Farm One Forty—
Holistic Management on a Small Farm BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS
A
rlie LaRoche and her husband, Brett, started their Farm One Forty near Vanscoy, Saskatchewan, where they focus on Holistic Management and regenerative agriculture. “I grew up on a cattle and grain farm near the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border and always helped out on the farm. I grew up with a love of farm life, and after graduating from high school I studied water resources engineering. I worked in the environmental consulting field for about 10 years. At that time my husband and I wanted to get back on a farm, since he grew up on a farm as well,” Arlie says. “We moved to an acreage near the city where we were working, and started raising our own livestock, growing a garden and creating our own food. At first it was just a hobby. Then we had kids, and the livestock side of things kept growing because we started growing extra for friends and family members. “It just kept growing and became a little harder to manage with both of us working in the city. Then in 2013 I did a threeday intensive workshop with Joel Salatin and this was the push I needed, to take the leap and do the farm fulltime. That’s when we started making it into more of a real business. Joel Salatin has been a big help, and I also had some permaculture teachers including Rob and Michelle Avis who own Verge Permaculture in Calgary. “They introduced us to Holistic Management. They are the ones who led us that direction. Brett and I did a Holistic Management course in 2018. Many of the things we were doing were already in line with Holistic Management. I was aware of Allan Savory and his work and had seen him speak. We’d done a tour at Gabe Brown’s farm in North Dakota and Allan was speaking there. He’d been a key teacher for us, even though I’d never met him. I’d listened to lots of podcasts and read about him.” At that time, Arlie and Brett were raising cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens and had a big vegetable garden. “We are still doing all of that. There are also honeybees on the property that someone else takes care of. We introduced
planned grazing and have been doing this for a number of years,” says Arlie. Just having the holistic context was the biggest thing that made a difference for Arlie and Brett. “It gave us a big-picture idea of what we wanted our lives and our farm to be like. Using that as a tool to help decide whether to take opportunities as they arose was also crucial,” says Arlie. “There’s no end to what you could do on a small farm to provide something for consumers. One of the biggest struggles we had, early on, was actually reining in all the things we wanted to try, and to limit our efforts to a handful of things that we enjoy and fit with our land, and with what our customers would want. The holistic context helped us let go of certain opportunities and realize that they were not a good fit for us.
The LaRoche family enjoying some quiet time. “It also helped us to create interactions between our different enterprises and how they could fit together—like grazing our cattle and sheep together. It’s very handy to just have one group, that one bit of labor, and use all the same infrastructure for both. They are also benefitting each other. It’s those kinds of things that have been helpful and I don’t know if I would have come up with those ideas on my own. There is definitely a holistic way of thinking.”
Farm to Table
In 2015 Arlie and Brett took a trip to Hawaii and visited a farm there that offered a tour and a lunch. “We found that experience to be so enjoyable and memorable and we were happy to have been able to do that. I thought we should try to replicate this at our place because it was such a neat idea, so that fall was when we did our first farm-to-table dinner,” Arlie says. At that time, Arlie was supplying a few restaurants in Saskatoon with pork, beef and lamb. “I had some good contacts in the
restaurant industry and I told one of the chefs that I work with about my idea and he was excited about it. He went along with my crazy plan. I wasn’t really set up to do it, so I had to rent everything—the party tents, tables and chairs, tableware, etc. We pulled it off and it was really fun and all of the customers really loved it, so we started doing that once a year and did it for several years.” It was a lot of work, however, and very inefficient to be setting up all of that temporary infrastructure for just one night. “That was when I decided to build a permanent event site,” says Arlie. “I built a facility with covered seating, and my own tables and chairs, etc. We started ramping up the agri-tourism aspect of our business.” In 2019 they took it to another level and opened a restaurant in Saskatoon, in partnership with two other people. “We own it together; the general manager and the head chef are partners with us. We supply the restaurant with our products—the meat and vegetables that we grow here, and the honey,” she says. “We also host many dinners out here on the farm, in partnership with the restaurant. The staff comes here to do all the cooking and it’s a high-end beautiful meal, on the farm. It’s a nice setting; the rustic farm and the gourmet chef-prepared meal.” Brett has been working in the city most of the time, but he also loves the farm. “He is more interested in the grain farming side than the livestock, and does a lot of regenerative farming practices like no-till and poly-cropping and cover crops,” says Arlie. “He would like to ramp up that side of our business a bit but we are still in a transitioning period as he works more toward being fulltime on the farm.” All of the management decisions for the farm are made with animal welfare and the environment as the top priority. “We figure that if we take care of those things first the other things will fall into place,” says Arlie. They’ve already seen soil improvement on the crop and pasture land and how the quality of the grass-fed meat is different than grain-fed meat. Another plus is that their customers appreciate where their food comes from, and the fact that they can know the farmer personally. They can also take part in the on-farm events. Arlie and Brett have two children, Emmett, age 11, and Maizie, age 13. “One of the things CONTINUED ON PAGE 6
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