Episode #269
JM Fortier at Farmer Friday: Growing Vegetables for Profit

At our Farmer Friday event at Churchtown, JM Fortier spoke directly to a room full of growers about what it really takes to make a small vegetable farm work financially. Drawing from more than twenty years at Les Jardins de la Grelinette, he explains how a tractor-free market garden on just 1.5 to 2 acres can produce strong sales and healthy margins through permanent beds, tight spacing, careful pricing, and constant refinement. This conversation on growing vegetables for profit is both practical and honest, moving beyond idealism into the daily decisions that shape a resilient farm business.

Our JM Fortier talk at Farmer Friday has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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JM Fortier addresses his peers at Farmer Friday at Churchtown, September 2025:

Linley Dixon
We’ll go until 12:30 pm – lunch is at 12:30 pm. Then after lunch, we’re going to bring everybody back up here who has presented this morning, and we’ll have a Q&A. Then after that, we’d like everyone to think about what the Real Organic Project has been working on, the roles that it can play in terms of marketing.

Linley Dixon
We talked a lot about production this morning, but the whole reason why the label was created is to try to figure out how we can access markets that either don’t exist at all or that used to be there and are disappearing quickly. That’s the goal of the afternoon – to talk about what’s happening on your farm with marketing, and the role that the Real Organic Project can play in that.

Linley Dixon
Start thinking about that for the afternoon. All right, let’s just get started with JM for now. Thanks so much.

JM Fortier
All right. It’s always a treat to present in front of your peers and your mentors – that’s really amazing. I feel very fortunate. I’ve been farming since my early 20s. I’m going to be 48 years old soon. That went pretty fast. I don’t know where that went, but it’s been good years for me and my wife farming a small piece of land. That’s what I want to talk about today.

JM Fortier
I do feel that a lot of what we’ve accomplished on our farm is very relatable to many folks, not just in North America but around the world, which is what I’m realizing over the last few years. If we have time at the end of this talk, I’d love to talk about that. I’ve been very fortunate in the last few years to travel more, and what I’m seeing around the world is really, really amazing.

JM Fortier
But to get back to my farm, it’s pretty different than what we just heard before. It’s two acres. It’s actually ten acres, but there’s eight acres of forest, and there’s a big two‑acre prairie in the middle of which there’s an old rabbit barn. It’s a 40‑by‑100‑foot building that we bought in 2004 and which is now our home. We built our home inside the rabbit barn.

JM Fortier
We used to farm in a teepee. A funny story: we learned farming in New Mexico with a great couple and their kids. They were farming market-gardening style there and living in a teepee with their kids. We did the same thing in Quebec, but it wasn’t the same outcome, I can tell you that. It’s a bit sketchy. We did that for two seasons, and then we bought our farm.

JM Fortier
Our farm is two acres, but it feeds a lot of people. One of the particular aspects of our farm is that we don’t have a tractor. Not that we don’t like tractors; it’s just we don’t need one. Actually, everything that we’ve developed or evolved into is because we don’t have a tractor. This is something that I want to share with you today.

JM Fortier
Our farm in numbers, so that you know what we’re about. It’s been more than 20 years in operation. We really started this farm in 2005, so it’s 20 years now on 1.5 acres. Sales of the farm have been above $300K for a long time now, probably 10 years. This year it was a really good season for us – we’re probably going to be around $360K.

JM Fortier
Obviously, over the years, one element that has made our sales increase every couple of years is the price list. Pricing your vegetables correctly is a big way to get more in your pocket. That’s really something that we’ve learned along the way. We have a CSA of 100 families. I would say 70% of these families are the same families that were there when we started. So we’re very familiar with them. It’s really nice.

JM Fortier
My wife goes and delivers every Wednesday to them. We’re also present on Thursday at a farmers’ market, and Friday at another farmers’ market. We also deliver fresh salad mix to the local grocery store. It’s a big joke in my community that we’re like [inaudible 0:04:30]. They eat the salad mix from our farm, and that makes our village very healthy and special.

JM Fortier
Ever since I started a farm school in 2015, which is another project that I won’t talk about today, my wife, Maude‑Hélène, that you see in the picture, she’s been farming the farm without me. I often joke that she says it’s better that way. It’s simpler and streamlined. She’s the boss. It’s been working well.

JM Fortier
The profit margins on our farm are around 45%, meaning that once we’ve paid employees – which are not employees that we keep every year – we have young people that want to learn with us for one or two seasons. They’re paid close to minimum wage. They’re sheltered and lodged on the farm, and then they move on to start their own farms, most of them, but it’s a pretty good return for what we’re doing. My wife has three months off.

JM Fortier
We’ve had this model that’s been working for us for many, many, many years. What is really interesting right now is that after 20 years, there’s a lot of, I would say, proof in the pudding. It’s been working for all these years, and we’ve kept it really simple.

JM Fortier
That’s the original design of the farm. That’s the farm as it’s laid out, and it’s been working really well. One aspect is that everything is in the center. Wherever we are on the farm, we’re really close to all of the fields.

JM Fortier
Most people that come and visit my farm, they’ll always say the same thing. They’ve traveled from far away, they made the trip, they wanted to see Les Jardins de la Grelinette, the name of our farm, and then they say, “This is it?”

JM Fortier
I keep saying to people, “This is a small farm.” It is really small, but it’s also really productive. I would say that again, a lot of the things that I built my farm on, and the principles – a lot of these things I took from Eliot Coleman, who’s in the room. They always say that you’re building on the shoulders of giants, and I really think this is true, and it’s proven to work really well for us.

