HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

Ferme Brylee— Transitioning a Small Diversified Farm in Quebec

BY HEATHER SMITH THOMAS

Brian 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 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

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

Darragh, Lise, and Brian Maloney

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

heavier lamb that finishes in the peak of summer grass. “I always call July the Christmas of the summer, since that’s when we harvest the animals,” he says.

“All of our businesses are based on seasonality; everything we do here is seasonal—the grazing, the marketing, the dining/ wedding enterprise. It may not be purely holistic, but all of our goals are fairly simple and based around the grazing season and optimizing what we can do here on our farm. I am not a purist when it comes to holistic because I pick and choose the things that work for me,” says Maloney. One of the main things is figuring out how to better utilize the resources at hand, and that’s how their tourist/ dining/wedding business evolved. Developing Agri-Tourism

One of the benefits of utilizing a holistic strategy is striving to be innovative and able to take advantage of potential options on any given farm—which can often spawn multiple enterprises. “We still had the old barn my greatgrandfather built and my grandfather added onto, and we cleaned out/renovated the upstairs to create a dining hall, and in 2009 started doing meals. We can accommodate groups from 10100 people in our dining room,” he says.

“We had the nice old barn that had been used by four generations, and when our farm was dissected by a new highway, we ended up at an intersection of two major highways. This brought people right to our door, though this location is not where we live. We live on another farm, but the old barn was nearby. Lise and I were looking to add on different enterprises. We live in an old brick farm house close to the new intersection so logically a person might think in terms of creating a Bed and Breakfast.

But that didn’t suit us. We looked at one another and immediately rejected that idea.

“First of all, we don’t even make our own beds, so why would we want to start making other people’s beds. Lise is not an early morning person; I can’t really talk to her much before 8 or 8:30 in the morning until she has her second cup of coffee! That’s not conducive to running a CONTINUED ON PAGE 8

Bed and Breakfast! That wasn’t for us,” he says.

“So we used the basic guidelines of Holistic Management in decision-making, checking to see how something works and feels, for different enterprises. She does like to cook, and we more readily fell into the dining part of it, since we already had the old barn as a resource, and the beef and lamb to serve our guests.”

This has turned into an interesting enterprise. “We host weddings and built a Perilla, which is an Argentine-style barbeque. We built it next to the barn, in the old pigpen where my grandfather raised his pigs. The meat on the menu comes from our farm and is cooked on the Argentine barbeque, which is a big attraction in our region. Everything is very rustic; that’s what we have and what we sell, and that’s why people are coming to our farm. About 90% of our menu is local products, and our own meat raised on the grass,” he says.

“We do a lot of weddings and already have 12 booked for this year. We also host many different kinds of tours. We work with one bus company and when they are bringing farmers across Canada who want to stop off along the way and see other farms, they stop here. We have some interesting conversations with those visitors including some farmers from Australia and France,” he says. Farm Identity Transition

“I am always proud to say that I am fourth generation here on the farm and I feel privileged to be here. I am 59 years old and the longestliving on some of our land, and the oldest. There were several earlier generations but either they

died young or some of them had left the farm.” says Maloney. “We were blessed with good land, though I had a lot of work to do because it’s heavy clay soil and we tile-drained a lot of it. The barn my great-grandfather and grandfather built is also a blessing to have, since it makes part of our business successful now. Once we decided we were going to do the dining--and marketing our product through the meals--I had to spend some money on the building. The outside of the barn structure was perfect, and upstairs where the hay was we haven’t done anything except create the dining room, but downstairs we converted the cow stables into our farm store, commercial kitchen and a The Maloneys spent $140,000 to renovate the old family barn to offer dining commercial walk-in and weddings as well as having an on-farm store. cooler,” he says. It took 45 days to compete the renovation in 2013, during lambing and right before putting the cattle out on grass. It was a very busy spring. “I invested $140,000 in this old barn. Halfway through that project, perhaps from being a little overworked or stressed about spending that much money, I realized that I would probably never see the return from this investment. I would never get my money back out of this, but what made me feel a lot better about it, and able to sleep at night was the fact that the generations before me all invested heavily in the farm so that it could be turned to the next generation. This barn renovation was my kick at the can to give the next generation an opportunity,” says Maloney. Lise did not come from a farm background. When they got together she was a career nurse. She continued in nursing for 30 years. “Here in Quebec we have a social medical system so it doesn’t cost the patients anything. It’s a pretty good system, but the bureaucracy of it is horrible. Lise loved her job working with patients but could not deal with the bureaucracy. Every day that she was going to work, she was wearing herself out, in that system. So one day, spur of the moment, she just told me to find her a job here on the farm; she didn’t want to deal with the nursing anymore. This was one reason

we jumped into doing the barn renovation for the dining,” he says.

