Embracing Organic
Mark (Class of ’05 & ‘O6) & Sally Bernard (Class of ’06)
A young PE couple earns the title of 2010 Organic Farmers of the Year for Barnyard Organics, a fully certified 500-plus acre farm in Freetown

It’s outdoor foraging time at the Barnyard Organics farm on Cairns Road in Freetown.
With their morning egg-laying duties done, the birds in this feisty flock practically fly out of the chicken coop door to conduct their hen-pecking ways for the rest of the day.

“They always head straight for under the trees,” smiles Sally Bernard of these birds, which are living an organic life as are the rest of the livestock and crops on the farm she manages with her husband Mark Bernard.

In an age when many in the next farm generation are opting for any career but one from the land, this young Prince Edward Island couple has jumped in in a big way. Their 500-plus-acre spread is 100 per cent certified organic, a milestone they reached in 2006.

This year they achieved another personal milestone when they were presented with the 2010 Organic Farmers of the Year award by the P.E.I. Certified Organic Producers Co-operative. The purpose of the award is to acknowledge organic producers for their time and effort in supporting a sustainable future for farming on P.E.I., their involvement with the organic industry and in helping all farmers working towards sustainable farming

“We’re just kind of getting into this and we’re still young, (so) to be awarded the Organic Farmer of the Year (title) is quite humbling,” says Mark from the homestead that has been in the Bernard name for generations and is where his parents, Wendell and Carol Anne Bernard, still live.

Mark’s forbearers were likely doing pretty much what he is now in a more simplified form.
But thanks to an agricultural education, he and Sally are taking the organic approach to a whole new level, applying what they learned at NSAC on a daily basis.

“It was neat to hear that Dad had remembered some of those techniques and had tried them back then and they’re still working today,” Mark says.

The couple actually met at the university. Sally grew up on a mixed farm in New Brunswick. They were married in 2006 and now have two children, Lucy, two, and one-year-old Wilson.

Organic certification of the land was a gradual process.

Because it takes three years to become certified, they started with a 50-acre section.

“We didn’t do it all at once so we were able to still rent out some of the land to help with the cash flow a little bit,” Mark says. 

“The first couple of years we were experimenting and playing around with the acreages and getting an understanding of what we were wanting to do.”

And contrary to what some might believe, there is a lot of work involved in preparing the land so it will produce organic crops in a sustainable fashion.

“That’s the misconception with organic  that you’re organic by default, that just by doing nothing you become organic,” Mark says.

“(But for us) it was a matter of planting crops and being able to play off certain crops, like we planted clover to produce nitrogen to put back into the soil and we’d plow it down.”

With more than 500 acres now fully certified, the Bernard farm is one of the largest organic farms on the Island.

While some of those incorporate potatoes into their land base, the couple has chosen to focus on soybeans, field peas and grains, such as wheat, barley and oats.

“We had grown potatoes conventionally (in years prior to the switch), but I had just thought there would be less pests in grains and soybeans and we were going to get in and get things established and if things worked out then we could try to add potatoes,” says Mark.

“. . . But now things are working really well, so we’re trying to help increase the organic livestock industry by growing feed for that. It’s kind of adding to the whole value chain of the (local organic) industry.”

In turn, Mark hopes he will someday get manure back from these same livestock farmers to fertilize his crops.

“(Then) it makes that circle,” he says.
“So when you get some of those inter-linkages and you get the nutrients coming back to the farm that produced the crop, it’s different than if I produced the crop here, shipped it to Ontario and there’s no linkage back to the farm. It’s gone. It’s kind of a disconnect from the organic cycle.”

On the livestock side of things, they’ve stayed away from cattle, which would require a lot of the land base for pasture that is presently being cropped.

They went instead with organic chicken and lambs, which are sold directly to consumers, as are their organic eggs at the farm gate.

“Mark wants cows, but we’re good with the sheep right now . . . . They were sort of my dowry. They came with me when I came over,” laughs Sally.

Their flock now numbers about 25, the wool from which is sold to a local woolen mill but is not a money generator.

This year they’re increasing their tally of roaster chickens from 300 to 450 for fall sale.

“We’ve also put a lot of infrastructure into the farm. We’ve set up a soybean roaster. The soybeans have to be roasted to be fed to livestock . . . ,” Mark says.

“We roast them here and we eat roasted soybeans for two days afterwards because they’re still nice and warm. They’re great.”

They’ve also set up a grain cleaning operation on the farm to be a little more self-sufficient.
“Basically with organic (grains), you tend to get a few more weeds in it, so we’ve set up grain cleaners so we can clean it. We’re also cleaning other people’s grains to be able to put it to market a little bit cleaner,” Mark says.

At present, he works full time on the farm. Sally does contract work for a local watershed group encouraging farmers to use good environmental stewardship practices. 

She is also the main voice people read in the couple’s online blog that is one of the features of their Barnyard Organics website which has attracted a sizeable following.

“I have the thought in the next two or three years that we’re going to be able to be at that point where Sally will be able to stay at home (full time),” Mark says.

The intensive work they put into building their soil from the start has paid off handsomely.
“The health of the soil is really rewarding,” Sally says.

“Some of our yields have compared with conventional yields,” adds Mark, who has also done a lot of work with experimenting and selecting organic varieties that do well in the local growing conditions.
Mark worked for a number of years with the Organic Agriculture Centre of Canada and has been closely involved with the P.E.I. Certified Organic Producers Co-op and the Atlantic Certified Organic Co-op. He also sits on the Environmental Advisory Council for P.E.I. Sally sits on the boards for Atlantic Canadian Organic Regional Network (A.C.O.R.N.) and the National Farmers Union.

One of the biggest challenges for these former conventional farmers was to completely shift their way of thinking from how things were done before to what works in the present.

“In conventional (farming) it’s if I get up today and I have a weed problem in this field I can spray this product,” Mark says.

“But organically I have to have gotten up a month ago and noticed that I’m going to have a weed problem and I’m going to have to weed the crop at this stage so that I can harvest it without the weed becoming an infestation and a problem for the crop . . . .

“It’s working a lot more proactively rather than reactively.”

AT A GLANCE
Fast facts

Award-winners: Mark and Sally Bernard, operators of the 550-acre Barnyard Organics farm on Cairns Road in Freetown, are the recipients of the 2010 Organic Farmers of the Year award from the P.E.I. Certified Organic Producers Co-operative.

Sharing their story: Online blog tales of their farm lifestyle and their children, Lucy, two, and Wilson, one, and other information can be found at www.barnyardorganics.ca.
Worth quoting: “Mark and Sally (Bernard) are proud to be building a farm with a sustainable future for generations to come, and their children, Lucy and Wilson, are already showing a love of agriculture. Instilling that love of farming in their children is perhaps their proudest accomplishment of all.”  Roy Genge, executive director of the PE Certified Organic Producers Co-operative which administers the Organic Farmer of the Year award.

As published in The Guardian, May 14, 2010.