Soil sisters – Country Guide

The two young women at Tipsy Willow Farm break a lot of preconceptions about farming. That’s true on many farms, of course, especially where the next generation is in their early twenties and they’re introducing new concepts to the family farm in order to launch their own farming careers.

But it’s even more true here.

“People have asked Jeanette, when she said she was taking over the farm, don’t you have any brothers?” says Sherratt.

“There’s definitely been that kind of struggle… it kind of took a year before people figured out that we aren’t just friends.”

Don’t fall into the trap and prejudge the farm reaction, though. Most established farmers in the area seem happy to see young people farming, and want to help where they can, especially in an area that is only 15 minutes from Peterborough and an hour and a half from Toronto, and that is increasingly encroached upon by urban development.

As long as there are younger people willing to farm, the pair say, they’ll get a hand.

The story begins

Jeanette Heffernan grew up on the family farm. Her mother, Geraldine, had come to Canada at the age of 23, meeting and marrying Sean, who is an electrician by trade, so when her mother had the chance to take over a sheep farm, she was the one who did most of the day-to-day farming.

For the family, it was like any other farm. Soon there were four kids, and, says Heffernan, “We were always good at helping out in the barn and still are.”

Heffernan’s brother, Jacob is also a sheep shearer. Her older sister de ella married a local beef farmer and is taking over the family farm, so with the exception of her oldest brother de ella, Freddie, who is in the air force, all of the siblings ended up in farming. “It’s a big family thing,” Heffernan says. “Everyone is always helping, and working together.”

Katie Sherratt, meanwhile, had a completely different upbringing. She was born in Toronto, then moved to Belleville, Ont., With her family de ella, who are in radio. She went to university for environmental studies in geography and in her second year, after watching a video on sustainable farming, she began to get interested in agriculture.

“I reached out to some farms in Prince Edward County near where I live and volunteered on a farm for a summer and then worked there and on a couple of other farms, for three summers after that,” she says.

Two years ago, Sherratt and Heffernan met through an online dating site. Six months later, they moved in together and started sharing their farm journey.

Heffernan had been farming for a year before she met Sherratt, getting a start with a 100-acre piece that her parents had bought in 2010 to expand the farm, but that needed regenerating, something that she didn’t hesitate to dive into.

A different transition

Heffernan and Sherratt have recently taken over the Heffernan family’s home farm, and her brother is now farming the land she originally started on. Heffernan has received a lot of help and support from her parents of her.

“I don’t think I would be farming if it wasn’t for my mom,” she says. “Just the knowledge that she has given me, and the money that it’s cost to get into the farming. I had to get a loan for the 160 ewes I bought initially and that was hard enough; I would not have been able to get a loan for a farm. The down payment alone would have been astronomical.”

Her parents held the mortgage for her in a rent-to-own type deal on the initial piece of land, which will basically be her inheritance, but with enough money built into the repayment agreement to pay off other siblings who are not on the farm . Now that she has taken over the home farm, any equity she has built up has transferred over with the remainder of the mortgage.

It’s been an interesting transition process. “We did a family shuffling for the wellness of everyone,” says Sherratt, who had attended a lot of workshops on family transition and helped facilitate some of the discussion.

“You see a lot of kids walking away from the family farm because there’s a struggle with passing it over, so it’s really nice to find that so many of Jeanette’s siblings and Jeanette are still sticking it out,” Sherratt says.

Creating a closed-loop farm

The couple are aiming to turn Tipsy Willow Farm into a totally closed-loop system. They grow their own hay for the animals: 200 sheep, 30 pigs, a few laying hens and meat chickens, and a growing herd of water buffalo, which are pastured over the summer. Manure is spread after composting on the fields in fall. They grow vegetables just for their own consumption at the moment, but a farm stand for produce is a goal for the future.

“We try to minimize waste with all our products,” Sherratt says. “When we shear the sheep, we have been trying to get wool made up, and we pick up the sheep hides and are experimenting with curing them, and we get the pig fat back from the abattoir to make skin care products out of it. ”

Part of the goal is also to dispel the belief among some consumers that meat production is bad for the environment.

“We are giving so much back to the soil,” Heffernan says. “We try to use every part of the animal that we can after processing, and the abattoir is only 15 km from the house, so by the time we get the animal from farm to table it’s traveled maybe 40 km at the most.”

The farm provides monthly, custom meat boxes that customers can either pick up at the farm or have delivered to them. Their customer base has grown rapidly from an initial five people to over 50 over the last year, and although the COVID-19 pandemic has definitely driven sales as more people looked for a reliable local supply of food, the ecological and ethical aspects of their production proved increasingly important to their customers — more important, says Sherratt, than being certified organic, which the farm is not.

“It’s a continuing process to educate people that there are different ways to produce food, and that it’s more important to eat local and find sustainable or regenerative farms that are producing meat or vegetables and that are giving back to the environment rather than necessarily eating organic or free range, or whatever other buzz word they are using,” Sherratt says.