JM Fortier
But growing better, not bigger, was really what happened to us, because we didn’t have more land. It just wasn’t available, so we had to make do with what we had, and part of our success is due to that constraint.

JM Fortier
It forced us to look from within to learn how to grow more of everything, how to crop plan, how to learn proper greenhouse techniques to increase yields without buying more greenhouses. It taught us so many things along the way.

JM Fortier
It also helped us avoid the trap of scaling outwards and just growing the farm by adding another piece and another piece and another piece and moving outward. We grew from within, and that really made our farm really productive pretty fast, I would say.

JM Fortier
If you guys have questions, feel free. One of the core principles of how we farm is these permanent raised beds. Again, a playbook from Eliot, from “The New Organic Grower”, 30‑inch beds and pathways that are really easy to maneuver.

JM Fortier
This is what I call human‑scale farming, because it’s sized for the human body. It’s sized so that you can hop over the bed, lean into it, and harvest the middle of the bed without hyperextending yourself.

JM Fortier
The fact that the beds are permanent avoids the need to have a tractor, which you would otherwise need to disc plow or hill‑shape the soil every time you need to plant. The beds are permanent, and we only use the top layer to work the soil gently – I’ll show some of the tools – but that avoids a lot of work.

JM Fortier
Before we did this, I had never really seen a farm of two acres with permanent beds. I had been to Cuba, and I had seen seed farms there, run without tractors. That was really impressive. That’s kind of how we got into this. I saw you had a question.

Audience Member
[inaudible 9:18]

JM Fortier
Yeah, Equiterre. It was at one point. Equiterre, you know them well, is an umbrella organization based in Montreal that would advocate for CSA nationwide. We call Quebec a nation, so nationwide in Quebec.

JM Fortier
That was many moons ago, but when the internet came out, we had a web page with a map of all the farms, and all the eaters could find easily where they would find their farms and connect there. At one point, we had 300 farms, and I think 25,000 eaters connected through this network. It was self-funded. It was really impressive, and it did some amazing stuff. We were part of it.

JM Fortier
Eventually it eroded itself, and now it’s not Equiterre anymore, but the network filed for bankruptcy last year. Kind of a story of a great success that didn’t turn out so well in the end. I would have never expected that. I thought that we were winning. I thought that the CSA movement was on an upswing. After COVID, we really had a lot of problems in our network. I can talk about that later if you want.

JM Fortier
Keeping all the spacings really tight. This is nothing new under the sun, but this picture really illustrates the difference between two acres of intensive, close spacing and five or six acres of row-crop cultivation that you would need if you had a tractor. Not specifically, but generally speaking, when I started in farming, that’s what I was seeing.

JM Fortier
That’s so much more land space for row covers, for insect nets, for irrigation setup. It’s just more land to cover without more yield or more crops. So just bringing everything back together, making it tight, and optimizing space really, really makes a big difference.

JM Fortier
Again, nothing new under the sun, but this picture tells it all. Nothing has to do with how we’re going to cultivate with the tractor. Our spacing is not determined by that. It’s really determined by how close you can get the crops together, and then sizing for caliber, yield, and also bed space, the time that the bed is occupied, so you can flip the bed and have another crop.

JM Fortier
I was telling you about Cuba. That was a visit that we made. I think it was in 2004. A very special time there. That was when the Soviet Union wasn’t around anymore, and they had no fuel on the island. It was 100% organic for, I think, 10 years, and there were these organopónicos everywhere.

JM Fortier
We would travel in the city and outside the city, and you would see these permanent raised beds, non-tractor, acres and acres. That was really impressive. That was one of our clicks about how we ended up setting our farm.

JM Fortier
Spacing crops. Different vegetables, different spacing. It took us a few years, trial and error. Obviously, there’s a lot of literature about that, but really doing it in our fields on 30-inch beds, is it four rows, six inches, or is it three rows, eight inches, measuring these yields, measuring also the caliber, and finding the sweet spot for all of our crops.

JM Fortier
The result is that you have a crop that is occupying not just space, but also forming this canopy in many instances, and just letting the soil be at rest. You’re creating moisture on the soil. It’s always cooler down there because there’s this canopy, and obviously there’s a lot of yield. I know that for some of you in the room, this is really not new, but perhaps for others, it is.

JM Fortier
A lot of the techniques that we use go hand in hand with this idea of just using the soil intensively, so we’re fertilizing intensively. Very different from what we’ve heard this morning. We use a lot of compost on the farm, about 40 tons per acre. This is compost that we buy because we don’t have a tractor.

JM Fortier
It’s not possible for us to make compost with a tractor, and it’s readily available to buy. It costs us a few grand every year, delivered in the middle of the farm. Then it’s not so complicated to wheelbarrow it on the beds.

Audience Member
[inaudible 11:14]

JM Fortier
We’ve been certified all these years, and so we’ve had to buy compost that was certified organic. There was already some form of a conformity test there. We’ve never been really excited about the compost that we get. It’s always been good enough and rather cheap.

JM Fortier
Some years we decided not to use compost. I think we went five years without using compost, and then we came back to it. Then eventually we started buying vermicompost and that. So we’ve been doing all these experiments.

JM Fortier
But one thing that I’m sure of is the first few years, in my opinion, the idea is to build the organic matter by putting a lot in. Then, as the soil gets better over time, you bring in compost that has better quality and less of it. Does that make sense.

JM Fortier
The rotary tiller, when I started, was kind of the tool of choice to prepare the beds. Again, because of Eliot and his insights about minimal disturbance, we quickly decided to move away from the tiller. The tiller is really nice.

