Good morning.
In October of 2009 my wife and I bought a small farm in the Martock area, just outside of Windsor here. We had been planning since early 2007 what we wanted to do. We definitely wanted a small-scale operation. In looking at different agro-ecological models, we tended to prefer a lower external input agricultural model. We decided on a mixed, diverse farm, concentrating mainly on animal fibre, cashmere and wool, and other high-end niche products.
So far it's been pretty encouraging. We've been going now for only about five or six months, but so far the community support has been great, and we're really encouraged that there are other endeavours of similar size in the area that are actually making a go of it.
But to digress a little bit, we were really lucky that high-speed Internet was connected shortly before we moved in. It has really helped us to connect not only on a national level but also on an international level with people similar to us, and eventually it will open up a market for our product not only in North America but also in Europe. One thing about having high-speed Internet is that while a lot of the government programs are listed on government websites, we find it extremely difficult to navigate them, and most of the links are broken on both the federal and provincial websites.
The main issues we've had—which you've heard from a number of people—were start-up costs and funding. The farm we bought is a 40-acre farm. It hadn't been farmed for 10 to 15 years. So nobody viewed it as a farm. It was a barn with cleared land and an old house.
We eventually did get a residential mortgage, and I think our rate was 3.5%. We were fairly lucky. We had gone to the farm board, but a mortgage with them wasn't really doable because the payments were going to be way too high and the interest rate was too high. And any program that we found didn't really fit our model; because it was not a working farm, we couldn't have a guaranteed income we could generate with the farm in the first year. In our first year, we are estimating that we're going to make about $25, so...
After registering the farm, we found that most of the programs were geared toward larger, well-established farms. I think we have heard that from a number of people here. It is encouraging, though, to see the increase in buy local, eat local campaigns, like Select Nova Scotia, the increased support of farmers' markets, and increased development in community-shared agriculture.