Family Farm Entrepreneurs

Mission Possible

E-mail connects agriculture with urbanites seeking food they trust

Every third Saturday, urbanites carrying totes, boxes, and baskets, crowd into Fermentations, a popular u-brew winery in east Toronto. But they are not coming to bottle wine. They line up for their orders of meat, eggs, cheese, honey and maple syrup from traditional Mennonite farms in the Kitchener area.

“Fresh From the Farm” is an interesting blend of the very oldest and the very newest technology, and of the local and the global economy. It started when ESL (English as a second language) students, newly arrived from war-torn Yugoslavia, pressed Tim Schmucker, their teacher at the New Life Centre in Toronto, to help them get Mennonite beef –a hallmark of hormone-free quality in their homeland.

Tim and Jacqui with sons Derek and Christopher. As the business has grown, Tim has had to leave his teaching job to take a more flexible position with the Mennonite Central Committee. A refrigerator truck now brings the products to Toronto, but he goes out to the farms frequently to maintain contact with the farmers.

Tim was able to help them because he had once owned a dairy farm near Kitchener with a cousin and still had many contacts among Mennonite farmers. “I had this affinity for the Old Order life,” he explained. However, “the idealism ran up against the reality of long, long hours.” He eventually went back to graduate school.

After a master in Peace Studies at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries in Elkhart, Indiana, Tim worked as a missionary in Colombia, where he met his wife, Jacqui. They later settled in Toronto because “Toronto is a good place to be a multicultural couple.”

Murray Schlueter raises sheep near Kitchener, providing lamb for Fresh from the Farm.

For several years Tim and Jacqui informally gratified their students’ wishes by bringing beef and chicken to town in their van. As much as anything, they viewed it as a way of befriending their often traumatized refugee students and staying in touch with them.

But word spread, and a few months later they were doing “favours” for people they didn’t even know. Then they hit on the idea of developing it into a business.

For a couple of years, the business developed informally. But as word continued to spread, what eventually resulted was “total chaos” according to Tim. “I’d arrive from the farms at 10:00 p.m. at night and there would be thirty people sitting on the porch and in the living room, waiting to pick up what they had ordered.” The only good thing was that this situation happened in winter so refrigeration wasn’t an issue.

After that, the Schmuckers rented the cold room in a winery for distribution. But it wasn’t long before winery patrons and their friends also started asking to be notified by e-mail of dates on which “hormone and drug-free” meat, eggs and cheese would be available.

The Schmuckers made arrangements with a local winery to rent their cold room for distribution. It is manned by occasional teenage help.

As orders burgeoned, some farmers, particularly the poultry operations, began to find that the telephone and Internet-based Toronto sales grew from extra income to an important part of their livelihood.

The Mennonites do not claim that their products are “certified organic.” But for customers who seek assurance of additive-free, non-bioengineered food, their option is much more affordable. For example, in February certified organic eggs were available from an Internet-based Toronto supplier at $4.20 per dozen—but the Mennonite eggs were only $2.20 per dozen.

The business itself is an interesting blend of the oldest and the newest—free-range chickens and eggs are marketed by e-mail as well as telephone and (if the customer wishes) paid for by Interac.

But, as Tim points out to his customers, the old ways do impose certain limitations: For example, meat orders must arrive the previous weekend because the farmers must decide how much livestock to butcher on Tuesday. “It’s not a factory,” he reminds them, “that’s why you buy it.”

There are problems with cultural adaptation too. The Mennonite farmers like to raise plump chickens that put on weight as the summer months wear on. But many Toronto customers, accustomed to the five-week hatchlings of the supermarket barbecue spit, were dismayed by birds that looked like turkeys. “Just a medium chicken” became a frequent, plaintive request.

On a visit last October, when a journalist accompanied Tim on his rounds, it was very clear that for the Old Order, farming is a way of life, not just a business. The women who were finishing up the poultry as dusk fell at the processing plant were singing hymns as they worked. One supplier also commented to Tim, “I just don’t know how people can live without faith.”

Country Poultry Processing: the processing plant in Millbank. Inset: geese roaming the plant barnyard.

Internet analysts say that businesses like Fresh From the Farm benefit from the revolutionary reduction in the costs of reaching individual customers that the new medium provides. Niche marketing of specialty agricultural products, especially organic products, is growing as a result.

But Tim and Jacqui did not really plan it that way. Indeed, Jacqui still prefers the phone, but the birth of their second son in 2000 made a phone-only business too difficult. Fresh From the Farm is still a blend between a business and a mission: it connects urban and rural people, fulfilling vital needs for both, and for Tim it is a way of reconnecting with the farm life he left behind many years ago.

Article and photos: Denyse O’Leary. Denyse O’Leary (oleary@sympatico.ca) is a Toronto-based freelance journalist. Her first book, Faith@Science: Why Science Needs Faith in the 21^st Century will appear in fall 2001.