JM Fortier
If you go into a 30-inch bed with a BCS two-wheel tractor with the tiller, it really goes deep. You can have really deep black soil. Put your hand into it. It’s amazing, but all the aggregates get crumbled, and then compaction starts to kick in. We had seen it on other farms.

JM Fortier
Because we’re doing one, two, three, four crops per year, per bed, we’re flipping soils. If we’re always relying on the rotary tiller, after a few years, we would imagine the soil would be beaten up and not good anymore. We moved away from it.

JM Fortier
One of the first tools that became part of our toolbox is the broad fork. Les Jardins de la Grelinette in French, that’s the name of our farm. The broad fork, a lot of people assume that it’s too much work. It’s definitely work, but it’s not more work than picking beans or harvesting salad mix or answering customers that you don’t really like at market. It’s just part of the whole experiment, I would say.

JM Fortier
But it really does a good job of opening up the soil without disturbing it, without mixing the layers, and without inverting the layers. One thing that I knew, reading all these books on bio-intensive methods of production, was that you really need deep, loose soil if close spacing is going to work. So hence the broad fork.

JM Fortier
It’s still today, it’s the tool of choice. We don’t use it every time we seed or plant, but every time that there’s a crop that has a deep rooting system, we will broad fork, and it’s just perfect like that. We’ll make sure that the roots will be able to go down, that the soil is loose, that oxygen gets into it, and that we have really, really good soil.

JM Fortier
We use a rotary harrow, with tines working this way, on an inch or two, to finalize the bed prep. Once we broad fork, put the compost, then we level and firm the seed bed using this tool. It’s really gentle, slow speed. In my experience, this tool is just so great. You see it here. I say that we don’t use a tractor, but we use a two-wheel tractor. It’s just a different size, and I would argue, much more appropriate for this kind of farming.

JM Fortier
One thing that we had early on in our toolbox is these black tarps. I don’t think I had ever seen another farmer use tarps like these to prepare soil. I had bought these tarps because I was wanting to solarize my north block for early planting. So I bought these big tarps, silage tarps, UV treated, and it didn’t work.

JM Fortier
The snow melted faster, but the soil wasn’t warmer. I was really young back then, and I didn’t know that clear plastic will warm up the soil, but black plastic really doesn’t do that. What it does, though, is it creates an absence of light, and everything that’s growing under it will eventually get destroyed or repurposed.

JM Fortier
We started to use these tarps to prepare our beds and prepare field blocks. That’s how we got around having to till and not having to hand pull everything or put so much organic matter every time we wanted to seed or plant. We just tarped.

JM Fortier
Ten, twelve beds, 100-foot beds, one tarp, leaving it for two, three, four weeks. We remove it. It’s a clean slate to start with. So permanent beds, broad fork, compost, tarps, minimal tillage, and it’s been working really well for us all these years.

JM Fortier
This is kind of the principles that I’ve been teaching others how to do. If you visit farms and you see this kind of farming, well, I think it’s because it works. It works pretty well. Soil depth, I would say, year four or five already we had really good soil.

JM Fortier
We’ve been followed by the same agronomist all these years. We have a fertility plan that mixes the compost, green manure, and also chicken manure that we use for certain crops. It’s all balanced, but the soil is really deep and really nice. It’s like one big brown layer going all the way to 10-12 inches. I really think this is key to this kind of farming. It’s paying attention to soil structure.

JM Fortier
I see a lot of young farmers now, they’re really into no-dig. You go onto their farm, and you dig a little bit, and then you see there’s good soil, and then there’s bad soil. There’s layers. I would argue that it’s better to have one consistent layer so that the roots can really go down and take what they need from good, healthy soil all throughout, rather than just layering them.

JM Fortier
Cover crops. It took us a few years to figure this out, how to manage them, but they’re a big part of our system. We have a crop rotation. I think I have an image of it. We have ten field blocks on the farm. Half of our field blocks are crops that are just one crop per year, per bed, so they’re not flipped.

JM Fortier
Then they’re either preceded by a spring cover crop or a fall cover crop, and those field blocks get rotated every year. We have about a quarter of the farm under cover crop almost all the time. How to destroy the cover crop.

JM Fortier
We have another tool that goes on the BCS. It’s a flail mower. I don’t think it’s really possible to do cover crops without a tool like that on our scale, but we mow it, and then we tarp it, and we come back a couple of weeks later, and it’s good to go. So really simple. Again, not disturbing the soil, and you really see the impact.

JM Fortier
When I started using cover crops, I was like most people here, you’re really into it, but then I really realized that, from my observation, the value of them is in the root system that’s decaying under the soil, feeding all the life that’s under soil. I really feel that that’s how you get to feed the bottom feeders in the soil ecology.

JM Fortier
What we want on our farm now is cover crop that’s quite high. We mix as many seeds as possible together. We don’t really care what the mix is, as long as it’s big and lush and that we have a really deep rooting system that’s opening up the soil and, again, adding organic matter down below.

JM Fortier
This is a picture of our crop rotation. I’m not going to go into detail, but just to explain to you that there is a rotation, and I think that that’s a big part of how we’ve been able to do this for 20 years on that piece of land.

JM Fortier
On this rotation, the way we built it from the get-go, again, that was taking a lot from Eliot’s book and Eliot’s work and insights about crop rotation. Because when you’re new in farming, you don’t really think about a 10-year crop rotation plan. It’s like you just want to get something in and get something out and go to market and make it work.

