These are not words you’d use to describe a typical farm.
“We’re a little like Steve Jobs working in the garage,” says Logie Cassells, managing director of LaHave Forests, a three-year-old start-up that’s partly a farm, partly a forestry operation, and mostly a very different approach to agriculture.
In bringing up Jobs’ name, Cassells isn’t just talking about his company’s bid to profitably grow the little-known haskap berry, but also its approach to innovation and its bold vision of creating an entirely new industry that could help revitalize Nova Scotia agriculture.
“When Steve Jobs was tinkering on the Apple 1, he might have had an idea that one day there would be products like the iPhone or iPad, but there was no certainty,” says Cassells, a former investment fund manager from the UK.
“And there’s no certainty for what we’re doing. We just have an educated hunch that this berry is going to be very big in the next 20 years.”
The story about LaHave Forests is only partly about haskaps and that hunch. It’s also a tale that would resonate with those who take an investor’s approach to innovation: Buy an under-priced asset and find creative ways to unlock its true value.
In this case, the asset is Nova Scotia farmland, particularly in the area near the LaHave River, which runs through the province’s South Shore region and empties into the Atlantic near Lunenburg. And while it certainly sells for far less than farmland in southern Ontario or B.C.’s Fraser Valley, its value depends on your perspective.
“It pains me when I drive through Nova Scotia and I see these beautiful fields with wonderfully productive soils being used for hay,” says Liam Tayler, LaHave’s commercial director who, like most company officials, is also from the UK.
“I recently talked to this fellow who said, ‘I don’t even think I’ll hay my fields next year because I don’t have the infrastructure and I’m not getting the returns.’”
Both men are accidental Nova Scotians. Tayler, 36, was taking a break from business by crewing on a tall ship when he met a girl from Nova Scotia. Cassells, whose father is Scottish and mother American, was preparing to emigrate to the U.S. when his wife suggested they check out Nova Scotia, where she had worked one year as a teenager.
Neither was thinking of farming when they arrived. Cassells had just ended a successful 15-year run in London’s financial district and was keen to pursue his love of gardening by starting a garden design company – which is what he did after the couple and their four-year-old daughter moved to the picturesque village of Chester, midway between Halifax and Lunenburg, in 2002.
He soon discovered his new home “is a fantastic place to grow things” thanks to a 210-day growing season and nearly 60 inches of annual rainfall – and he couldn’t believe the price of prime land. (Although prices are rising, good-quality land can still be found for around $500 an acre, says Tayler)
“It’s not just cheap, but the soil is very good quality and high in organic matter,” says Cassells.
“When Simon and I did the research, we concluded that Nova Scotia is one of the best places in the world to grow permanent crops, such as grapes, hops or berries.”
Simon is Simon Fineman, CEO of Timbmet, the U.K.’s largest importer of hardwoods, who became a convert to sustainable forestry after his company was accused of destroying Brazilian rain forests by sourcing mahogany from that country. Fineman was in the process of creating a sustainable forestry operation in Ghana when he met Cassells through a mutual friend in 2008.
“I told him, ‘You’re mad to try that in Ghana. Come to Nova Scotia,’” recalls Cassells.
After a four-month feasibility study, LaHave Forests (lahaveforests.com) was created in 2009, eventually encompassing 450 acres on three sites. Part would be planted to high-value timber such as Black Walnut and Cherry, but some land would be used for other crops to generate cash flow while the trees grew to harvestable size. Although they weren’t exactly sure what those crops would be, Cassells and Fineman were confident.
“It’s like Warren Buffett says: Invest in undervalued assets,” says Cassells, 50. “You don’t know whether you’ll realize that value tomorrow or a decade from now. But you’ll sleep well at night. After all, if you’re paying 30 cents on the dollar for a particular asset and your business model proves to be wrong, then the price of failure will be minimal. And on the other side, if you are successful, the payoff can be considerable.”
As part of that approach, LaHave developed a multi-pronged business plan. It grows and delivers fresh produce for area restaurants; offers soil testing and soil enhancements such as biochar and compost tea; and is experimenting with biomass crops such as miscanthus. But the main focus was to find something with value-added potential – and that turned out to be haskap.
“I’d love to tell you a nice story about wandering around the Tokyo airport and picking up a bag of haskap berries,” says Cassells. “But the truth was I used Google. It was Feb. 10, 2010 and I was looking for new types of berries. The three that came out were acai, goji and haskap. Acai is a palm tree and won’t grow here, and goji we tried, but they tasted awful so we ripped them out. But I had a good feeling about haskap.”