It was a good fit, and has worked well for Lise. “It was a difficult transition for her, however. The bureaucracy of the medical profession was wearing her down, but she was also comfortable in the fact that if she worked 40 hours she would get paid for 40 hours. The stability of that—then returning to the farm to work—was quite an adjustment. Yes, there was salary but also the gamble, and the question of what happens if this doesn’t work? What happens if people don’t come to our dining? What happens if the price of beef goes down? She was very uncomfortable with the uncertainty, and that made transition difficult for her,” says Maloney.

“I felt the same thing, too, twice in my career. First was when I gave up dairying and felt I was giving up my identity. I was a man who was a grass dairy farmer, and being a workaholic, I put too much emphasis on what I was doing and not the being part of it. She was going through the same thing, because she was no longer a nurse. That had been a huge part of her identity. That transition wasn’t easy and we had moments where it was difficult for us to manage, because it was her enterprise within the farm business, but I was still the boss, though we were partners,” he says.

“We had interesting times figuring this part out. We had some human resource people help us figure it out, because it was important that we continue, and have everyone know what their roles were. In a lot of relationships, once there is confidence you can say ‘this part you are really good at and this part the other person is really good at, and I don’t worry about what’s going on over here because I know you’ve got it.’ It becomes a team effort. When you get to that point it’s easy, but sometimes it’s a challenge to get to that point,” he says.

Steps along the way make an interesting journey. Sometimes it’s challenging but often the evolution is amazing, and works out very well. “With my son who works with us, we don’t have that part figured out yet, but we are working at it,” says Maloney.

Brian and Lise have 5 children (age 32 to 21), but at present none of them are ready to really sign up and take over the farm. The oldest is Katelyn, son Darragh is second, then Harrison, then daughter Kim, and Krista is the youngest. “They all worked for us when they were younger. Most of them live fairly close except for Harrison who is in Mexico managing a plant that makes recreational vehicles,” Maloney says.

“My son Darragh has worked with me a lot over the past years, but it didn’t work out the way we expected. At this point our plans are unclear; it’s still a work in progress. We just had our first grandchild this past July, however (Darragh’s son), so there may be some potential for future generations; the story isn’t over,” he says.

“I made the mistake in the past, thinking that in my generation if you weren’t pretty stable and had things figured out by the time you unbelievable number of people approaching us, ready to take over my farm, thinking they could get it for nothing. We had great exposure and many people looking for a farm, but nothing came out of it directly,” says Maloney.

Indirectly, however, the article stimulated some serious thinking among the younger generation. “Two of my kids suddenly said, ‘Whoa! Slow down! What’s going on here?’ My son Darragh said he didn’t want to see our farm sold; he didn’t want anyone to ‘mess up all the hard work we’ve done.’ I told him not to worry

and that the article didn’t represent our actual plans. This has given us a good opportunity to talk about this,” Maloney says.

“Darragh and I had tried to work together earlier, for several years, and never could finish out the season without conflict. We learned from that, however. The farm will need to take a change of some sort, in the future, and if my children want to be a part of it we all have to learn from what didn’t work.

“The way we worked together, the things we did, maybe even some of the things we are currently doing on the farm, maybe aren’t right for it now. My son is coming back to see what can be done, and our second youngest daughter Kim (who works in marketing) also said she wanted to do something on the farm. So we are handing off some of our marketing tasks to her,” says Maloney.

“We could do a lot more product than we are doing currently. Custom grazing is the weakest link on our farm in terms of profit. If we could do less custom grazing and more grass finishing, the farm will be better. So we told our daughter that whatever extra she can sell would

The Maloneys direct market their beef, pastured veal, and lamb through their farm store and their dining enterprises.

were 20, you probably weren’t going to make it. Today, 30 is still considered quite young. Maybe I wasn’t realizing soon enough that the generations are very different. What I’ve learned about his generation and my generation is that we probably have the biggest difference in value systems and even at best it’s a natural conflict.”

Each person has to really work at making it work. “I think my son worked really hard at doing a continuation of what was being done here, without stepping into what his own role and what the farm could be like when it was his turn. I think that was a huge part of his frustration. He could never do a good job of being me. He needed to find his own fit in this. It might be that he should do just a small part of it and someone else could do more of it,” says Maloney.

Early this year an article about their farm was published in a local agricultural paper. “The article was about family farming, but the author for whatever reason wrote that this old grazing farmer (practically no one does this, here—and I am looked upon as the pasture specialist of Quebec) was looking for someone to take over his farm. As a result of that article, we had an

be hers. We don’t really want to bring in people to replace us. We just want to bring in more activity, more cash, etc. with our own family members. We are not getting ahead if someone is just creating less work for Lise and myself,” he says.