JM Fortier
But because we were landlocked, we knew that if we didn’t install something that would be long lasting, and that would be a firewall for us to just plant anything anywhere, we had the insight to think that we needed to do this, which we did really early on.

JM Fortier
Our crop rotation is that there’s four botanical families, one of which is the light feeders that get flipped. Carrots get flipped by salad mix, which gets flipped by beans. These are half of our field blocks. They’re light feeders. They don’t get compost. Then there’s families of heavy feeders that get the compost.

JM Fortier
We put a lot of compost on half of the garden every year for the crops that are heavy feeders. That’s how we rationalize using our compost. Good enough?

Audience Member
Do you farm with high tunnels, and how do they integrate into your crop rotation?

JM Fortier
The question is, do we farm with high tunnels or greenhouses, and how do they integrate in the rotation? I’ll get to it. But to answer shortly, we have caterpillar tunnels that move around on the farm. We’ll move them two or three times per year. In the spring, they’re at one place. In the summer, they’re over, let’s say, the nightshades. In the fall, they’ll be moved one more time.

JM Fortier
We can move them anywhere we want on the farm. We have four of them. We also have four permanent greenhouse structures, three structures for cucumbers and peppers, and we have three successions of cucumbers per year. We’ll start a first succession really early. These are heated greenhouses. First succession of cucumbers, after eight to 12 weeks, we know that they’re going to die off.

JM Fortier
So we have another succession coming in, and another succession coming in. Then peppers and other crops in between, and then cover crops in there.

JM Fortier
We have one tomato greenhouse that’s been planted in tomatoes for 15 years now. Tomatoes year after year after year. These are grafted tomato plants, and the rootstock is resistant to a lot of soil-borne disease. This is where we make a lot of our money, growing these high-yielding tomatoes. I have pictures of that to show at the end. Coming back to the system…

JM Fortier
The slide show shows this concept of appropriate technology. We’re farming two acres. We have markets for all these vegetables that we grow. The idea of market gardening is that you grow a little bit of everything every week, but you have everything you need for the whole season. Never too much, never not enough. It’s really how we think about it.

JM Fortier
Over the years, we’ve had amazing developments of tools that are appropriately sized for our kind of farming. Again, coming back to Eliot Coleman, he’s in the room today, a lot of this is because of him and his work over the years of developing tools that he had seen in Europe or in his head, or developing them with Johnny’s and that great partnership that went on for all these years.

JM Fortier
I remember when I was a young grower, pre-internet, we would get the Johnny’s catalog. Man, it was like, woo hoo. I would go to the tool section right there, and then I would learn so many things just looking at the new tools that were there.

JM Fortier
I was like, “Oh, man, this works for that. This works for this. A new seeder, a new this.” It was really epic in how it helped shape not only what we ended up doing, but also just allowing this kind of market gardening, kind of farming, to really be possible because of these tools. That’s really important.

JM Fortier
All these years that I would go – I’ll talk about this tomorrow if have a chance – but I would go to California sometimes because I was invited, and I was really excited to go there. I would always visit these farms that had 150 or 250 CSA members, and they would make probably less money gross than us.

JM Fortier
They were on five acres with tractors and the whole thing. I was like, “Man, it’s a lot of output for what you’re bringing back. A lot of soil is exposed.” I guess that’s part of my story, is that I felt compelled to share another way of farming because I thought there’s a lot of ergonomics in farming smaller, and there’s good economics in doing so.

JM Fortier
The slide show is not working. It doesn’t really matter. Where is the next slide? Any questions?

Audience Member
You’ve been adding compost for 20 years. Where’s your organic matter on? Have you found something like similar to what the previous speaker was talking about with organic mattering at a certain level and nutrient cycling?

JM Fortier
The question is, we’ve been adding organic matter compost for 20 years; have we seen anything special? It’s funny. I’ll tell you something. Today, because I’ve been doing this work, planting, transplanting by hand, cultivating with hand hoes, seeding with push seeders, harvesting, I’ve seen the soil so many times that just by looking at it, I kind of know if it’s good, if it’s healthy, and if it has what it needs. It’s kind of really bizarre to say that.

JM Fortier
The soil tests, we’ve stopped sampling probably 10 years ago. The last time we did it was around seven percent. We started at 1.5 percent. I was putting a lot of compost early on. I was kind of like a young guy, really trying to do it.

JM Fortier
Now two things have happened. First of all, we don’t have all the agronomists on our back anymore, which used to be a big thing, because people would hear about our farm, we were in the paper, and then the agronomist community would try to come and take us down because we were using too much compost. I was like, “We have five times the yields. It’s normal that we…”

JM Fortier
Now we’re just putting about an inch of compost. We’re keeping it really simple, and we play it by ear. So it’s a funny answer. I visit farms, and I can see the quality of the soil just by opening it up a little bit.

JM Fortier
The same thing, I’ve been training young farmers for more than 10 years, and I always tell them, “The crop will be as good as how you’ve prepared the bed. If it’s well done, well prepared, it’s going to work. But if it’s crooked, or if you’ve gone too fast, you didn’t broad fork or whatever, it’s just not going to work.” A lot goes into the process, I believe.

Audience Member
Why dont you make your own compost?

JM Fortier
Why don’t I make my own compost? A big part of that is that we use about 40 to 50 tons, which is a lot of compost to generate on our farm, considering that we have two acres, which is pretty much all planted.

JM Fortier
We don’t have a tractor, we don’t have a loader, we don’t have a compost turner, we don’t have manure, and we don’t have the time. We just buy it from companies that make compost. I know it’s hard to hear, but honestly, I don’t see that as a problem.

