In July 2023, the Ontario Soil Network, FoodBridge and Valley Bio farm in Cobden, Ontario hosted a farm visit and panel discussion called Monetizing Soil Health. The event sparked a great discussion about the challenges and opportunities of supply chain collaborations.
On a recent visit to friends in Toronto’s hip Leslieville neighbourhood, I had a meal at Avling Kitchen and Brewery. Just off bustling Queen Street, Avling is an industrial-design restaurant with back windows opening onto to massive brewing tanks. Up a flight of stairs is the rooftop garden. The garden adds hyper-local colour to the pub’s meals, even if it serves more of an educational than production purpose, explains owner Max Meighen. But his work to impact sustainability through procurement goes deeper and broader than the garden and includes purchasing from local malting companies like Mississippi Malting.
Four hundred kilometres northeast of Toronto, the Mississippi Malting Company began malting two years ago when owner Dean Bowes decided, after taking over the 160 acres family farm, to develop a value-added business. Just three years into the business, he says their production a drop in the bucket compared to demand for malting barley. He grows half the barley he needs on his own farm and buys most of the rest from nearby farmers, including cover crop seed from Reuben Stone.
Reuben Stone of Valley Bio Farm in Cobden is a serial entrepreneur and graduate of the Ontario Soil Network’s Network Challenge. He grows an amazingly large variety of crops, mainly for seed, including cover crop seed, and recently began using a drone to seed cover crop, accessing fields when they are too wet to drive a tractor on. Reuben’s innovative field practices clearly influence the farmers around him, including Chris Moore from Sandy Creek Farm.
Chris raises sheep which double as lawnmowers for solar farms. The meat is sold auction barns, direct to processor and direct to households and restaurants willing to buy the whole animal. Working with solar farms was a turning point for him, because “farming is risky, and we need to innovate to mitigate some of that risk”. Varying the geography of the sites for raising sheep and accessing insurance for at least some crops is another form of risk mitigation.
Reuben Stone with his drone for seeding cover crops
The links and circularity in even this small part of the value chain are multiple: beyond the straight chain from barley to maltery to brewery, the tailings from the malt cleaning process goes to feed sheep and other livestock and lambs are sold to local restaurants. None of this diminishes the difficulties and risk for each of these enterprises but as Max explains, “in the restaurant and farming business, there are no guarantees. Any way you can stand out and be different goes a long way”.
Thinking about this group of innovators, I realize that none of them are running single businesses – they have each diversified to build resilience, and to drive change they believe in. Reuben Stone says “There’s an entrepreneurial spirit to farming that we tap into”. Max Meisling adds: “Running a restaurant, much like running a farm, is a constant balancing act of compromising – understanding your markets and what you can pull off”. The last word goes to maltster, farmer and accountant Dean Bowes: “Some customers are so disconnected from agriculture, they don’t even realize that soil health is a thing. Others like Max are very connected and are actually driving it. If we can market in a way that allows our customers to differentiate themselves and also do the right thing for our farm, the soil and farming, it’s win-win-win.”
To see the recording of the panel, head to Valley Bio’s site. For more on the event, see Jonah Grignon’s article in Farmtario.
