Jon Faulknor and Kristen Holyoake run a small Bancroft farm that includes a market garden and offers a variety of meat.
A little bit of everything
Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum
BANCROFT — Out of the hardscrabble Bancroft landscape, Jon Faulknor, 46, and Kristen Holyoake, 37, have carved out a sustainable market-garden and fresh-meat enterprise renowned for luscious lettuce and pasture-raised Jersey beef and Kunekune pork.
The couple only moved onto the 75-acre spread three years ago but that was enough time to make an impact — and find themselves honoured with a Farm Family Excellence award from OMAFRA minister Lisa Thompson in October.
“It’s still a work in progress, but we’ve become the largest producer of vegetables in Bancroft area,” Holyoake said at Everlily Maples Farm.
They’re known for their carrots and beets, garlic, spinach, potatoes and other vegetables. Faulknor adds that their top seller is a salad mix containing “four or five lettuces, depending on what I put in there. There’s a red and green sweet crisp lettuce, and there’s a red and green butter crunch lettuce. I wash it and bag it up in half-pound bags and people flock to it.”
He adds, “It’s fresh-picked, locally grown and the people are getting two-and-a-half weeks of shelf life in the fridge out of it.”
They retail almost all of their produce at a local farmers’ market, a local spa and at another retailer located about an hour’s drive away. A smaller quantity is sold through a temporary farm stand at the end of their laneway, though they hope to increase farmgate sales with the planned construction of a permanent stand in 2024.
The farm income sustains the couple and their three children, though Holyoake also has a part time job as a school bus driver. “It works well with the farm because I’m only gone for a few hours a day, and then I’m here all day to do whatever we need to do around the farm,” she says.
They also run a 350-tap maple sugarbush and sell out of syrup every spring.
Their diverse pursuits extend to the meat side of the business: Chickens, rabbits and water buffalo (eight of those creatures) are all raised on the farm, as are beef and hogs. They have a paddock with about 15 Jersey cattle for beef and about 30 Kunekune pigs for pork. The smaller stature of those two breeds fit well with the operation and are sold fresh to customers, by the half, after slaughter at an approved butcher. Holyoake explains that the smaller animals are appreciated by customers “who don’t have room to fit half a Chevrolet in their freezer.”
“Jersey isn’t a profitable breed for people on a commercial scale, but because we’re small scale, we can still use quality over quantity,” she adds. “Our Jerseys are really well known for the flavor of their meat, and they’re nice and tender because we slaughter them at around 12 months.”
On the vegetable side, they haven’t delved into the “community supported agriculture” (CSA) model of produce marketing. The technique relies on signing up subscribers who pay a flat upfront fee to receive a new box of vegetables each week. Faulknor and Holyoake did supply some vegetables to a small CSA producer who was running short this year, but they don’t see much utility in it for themselves.
CSA marketing “is much more of a big-city thing” and aimed at higher income individuals, Faulknor observed, adding he knows of a small-town CSA grower who has to deliver veggie boxes into Toronto to make a go of it.
Holyoake says they’re trying to maintain a balance of earning an income while producing food people in their community can afford. “We don’t want it to be out of reach of people that deserve to be eating good quality food.”
They both found their way to farming without being raised on farms.
Faulknor, whose parents ran an Ontario campground, moved out west, became a self-confessed ski bum, and started growing vegetables from an apartment balcony in Victoria, B.C., before graduating to larger gardens. Holyoake grew up in rural Ontario and got into horses at the age of 8. She later worked on a neighbour’s Angus beef farm and became a breeder of Nigerian dwarf goats on the small property she and Faulknor occupied before moving to Bancroft. The little dairy goats are still part of their collection of animals.
Jon Faulknor