JM Fortier
There’s a total disjunction, because people that make compost, good for them, they’re recycling a lot of things. For us, it’s more practical to simply buy. The French market gardeners of Paris, that was their thing. They would go to Paris with their vegetables, and then they would bring back the manure from the city.

JM Fortier
There’s many ways to look at it, but again, on our farm, we just don’t have the space, so that cuts that project out.

JM Fortier
Yes, it’s compost that is certified organic. It’s definitely good enough, but it’s not… They need to follow certain principles. I know the compost makers; they’re pretty good. They’re actually pretty geeky, a lot more than me. I know other compost makers that are next level, but they’re like five times the price, and so that kind of cuts it off for us. I’m sorry if my presentation is lagging.

Audience Member
You talked about it, but if you were to begin, would you apply as much compost as you did the first year?

JM Fortier
Yeah, I think I would put in a lot. I would start with a lot, just make sure that soil is fluffy, loose, that there’s a lot of elements in there. Then I would try that for a few years. I’ve started a lot of farms, so that’s always my go-to. Yes.

Audience Member
Two questions. One, spacing refinements. After doing it for a number of years, you have spacings established that work, but when we’re chasing that last two to five percent of yield, do you have any methods to trial things without going overboard and rocking the boat, like when you’ve got one bed of carrots, do you just take the whole bed and stretch it a little bit?

Audience Member
Then also, with crop rotations, we’ve found that here the markets shift. Your salad block gets a little bigger, your other crop a little smaller. Has having a rotation driven what you’re growing and how you’re selling it, or are you flexible in the way that you’re…?

JM Fortier
The question is about spacing refinement, finding the two to five percent last limit of how you can expand and get more yields, or be more precise. The second question, which I really like, is what is it, again? Sorry, I got confused here.

JM Fortier
What’s being said is that the crop rotation some years, you realize you need more carrots, you have too many potatoes, whatever. Our crop rotation is very limiting, because it’s one field block, 16 beds of a botanical family. That’s it, and that’s the reason why it’s been working. It’s been a buffer. We can’t just decide to just….

JM Fortier
Because what happens is, if you do a crop rotation, then you start to pick and choose, you’re not following a rotation; you’re just lying to yourself. Which happens a lot. I see young people starting in farming. They have these amazing crop rotation, so complex. I’m like, “Dude, man, I’ll come back in four years, and it’s all going to change.”

JM Fortier
My advice to them is, wait till year four or five, max out your production, understand your client base and your business model, and then do a rotation, and then stick with it. If you want to keep that piece of land fertile for a long time…

JM Fortier
There’s a lot of market gardeners – that’s not my style – but they’ll farm for four or five years, and then they’ll move on. I’d rather have something that’s more durable. About the kind of five percent I’ll answer by telling you that over my years in farming, I’ve geeked out on a lot of things

JM Fortier
But some of my interests have been more about how to crop plan, how to maximize every inch of not just the growing area, but the succession planting, making sure that it’s always… I’m harvesting these carrots, the next day these salanova are really ready to go in, and it’s all timely, done. Perfectly nailed to my sales.

JM Fortier
I’ve geeked out a lot on this, and we eventually developed a software that does this really well with AI. Now it’s really impressive, and I’ve geeked out on the motions on the farm. How do you minimize foot traffic? How do you maximize efficiency at the wash back area, which is something that not a lot of people think about?

JM Fortier
We process a lot of vegetables, so how is it organized? How is it laid out? How can you save time here and there? I would say to you that for me, my kind of like superpower or my mindset has been, how can I save time here? Save time here. Save time here, with tools.

JM Fortier
That, for me, is the golden arch, because time is the limiting factor on the farm. It’s never money. It’s never nothing else in your time. When you have a family with kids, and then obligations, and then life. Now I’m getting to a point where, if I want to farm 12, 15 hours a day, good for me. But a few years back, I had to bring the kids to soccer, and then it was this and that, and it’s just like I needed to stop.

JM Fortier
Market gardening, tractor farming, tools, you all know these tools, but they work. We have some of these tools in our initial tool shed. We bought them in 2005. They still work really well. Seeders, push seeders, new tools that came out a few years. This is a blind weeder, really nice for salad mix. I could go on and on and on. Plain weeder. I have a passion, just like Eliot, about tools.

JM Fortier
But these are all tools that are made for this kind of farming, and they’re really good tools. Really sophisticated, really work well, not cheap at all. These are tools that you’ll have for all your farming career. When you buy a seeder, that’s $1,000, it’s nothing.

JM Fortier
This is how we blind weed, cultivate between crops that are really densely seeded. These are spring tines. Then you’ll rake the ground, and it’s going to eliminate a lot of the dormant weed seeds, not all of them, but a lot of them.

JM Fortier
On the other farm that I’m not talking about today, which I worked on for 10 years, we systemized so many things. This planting, the next step is that, the next step is that, the next step is that using the right tools, again, with the idea of having yields and saving time.

JM Fortier
But I would argue that one of the biggest insights from our farm was this whole concept of standardizing bed size, because this is, again, something that a few of us, when I started, were really keen on, but having all the beds the same size, and having all of them grouped in field blocks, is a lot easier to manage, and then having all the material super versatile.

JM Fortier
You have just one set of drips. The row covers are all the same size. You can move them around, tarps, insect nets. It just makes so much sense to have everything organized like that. You never want to have another bed that’s like 130. It just doesn’t make sense, because then you need another set of tools and material just for that bed, and then you’re not being lean in that way.