The couple use social media a lot to get the message out about how they raise and care for their animals and they know it’s made a difference to most of the people who seek them out and become customers.

“Our pigs are happily wallowing out in the swamp while we’re sweating hauling 1,000-lb. square bales around,” Heffernan says. “Who’s living a better life?”

Travel experiences shaping the vision

The couple adhere to regenerative principles, and find many of their ideas on their experiences traveling and working on farms in other countries, including unique livestock like water buffalo and value-added products such as skin creams and soaps made on the farm with byproducts from their production.

In 2019, Sherratt took a six-week, community service, farm-to-table trip in Thailand learning about different farming techniques and food systems there, which is where she first found water buffalo. She has also traveled to Costa Rica, Asia and to New Zealand with Heffernan, who had caught the travel bug from her mother de ella, who had traveled extensively in Europe, Australia and New Zealand by herself before coming to Canada.

“I was always told that I should travel because I could always come back to the farm,” Sherratt says.

She’s traveled Scotland and Europe, and done an exchange year in Brazil followed by time in Argentina, Chile, Japan, Thailand and Cambodia, and two winters in Hawaii that led to a work-away opportunity on a cocoa farm that grew its own chocolate beans , processed them on the farm, and brought tourists in to show how everything was done.

That definitely got the wheels turning, and helped shape the vision of Tipsy Willow Farm, including a goal to add some agri-tourism opportunities some day. But apart from helping shape their farming vision, traveling has also made both of these young farmers understand how lucky they are.

“I stopped taking everything for granted. As I travelled, I realized just how fortunate I was to be from Canada, living in Ontario on a farm, and having a supportive family that would always let me come home,” Heffernan says.

“Traveling gives you perspective,” Sherratt agrees. “In Thailand their one tool was a machete and it did everything. It was impressive to see these other ways of living. It’s eye-opening to see these other country’s food systems and how they’re farming and making food work for them.”

Traveling also led to the farm raising water buffalo, animals that have fascinated Sherratt since her trip to Thailand, so when she ended up on the farm, she began searching and found two pregnant water buffalo cows for sale on Kijiji. Now, they have eight cows and a bull, and they plan to milk the animals and sell it to their customers.

“We are looking at portable milkers for right now,” Sherratt says. “Water buffalo milk has a high fat content, and it isn’t under the same regulations as cow milk. It doesn’t have to be pasteurized; people can drink it raw, and it’s delicious.”

It also opens the door to products like water buffalo cheese, Sherratt says. “Neither of us is scared to fail.”

Challenges are not unique

Their biggest challenge in the brief time they have been farming has been drought and having enough winter feed for the animals. Although they don’t consider they have encountered any real external challenges because of their gender, youth, inexperience or their relationship, the relationship is often the hardest to juggle against their busy lives, as it is for many couples.

“We’re young and we’re trying to balance our relationship, off-farm jobs, a business and a farm,” Sherratt says. “Struggles eats with that.”

“It can be isolating being on the farm,” Heffernan adds. “We don’t have our weekends; we don’t really have a social life, and we are often exhausted by eight o’clock. It’s a busy household and an adjustment.”

Both though they are deeply committed to the regenerative farming principles, and their ecological outlook, common to more and more younger farmers today, is something that they firmly believe will open way more doors than it closes.

“It opens more of a community for us and gives us a large customer base because we’re meeting a lot of peoples’ expectations,” Sherratt says. “It’s almost the new age of farming.”

Sherratt is also in the midst of a one-year, environmental planning technician program at Fleming College, which will have benefits for their own farm, as well as maybe offering some side-income down the road.

“I always wanted whatever I do off-farm to still align with what we do on the farm,” Sherratt says. “I’m really interested in creating a better food system that links rural and urban areas and I’m seeing that eventually I can have my own consulting situation where I can work with farmers and help them with zone and bylaw amendments, and understand policy to get environmental systems on their farms working better.”

The business side, longer-term, includes adding more ventures to the farm, perhaps producing and definitely more water buffalo for meat and milk sales, but also increasing their value-added side for things like hides and skin care products, and hopefully expanding into hosting farm tours (when COVID-19 makes this possible) to show people what makes their farm unique.

Another part of the plan is conservation, something especially dear to Heffernan’s heart, who spent many summers planting trees and even fighting forest fires, which has led her to recently volunteer with the local fire department. (As we’ve already seen, busting stereotypes in nothing they’re afraid of.)

The ultimate goal, not surprisingly, is to transition from the off-farm jobs and be self-sustaining on their farm.

“We both want to be able to make a living off the farm,” Heffernan says. “Then, if I want to have an off-farm job to bring in more profit, that’s fine, but to have money coming in every month and not be losing would be nice.”