That’s partly because, as Google told him, haskap berries have a huge market potential. In Japan, they are highly prized both for their taste and high levels of antioxidants, vitamin C, and other nutrients (earning it the moniker of “the fruit of life longevity”).
Cassells ordered some plants bred at the University of Saskatchewan, which has been crossing Japanese and Russian cultivars with native varieties (the cold-hardy plants grow well in most of the country) to produce high-yielding plants that produce fruit with firm skins (essential for mechanical harvesting) and just the right blend of sweet and tart. Cassells, Tayler and farm manager Sez Seraphin (another UK ex-pat) then did something few farmers would dream of doing – they decided not to nurture the little haskap plants.
“In 2010, we put in a one-acre trial plot in a little cleared area in a nearby forest,” says Tayler. “We came back a year later and the weeds were up to our waist, but the haskaps were fruiting and looking very, very happy even with this competition. So we thought, ‘If it can survive this, it can survive anything.’”
At 1,000 plants per acre, that’s roughly $4,000 for the plant stock alone, but Tayler says it was worth it to find out if these Prairie-bred cultivars were suited to the Maritimes. Satisfied on that score, they took the opposite approach after planting 20 acres of haskaps in 2011. Both Tayler, a biologist by training, and Cassells are advocates of using “biodynamic” organic methods to enhance soil quality. The orchard (slated to reach 80 acres in 2014) uses clamshells as mulch to add calcium and seawater minerals and to raise soil pH; biochar to improve water retention and nutrient uptake; and compost tea instead of chemical fertilizers.
There are plans to convert an old farmhouse into a facility to turn miscanthus into biochar and the company has become a distributor for a device that uses air power instead of water pumps to make compost tea.
Newbie farmers on a start-up farm growing a little-known crop using unconventional production methods. It seems like a lot to take on, but Tayler says they’re simply trying to produce the highest possible quality using the most promising technologies available.
“I can understand that people might be skeptical, but you have to look at what we’re doing,” says Tayler. “Take compost tea, for example. This has been used for generations where you put compost in water and then spray that water onto plants to increase yield. By using all these technologies together, we feel we have come up with a very effective way of creating high-yielding plants in an organic environment.”
The early results have been promising. The first haskap harvest this summer (the berries ripen in June) produced yields several times higher than those of first-year plantings in Saskatchewan, which is home to most of Canada’s small haskap acreage. That suggested Nova Scotia-grown haskaps would reach full maturity faster than on the prairies, and may exceed prairie yields, which top out at around 8,000 pounds per acre.
But once in full production, where will all these berries go?
Once again, the idea was to first assess the value of the berry and then use a multi-pronged approach to unlock that value.
Haskap, in Cassells’ words, “ticked all the boxes.” It can be marketed on its taste and rich purple colour as well as its nutritional properties. Unlike blueberries, it doesn’t grow well in warmer climates, so potential competition is limited. But it shares blueberry’s ability to be used in a wide range of foods and beverages.
To encourage product development, LaHave has been supplying berries to a host of entrepreneurs in the province, including a juice maker, two wineries, a brewery, a liqueur operation, a gourmet ice-cream chain, a honey producer, restaurants, and a baker. The idea is to get berries into the hands of creative people and let them “come up with fantastic things,” says Cassells.
LaHave is also encouraging other Nova Scotians to grow haskaps. It distributes plants at near cost, shares its growing methods with new growers, and will manage orchards (either on its land or on an individual’s property). Longer term, the plan is to create a co-op that will handle marketing and sales, and also allow smaller growers access to a mechanical harvester and freezer space.
“We’re trying to encourage a haskap industry in Nova Scotia,” says Tayler.
What they don’t want to be is producers of a commodity, even though there is high demand for the berries and the chance to earn premium prices. Haskaps have long been cultivated in northern Japan and the most prized berries can fetch as much as $30 per pound. Cassells keeps a close eye on the Asian market but his focus is on products. Anyone who goes into a venture like this with the goal of just selling unprocessed berries has “the wrong mindset,” he says.
“If you look at who’s made the most money in agriculture in the past 30 years, it’s been the wine guys – and the reason is that they don’t grow grapes, they grow bottles of wine,” says Cassells. “Our business model is based on healthy soil and growing a healthy berry but it’s also based on owning the brand and receiving the profits that come with the value-added component.”
Both Cassells and Tayler admit LaHave’s approach to farming is very different, but say that’s not a bad thing.
“One of the strengths of not having a history as farmers is that we haven’t done things the same way for years and years,” says Tayler. “We have a group of individuals with different backgrounds who, when we look at an opportunity or an issue, come up with different ways of solving it. We’re not stuck in our ways, and we’re very open to new and innovative ideas to farm. We’re always thinking of ways to make it more profitable.”