JM Fortier
Then learning the greenhouse techniques. We were so lucky and blessed early on in our farming career. We had these agronomists that were growers themselves, and they visited… I don’t remember how it happened.

JM Fortier
But they were on our farm, and they had the mandate to help us for a season, and we tripled the yield with them, learning how to graft, learning how to lower and lean, learning how to prune, learning how to heat the proper way, how to get the moisture out of the greenhouse, how to measure…. This was all new to us. We didn’t know how to do this.

JM Fortier
We learned it, and then sales went up. We were the first at market. We still are with super nice tomatoes early June. We really kill it at farmers market. That’s been a big part of our success – learning greenhouse eggplants, and beans.

JM Fortier
Then growing year round, I did a lot of this work on FQT farm again, following what Eliot was doing. Really, anything’s possible if you’re able to extend your seasonality in the spring and in the fall, and you have a market, and you double, triple, quadruple, crop per bed per year, you can really, really grow a lot of produce on a small acreage.

JM Fortier
All of this is in my book, “The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming,” not a sales pitch for it. I’m just so amazed. I would have never imagined when I wrote “The Market Gardener” that it would…

JM Fortier
Now it’s translated in 12 languages. It’s sold a lot of books around the world, and people read this, and they’re like it has ignited in them something that they wanted to do but didn’t think it was possible, and now they know that it is, and that’s really encouraging.

JM Fortier
Then, when I was at the other training farm, for four years, we researched for three years, and then documented for four years the procedure of everything that we do, how we grow each crop. We filmed it, and then put that together into a class. So it’s 90 hours. Then you have all the vegetables, from seed to sale, how I do it on the farm.

JM Fortier
That’s been helping a lot of growers that are new to this not make too many mistakes, because if they follow the procedures, they’re getting 80% of it right. They’re learning how to graft, they’re learning how to lower in lean, they’re learning how to ventilate their greenhouses, they’re learning how to grow celery, how to harvest beans with both of their hands. They’re learning all these things. That’s been really cool in my journey.

JM Fortier
If I were to leave with some key economic metrics, so that you guys have an idea of what market gardening is, these are benchmarks that I would kind of throw out there. They’re not 100% foolproof, because it really depends where you are, depends on your price list, depends on how efficient and effective you are as a grower.

JM Fortier
But I would say that an acre market garden that is pretty much well-run should make $140K – $150K, in my opinion. But I don’t want to oversell it. You should have about a third of it: your cost of operation, your salaries, and your net return in your pocket.

JM Fortier
These are benchmarks that we’ve seen from the Market Gardener Institute that I founded in 2017. We have farm profiles of different farms in the US and around the world. These are farmers that we know are good farmers using good techniques. These are actually pretty near benchmarks.

JM Fortier
Then two acres to get to that, with these kind of numbers, gets to be a pretty good revenue stream and a pretty good way to live your life, which is what we care about. That’s it for me. If you have any questions. Yes, Seth.

Audience Member
I know a big part of your model is the marketing side, direct to consumers. You touched briefly on how things have changed post-COVID. I think a lot of farmers feel that—I’ve heard that. And as someone who’s talking to a lot of farmers, what trends do you see, and how do you see that going forward?

JM Fortier
The question is about sales and sales outlets and opportunities. Obviously, market gardening only works if you’re direct selling, because if you’re wholesaling and you’re getting 40% of the revenue, you’re just not making enough volume. That’s really something to think about.

JM Fortier
CSA, farmers market, selling to chefs and restaurants, that’s been my go-to outlets for all these years. Now, there’s a phone with the online stores. I think the next revolution is there, and I’ll talk about that tomorrow, but I really foresee that instead of competing for shelves in the big markets, we’re just going to use the phones, and people are going to buy directly, locally, through their phones, without any middleman.

JM Fortier
I think that’s the next big revolution that’s already underway. There are so many smart young growers, you should see how smart they are, and the numbers that they’re… They’re laughing at my farm, and our sales are like, “This is like 2015 and it’s incredible.” There’s a lot of that happening.

JM Fortier
But I think the phone, the fact that you can set up an E-store really easily, and then people are more and more used to buying on phones now, especially the younger folks, to answer your question. Yes.

Audience Member
[inaudible 48:01]

JM Fortier
I really love your style. He’s asking me – he’s seen a lot of farms that look like this – if I should franchise this? I have, in a way, because we’ve created a movement, and I’ll talk more about it tomorrow. But at the Market Gardener Institute, we’ve given the Market Gardener master class to more than 10,000 farms in 91 countries. So it’s a lot of farms.

JM Fortier
Now the app that came out, Heirloom, the crop planning software, it’s beyond what I could have ever imagined, of what’s possible. It’s like having an agronomist in your pocket, and it’s all designed for this kind of farming. This also will eventually have a lot of people in it.

JM Fortier
My goal seeding this and being part of this was never to own it or to be the guy. I’m just so happy that this is happening, because I do feel that there’s a crowd of young people that are starting farms. You wouldn’t believe how many young people are starting farms. It’s amazing.

JM Fortier
I go to conferences like this; it’s all young people, they’re all market gardening, and they’re all excited, and they want to do it, and they’re making it financially. They’re making it work. I’m inspired by that, just like I was inspired by Eliot and what he did.

