Thank you.
We're going to come at this from a very different angle, because my wife and I are first-generation farmers. We started this farm in 2011, with our first season in 2012. It has grown. We hire around 20 people at the maximum time. We're probably the largest organic farm producing vegetables in New Brunswick, and possibly even in the Maritimes. We're highly diversified and we do a lot of home delivery and local pickup, with 90% of our product going direct to the consumer. I would like to talk more about why that is. We'll see if I have time in my five minutes or if we have to do that later.
On the barriers to growth as a start-up farm, general bureaucracy comes to the top. Every time you add a layer. We're very diversified and grow over 50 crops, and we have beef, pork and pasture-raised chicken, but each thing is developed in a silo to our government. For example, we raise poultry and have to come under the quota system. This is pasture-raised poultry. I need a whole separate audit for the food safety side of our poultry operation. That's one of multiple streams. I fought to see if my organic certification would be enough. It wasn't.
All of these different aspects make it really challenging. There are the safe food for Canadians regulations. We're on the east coast. Our three provinces of New Brunswick, P.E.I. and Nova Scotia are roughly equivalent in population to the greater Montreal area. It's like taking Montreal, splitting it all up and saying you have to go through provincial borders just to get your stuff to market. I have a farmer who farms on the border of New Brunswick but sells into Halifax and Moncton—two different provinces. He has safe food for Canadians registration and is up for a multi-day series of audits in the middle of his busy season.
One of the challenges, and the reason we sell 90% direct, is getting into the chain stores. When we talk about food security, the reality is that over 80% of people still buy from the chain stores. We can talk about markets, direct sale and all of these other ways, but I feel we really need to look at the elephant in the room, which is how does a starting farm or a new farm get into the grocery chain system? Sobeys asked us to grow carrots for them. In the end, they couldn't give us a price, and there was no way we could build a business plan that would make sense to a bank for us to put up the warehouse Sobeys wanted. Anyway, logistically, it was a nightmare.
I know other farmers who have run into the same thing. There's no way to get from farmers' markets or local sales to the supermarkets that want you to supply 50.... There's a big gap there. A friend of mine started supplying carrots and, three years in, ended up going bankrupt.
Then we can look at the more obvious things like the cost of fuel, which has doubled. The carbon tax was taken off. As a farmer, we used to be able to get carbon tax-free fuel, but now that the carbon tax is built in upstream, we have to pay top dollar for our fuel. We're not getting a break there.
There are labour costs and a lot of audits around labour, especially our foreign workers. Out of our 20 employees, six are Canadian and year-round. We have five seasonal workers from Mexico. They come back every year. They love it. It means the world to their families, but to give you an idea, out of 20, we have five. We are under the impression—and I could be proven wrong—that the current government really dislikes that program. However, the reality is that if we didn't have those five, we would probably lay off all 20, because we need that surge of help during the six-month growing season. I can get into all the whys and wherefores, but I just want to convey the utter importance of that.
Another thing that's a challenge is all the government audits and surveys. We have probably 12 different surveys that we're hounded to do each year. I talked about the audits—