“It’s not a big property, just 500 acres with the rented land, and 360 acres of it in grass. Maybe we have more land than we need, if we don’t have to do the custom grazing anymore. Perhaps we need to do some different enterprises on smaller parcels, like grow some vegetables or try something else that gives us a higher return per acre. These are the questions we are all asking ourselves,” he says.

“It was discouraging last summer to think that I didn’t have anyone ready to come onto the farm and continue with it. That was a dark thought, realizing that after 40 years the best I could do would be to sell it to crop farmers to put into soybeans! This was a difficult thing for me, because at the time that was the only option I could see.”

Then when the article came out and there was a fluster of activity with interested people inquiring about the farm, it brought the family back together, questioning the future and what they might do. “This is part of the basis of Holistic Management, always re-questioning what you are doing. It brought our family together a little more, to look at this, and see what we can do,” says Maloney.

They have hired a marketing firm to help them refocus. “Both Lise and I are doers but we just do what we like, and sometimes we don’t spend enough time on our business. We sometimes need to refocus. We have a lot of people come to the farm, but the wedding customers are not meat customers. So when we do our marketing we need to figure out who we are targeting and whether the right message is going to the right people. We can’t just use our website and Facebook to put out a message because we don’t know if we are addressing the right people,” he explains.

The marketing firm is going to draw up a plan and help the family work it out. At the same time, Maloney hired a resource management person to come talk with the family to clearly identify everyone’s objectives, to see how or if these objectives can all meld together. This will be a good try at getting everyone pulling together as a team.

Creating a Legacy

There are many things going on at once at the farm. “In the dining part and the marketing part, Lise has excellent staff. It’s very easy to hire young girls to work in the kitchen and serve the guests and help her with the meals. Yet on the other aspects of the farm, it seems impossible to get farm workers,” he says.

Last summer he had an intern from France for three months, but that was all he had for farm help. “The work is not overwhelming, but when you have to stop and move cattle during the middle of a wedding you are hosting, you do need a little help, and I didn’t have that. The focusing process clearly identified this--that I need someone to physically replace me and do my job on the working part of the farm when I want to devote more time to support Lise in the direct marketing and the meals,” he explains.

“Having someone else do my jobs suits me very well because I have done this for more than 40 years. I actually enjoy being the number two or even three or four position on the farm. I have

Offering on-farm dining was the perfect add-on enterprise for Lise who enjoys cooking. The investment in the barn also provides more opportunity for the next generation of Maloneys interested in taking over the farm.

had enough of being the number one so I don’t mind being the go-for or the guy that runs an errand because then I don’t have to think very much!” It’s a change of pace and can be almost relaxing.

“This is where I see myself moving toward, letting someone else do the day-to-day work. This was part of that whole process of having a very dark summer, winter and spring season— when I was thinking that the grazing farm would not be able to continue. The word legacy kept coming to me and I couldn’t fathom how this could be happening. I know this is the right way to farm, making big changes in the way we are managing the soil. I can see the good we are doing, and it was hard to envision this not continuing and transferred on. I kept thinking about legacy, but when I let go of the farm and realized that the legacy was probably more my knowledge—and the teaching and consulting that I can do—the phone started ringing. I ended up getting a lot of business doing consulting on grazing,” he says.

“I learned that when I stop fighting the universe, good things happen! There are many lessons we learn along the way. Now our children all want to come back to the farm in one way or another—to be with the animals, go move the animals, or just come visit. We can see that grounding process.” The farm is their hub, their roots, the thing that anchors the family as a whole.

There is something here that brings them back. The land is good for the soul. It grounds

you in a natural, primordial way. There is a peaceful aspect to life, working with the seasons and the land and animals.

“Michael Schmidt, the pioneer here in the raw milk movement, has said that the word soil and soul are very much the same. Here on the farm we are often running like crazy, and I sometimes tend to complain that I have to run over to the pasture and move cattle in between wedding services. When we are doing weddings there is some stress. But when I come over here to move the cattle and change the fence, everything just seems to fall into place and slow down. I can visualize things and know what has to be done when I go back—where I have to

be and what I have to do. There is a wonderful calming and grounding effect working with the cattle,” he explains.

“Working cattle is so easy for me, and satisfying, because cattle never lie. They are very honest. Maybe one evening they are a little bit restless because I didn’t move them or the weather is changing or something is not right. You can read that, from a quarter mile away. If you have an individual that is not right, you can see that right away. People are not so honest!” A cow always lets you know what’s real and true and is also very forgiving. She may be upset if you are slow to feed her, but once she is fed she’s happy and grateful. There is a certain relaxed peacefulness, working with cattle, that is harder to find when working with people.