JM Fortier
Okay, more questions. Do you want to pass the mic? Does the other mic work finally? That could be easier, but I’ll start with …

Audience Member
I’m Sarah from the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. The last slide, thank you for sharing that. We spent a lot of time working with all of our farmers on demystifying farm financials and really hooking in on that. I’m curious if you can just share, we’ve seen the cost of labor increase dramatically.

Audience Member
For most of our folks over the last few years, most folks are now paying in Maine $17 to $22 an hour for on-farm labor, so that one person equals one grower plus two full-time staff. Can you just talk about, is there an owner’s draw in that?

JM Fortier
Yeah, it should be the third.

JM Fortier
[inaudible 50:50]

JM Fortier
As your salary. This kind of farming doesn’t allow for people to have higher wages every year. I’ve never seen a market garden that has employees paid $25 an hour. Most of the time – I don’t want to be right here. This is what I think.

JM Fortier
It’s young people getting in, or not so young, but just people starting, and they’re at 17, 18, 19 dollars an hour. They’re not there year-round. They’re there for 30-35 weeks in our case. It needs to be like that, because this is a delicate model.

JM Fortier
It works. There’s this fine-tuned economics. It works really well, but it’s not this kind of farm where you grow the farm because you have employees. It’s not like that. You really need to keep the labor to the farmer.

JM Fortier
So if you’re not involved in the market garden, when you’re paying wages for a farm manager, you’re definitely not making as much as if you’re running the farm. Does that make sense? On our farm, it’s usually around $50,000 to $60,000 a year in salaries – sometimes $70,000.

JM Fortier
It’s above minimum wage. People are fed on the farm, they have shelter, and they end up not spending so much money. It’s all legal, and it’s all okay; it’s just not a business model where you’ll have somebody stay for six, seven, ten years and have increasing wages every year, until I’m proven wrong, which is okay, which I would love to be.

Audience Member
We are doing basically what you’re talking about. I didn’t want to necessarily be put on the spot to talk about that right this second, but I wanted to say we’ve been doing your style of farming for fifteen years now.

JM Fortier
Nice.

Audience Member
Thank you. We’re grossing over a million dollars a year. We hire thirty people.

JM Fortier
Thirty people?

Audience Member
Yeah. We farm no‑till on 5.5 acres. I’m just wondering if you’ve heard of other farms like ours, because it would be really great to find some peers with things like a similar scale does.

JM Fortier
The biggest farm that I know is FQT Farm in Quebec that I started in 2015. We have twelve staff. We’re on six acres, and we make $700,000 of production per year without a tractor. That’s a lot. I can invite you. That would be the best to check that out, and we could go and visit you. I would love that. It’s rare to have a market garden that kind of blew up…

Audience Member
Where are you located?

Audience Member
We’re in Michigan.

JM Fortier
I’ve always thought that the next succession of the pioneer species, like, say you have a market garden, and then, let’s say you want to grow the farm, then you’ll wholesale one or two crops and then you’ll get mechanized around the market garden. I’ve always thought that that was kind of the natural evolution.

JM Fortier
When I started FQT Farm again, because Eliot introduced me to this billionaire that wanted to have a farm, I said, “Well, why don’t we make a farm school?” “Oh, yeah, great. Okay, there you go.”

JM Fortier
I decided to create a really big market garden, because I wanted them to be trained in repetition, so that they would harvest not just one bed of carrots, but like fifteen beds of carrots, and really get the motion of seeding a lot of beds and really feeling what it is to be overworked, so that when they’re on their farm, they’re able to maneuver at high speed, because they’ve learned it. I don’t know if this is relevant or not, but I would love to chat with you guys.

Audience Member
Is that working?

JM Fortier
It’s working.

Audience Member
I’m wondering, in this system, you mentioned not making compost, how are you managing all the larger and woody plant residues? Are those all removed from the bed with…?

JM Fortier
No, we flail mow. We flail mow, and we tarp. Sometimes we’ll remove them by hand, but that’s pretty rare. Let’s say broccoli heads, we need to rip them out. Or pepper plants or eggplants will be removed, but this is usually at the end of the season.

JM Fortier
Most of the crops for flipping we will use the flail mower, and then we tarp it. That’s it. If the worst-case scenario, I’ll use the rotor tiller, and I don’t mind. I’m like, “Whatever. Business first.” Once in a while, I’m okay with that.

Audience Member
Woody brassica, stocks, tomato plants are…

Audience Member
Yeah, they’ll be in the compost pile. I say that we don’t compost, but we do compost, but, man, seriously, it’s like, it’s a compost pile that the neighbor comes every other year to flip, and then we use it for the flowers and the trees.

Audience Member
I’ve learned that making compost – I don’t know if this is new to anyone, I don’t think so – it’s not so easy. To make good compost, it’s not just like you do whatever. You really need to follow a process, measure the temperatures, make sure that you get to those points, water it, and then have the right equipment and the right ingredients. It’s a project. This hasn’t been one of our focus.

Audience Member
I first saw you years ago at a NOFA Vermont Winter Conference, probably 15 years ago or so.

JM Fortier
Was I telling the same story?

Audience Member
Pretty much. I think you had just come out with “The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming.” I have a signed copy by you at home, but that’s beside the point.

Audience Member
I asked you then about drip irrigation, and I never forgot your response. You referred to it as drip “irritation.” I’m wondering if you ever changed your mind on that, or do you still overhead water?

JM Fortier
That’s a great question. We had to redig our pond three times because it went dry. What can I say? First iteration was a pretty big pond, I would say, not the size of this, but pretty big. It went dry, probably six, seven, or eight years ago. We had the excavator come in, and double the size. Some years ago, it went dry. We went deeper, and double the size.

