nicely, and then mad cow happened and we couldn’t sell them. We kept
those heifers for a year, calved them all out, and sold them for the same price I bought them, so I lost a lot of money on that project. It was a learning lesson,” he says. He had always done a little custom grazing even when he had the dairy, so he slowly expanded that aspect of the farm. “We always had a few meat customers, so we went more into raising grass-fed beef. For the past 12 years we’ve also had a small flock of sheep. We kept everything very seasonal, and that suited us best,” he says. Everything is very small scale. “I don’t think anyone in Quebec besides us was doing custom grazing. Very few farmers are intensively managing their pastures. We have 360 acres of land that we own or rent. It’s all pasture, and all fenced, with water systems everywhere. Today we finish about 50 head of cattle, buying the calves in the spring and finishing them on grass. We direct market those, and also bring in about another 300 head to custom graze,” he says. The farm also sells about 60 lambs annually, but these are older lambs, like the old British system called hogget. Hogget refers to a young sheep between one and two years old, and the meat tends to have a darker red color than meat from a younger lamb, and a slightly richer flavor. Maloney raises Katahdin sheep which are an ideal breed for meat since they are hair sheep and don’t need to be sheared. The lambs are born in early spring, spending all summer on grass with their mothers. “Then they are weaned and fed all winter with our highest quality hay, and finished with a minimum of 60 days on grass,” he explains. The lambs are about 14 to 15 months old at that time, and harvested in sync with the grass. They are harvested in July, and this produces a