“This is part of the basis of Holistic Management, always re-questioning what you are doing. It brought our family together a little more, to look at this, and see what we can do,”

“Working with the cattle gives me the good balance, having both. When I started into Holistic Management, I really adapted into the grazing part of it, and that seems to be the core, for me. Lise and I went back and did a holistic course together, after my first one, so that we’d have a better understanding of it, doing it together. For me, it was figuring out that the only things that are really long-term on our farm are the land and the people. So those are the things that have to be taken care of,” he says.

Making a Better Life

“In the markets we have here (being close to Ottawa and Montreal) there is a lot of direct marketing opportunity and I truly believe that our farm should be able to support at least three different families, with people doing their own small enterprises. The farmland we are managing now supported at least five families in earlier years. How do we go back to creating our own community, within our community, so that we are all working together, yet separately?” he asks.

For instance if there’s a weekend when one person can’t go to the market, someone else can fill in. “It can be a community where everyone works and has their own enterprise but there is some overlap and we can cover for each other. We are also very open to the fact that it doesn’t have to be family members who do all this. We are open to bringing in other people who are willing to bring a project, and some money to the table, too, and be part of using all the resources that we have. That’s my goal, and that’s why it was so sad to think that it was all going to end,” says Maloney.

The price of land has increased a lot over the past years and he could just cash out and keep a smaller farm and continue to do everything he was doing—and just let go of the custom grazing part. “We would have a good chunk of money in the bank and have fun doing what we are doing, until we are done with it, but I wouldn’t be very fulfilled by doing that,” he says.

“I am not saying that this isn’t something that might eventually be part of the solution. Maybe the direction of agriculture on our farm in this area will be to go smaller scale because the cattle business is still a really tough business. We are not big enough to have the right scale for that. We don’t winter any cattle, we have no machinery, and we don’t make any hay. We’ve done all the things we should do to make a chance at being profitable but we still don’t have the numbers. Just grazing 350 head of cattle and finishing just 50 is still not enough in this business. But if we were to market an acre of vegetables we could gross $100,000. Someone could make a decent living, but it’s all about what a person chooses to do, and what fits,” he says.

“I am not a purist in terms of Holistic Management. Over the past couple years I have met some people who are talking about holistic in ways that for me becomes easier to understand and adapt to. I am a rebel at heart, so if something feels like it is too regimented, I just pick and choose what I want from it.”

Maloney has worked with Ben Bartlett (a Holistic Management Certified Educator) and Ian Mitchell Innes. “Ian comes to my farm, and this will be the fourth year that I hire him. When I see people like Ben and Ian practicing and how it can develop in different ways, for me the holistic part made it easier for us to focus more clearly on what we wanted. Yes, there will be changes over the years to come. There have been many changes in my career, but we are coming to understand our core values and what works well for us, and becoming able to fully commit to our decisions, based on knowing that this is what we want to do. This was the biggest thing,” he says.

The land is central to it all, and sometimes he curses this great attachment to the land because it can seem like a burden to find the next generation. “I’m realizing that this has been the challenge, for the past four generations— not just continuing with the land, but finding the people to do it. In the past it was family members, but in the future it might not be all family members.” That’s part of the challenge, too—to find the continuity regardless of however it works.

“My heritage is Irish. My family is from a background that isn’t completely connected to the land. We are, however, connected to a tradition of making decisions that are best for our family. Someone in our family early on decided to leave Ireland, when the only other choice was to starve or become sheep stealers. So the family left Ireland and came to a new country. That decision was based on needing to make a better life for our family,” says Maloney.

This is part of what Holistic Management is all about. “I openly talk about how difficult this past year has been. It was depressing for me to realize that our farm here might not continue the way I believed it should, like a continuation of doing exactly what I am doing. During the process of realizing that it is going to evolve and be something else, and that there are options, I could try to stop fighting it and just be open to what’s out there. That’s when things started to open up, along with my realizing that it’s really based on making the best decisions for all of us. If we are going to be hurting ourselves financially and physically and not have a happy family, it’s not worth it,” he says.

“Thinking about my Irish ancestors and heritage, there is some stubbornness and willingness to fight—which is both good and bad. My ancestors had to be tough, to survive. Our family came to this country, along with all the other Irish immigrants, to the quarantine station where we landed here in Quebec. In a celebration (about 20 years ago) of the 125th anniversary of this island where they came, we were told that at the end of that period, when things were going quite badly for the people in Ireland, there were many ships that came in and everyone on the ship was dead—crew and all. The ships just floated in. When I think I am having a bad day, I have to realize how bad things were back in that day. We came from the people who survived that,” he says. It’s important to put everything in perspective, and Holistic Management helps with that.