JM Fortier
So drip “irritation,” because it’s so much more work to put the drips. It’s four drips for 30-inch beds, not two; it’s four with valves. A lot of work, and then if you want to stir up whole things, you need… Sprinklers are so much better. But no choice. That’s being young and bold; you don’t know what’s coming up next.

JM Fortier
I remember when I started in farming, all the market farmers in our CSA network, most of them didn’t have an irrigation system. The CSA would start mid-July. That was pretty much the standard – no irrigation, CSA would start mid-July. CSA now starts mid-May, and all the farms that I know have irrigation and water. There’s been a big evolution.

JM Fortier
I think climate change and the fact that the weather is so sparse makes a difference. There’s a new system now. I don’t know if you’ve heard about Sumi Soakers. Can check those out. They’re really interesting. It’s one tape that can cover four, five, six beds, each side. Pretty uniform coverage. It uses more water than drip, but less than overhead sprinklers. That might be an alternative.

Audience Member
[inaudible 1:00:12]

JM Fortier
It’d be fun to have a fund. No, we don’t help them. We give them the teaching so that they can run and operate their farms. We don’t really teach them about economics, and we don’t work with them for business plans and stuff like that, because I feel that there’s a lot of folks out there doing that.

JM Fortier
Especially for new, younger farmers, my advice is always… because a lot of them try to start without borrowing any money, and it’s not the right way. You’re better off starting with a good plan. We teach them to start with the end in mind.

JM Fortier
Show me the farm at year five. I want to see the design, and I want to see the irrigation system. I want to see the washback. I want to see the greenhouse, and I want you to cost all of that out at year five, and then that’s the money you borrow and you pay it back. That’s as far as I’ll go for now with them.

JM Fortier
It’s a challenge to scale teaching, which is what happened to me, like, how can you be relevant to so many people in different countries and still give something of value without being so specific, because you can’t.

JM Fortier
We’re working on issues like this, but it’d be fun to have funding for these Young Farmers, but I started without it, and I succeeded. I think also there’s this, a lot will try and few will succeed. I think in many businesses, it’s the same; it’s not different in farming.

Audience Member
A compost question….

JM Fortier
The compost is the compost conspiracy.

Audience Member
Compost is not just a source of organic matter and good soil conditioning, but it’s also fertilizing. Have you ever found that repeated application, year after year, can lead to an overabundance of certain nutrients?

JM Fortier
As you’ve seen, we rationalize how we use the compost, so we use a lot of it, but every other year. You saw that in the rotation. So we’re not just putting compost every year everywhere. Most crops don’t get compost. Actually, compost in our system, I think, is really to feed the soil and the heavy feeders, and then we also supplement.

JM Fortier
We’ve been using chicken manure; we’re not super proud of it, but every time we’ve tried something else, it was four or five times the cost. At one point, we’re like, “Well, this is not our battle; we’ll just go with what works.” I want to have pelleted stuff like I see in Europe. It’s amazing.

JM Fortier
But so far in Quebec or in Canada, we don’t have access to everything else, especially products that are made in the US. It’s very hard to get fertilizers up where we are. I’m not going to go down in history as the guy who was the most pristine with farm fertility. I still have 45 years left, in my opinion. Perhaps I’ll start another farm, and this one will be more like that.

Audience Member
I was wondering about transplants. Do you use paper pots, or do you just hand transplant each plant?

JM Fortier
Yeah, we hand transplant pretty much everything. If we have the choice between direct seeding and transplanting, we transplant because we can flip crops better. We have perfect density. We’re really good at growing seedlings.

JM Fortier
The amount of work that goes into transplanting a bed of spinach, four rows, six inches on the row, or beets that we transplant and thin, is a lot of work, but it’s worth it, and it’s just part of the whole process on the farm.

JM Fortier
I have to admit that when I go now, and I’m with the younger kids on the farm, and I try to come and show them how to do it, I’m a bit tired at the end because it’s a lot of maneuvering. The paper pot for us was a no-go from the start. It’s not certifiable in Canada. I’ve seen so many farms where there are papers everywhere.

JM Fortier
The paper pots, they just don’t decompose. They last for years. For us, it’s like, it’s not really what our style is.

Linley Dixon
Any last questions…

Audience Member
I have it. I’ve come into a farm that’s been set up on your system, except from what I’ve seen, and I’m new to it, it’s been 18 months in. We have a lot of value-added products: honey, syrup, and other things.

Audience Member
I’m just curious about your philosophy, your opinion on value-added products, in addition to the direct product, creating a value-added experience for farming the Hudson Valleys. To everyone here, they also do concerts, dances, and farm stays.

JM Fortier
I love it. I’m a big fan. I believe in reverse economics, like if you have 200, or 300 clients, sell them everything. They want eggs, provide eggs if you can. If they want to have a farm-to-table experience, provide that.

JM Fortier
Acquiring new clients takes a lot of work. Once you have your client base, if you want to create event space, that’s not for everyone. But I just feel that the farm is a store. People are so creative right now. It’s amazing. I have the opportunity to get invited to these parties. They’re pretty cool. Farm parties like pizza nights.

JM Fortier
On our place, we have Wednesday night farmer night. When we started, there was one organic farm. Now there’s like 25 organic farms where we live, and every Wednesday we get together at Wednesday [inaudible 1:06:34] Wednesday farmer night.

JM Fortier
All the interns and the farmers, we go for a beer. It’s amazing, because it’s kind of like we revitalized that community for all these small farms. It’s super hopeful. I’ll just end it with that.