Farm finds resilience going with the grain

AGASSIZ – A family-run mixed organic farm on Seabird Island highlights the potential for grain and other crops in the Fraser Valley, and the importance of diversification to long-term resilience.

“This is the start of the really fertile valley floor land that runs all the way to Delta,” says Hannah Exley, daughter of Jim Grieshaber-Otto and Diane Exley, owners of Cedar Isle Farm in Agassiz. “The grain is probably the thing we’re known for. That’s only part of the farm.”

Exley spoke about the farm’s history to BC Organic Conference participants on November 27.

“In the early 1970s, my grandparents moved to Canada from Minnesota,” she says. “This was largely blackberries back then.”

An abandoned dairy farm, the property featured the picturesque setting Grieshaber-Otto’s parents – then in their 50s – were seeking for an organic farm. Beef cows, chickens, a flock of sheep – primarily for wool – and willow for basket-making got them started. Grains were a natural part of the mix to feed the animals.

“They weren’t so into making it into a viable farm,” explains Exley. “We’ve had to reframe that idea and get into making money.”

As her parents took over the farm, they kept chickens, geese and ducks, but dropped beef production in 2009 when the market was poor. Grieshaber-Otto, who holds a doctorate in agricultural botany, started looking into new grain options.

Recognizing that wheat varieties grown on the Prairies weren’t a good fit for the eastern Fraser Valley, he wanted to find grain varieties suited to Seabird Island that would also be good for making bread.

“Grain really has been bred for climates that are dry,” says Exley. “And for yield.”

Grieshaber-Otto had a small combine and had grown wheat for the animals since he was a kid. He initially focused on Marquis, a winter wheat bred in Canada in the early 20th century for the Prairies. It still makes up the majority of the 30 acres of grain the farm grows.

“It makes the most amazing bread,” says Exley. “People say it reminds them of the bread their grandparents made, which makes sense because it’s the same wheat.”

More than ten years ago, as part of Grieshaber-Otto’s exploration of alternatives, the farm joined a participatory plant breeding program through the University of Manitoba. It involved planting a university-developed cross, selecting promising kernels and sending those back to the university.

“In the first year of a wheat cross, there is a lot of variation,” says Exley, noting height, overall look, colour and size of head among the variables. “Without even trying, we were starting to breed wheat for this area.”

She says that within 10 years, they ended up with a landrace of wheat that they didn’t have to think about developing. Now, PPB Fraser Red is a standard winter wheat Cedar Isle grows.

Exley says it takes minimal threshing, as it “just jumps out of the head.”

“It grows especially well right here, but it’s also okay in Manitoba,” she says.

The third main wheat grown at Cedar Isle is Skagit 1109, another winter wheat and one that is more resistant to rust than most. It was bred at the Washington State University Breadlab in Burlington, Washington, and is in high demand by bakers.

Together, the three varieties account for 80% of the grain grown at Cedar Isle, which also grows rye, oats, and barley.

Tommy’s Whole Grain and Bad Dog Bakery, both in Vancouver, are regular customers which take large volumes of wheat to produce their organic breads. In addition to direct sales to bakery customers, the farm has a thriving community-shared agriculture (CSA) program.

But even with locally adapted varieties, grain growing isn’t easy. Wheat wants moisture up to June, then it needs dry conditions. This decade’s relatively dry summers have helped the crop.

Weeds are also a significant challenge and drive the farm’s crop rotations. Wild brassicas are a significant problem during mild winters.

“Every year you grow grain, you get more weeds,” she says. “You have to integrate grain into your broader system. The first year you plant grain, it does much better than year four.”

Between years three and five, the grain fields are rotated into organic forage crops such as alfalfa, clover and mixed grasses. The forage crops supply local farms and have allowed the family to create collaborative relationships with two nearby dairies in particular.

“They have more manure than they can deal with and we have more land than we can fertilize, so that works really well for us,” Exley says.

Some forage is also sold to horse farms, and the organic straw is popular both on and off-farm.

The forage crops balance out the unforgiving nature of grain when the weather doesn’t cooperate.

“If the forage is happy, the grain is wet, so something is happy, something isn’t,” she says. “The grain dries out well most years.”

Recognizing nature’s pluses and minuses led Exley to suggest adding vegetables to the farm’s mix. It’s not that the family hadn’t grown vegetables for their own consumption, but they’d not done anything on a commercial scale.

But Exley has found success with her addition to the farm’s production – mostly brassicas, alliums and root vegetables.

“I started doing vegetables a few years ago, supplying CSAs. On the face of it, it makes a lot of sense,” she says. “Some days of the week are really veggie-intensive. I really focus on spring and fall, but that’s easier said than done.”

If the weather has delayed wheat production and she’s busy harvesting root vegetables, she can end up juggling both sides of the operation – a tough act for a family-run farm. An awareness of labour and thoughts about expanding the vegetable crops led to a discussion of farm succession planning.

“It is always daunting to think about what the coming years will look like, but we are confident that we can make it work and evolve as needed,” says Exley. “As a family, we’ve built a diversified, direct-market organic operation over three generations, and we believe it can weather new challenges in the seasons to come.”

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