Fat Chance Farmstead

Mar 25, 2015

By Jonathan Davies

I sat down with Josh Suppan and Jen Valberg of Fat Chance Farmstead at their home in Inverary earlier this month. The thaw was just setting in and the sun streamed through the glass doors to the deck, revealing a vast, snow-covered meadow.

The view is lovely and the home is cozy. Only, it is a rented house on another farmer's land, and it may be a short stay. The farmstead itself is about a five-minute drive away, on a rented piece of land, part of a larger organic farm. Last year, it was a few miles away from their current plot.

Living and farming in rented homes, on rented land, sometimes each in a different location, is not uncommon for farmers, and it is pretty much the norm for those younger and early into their careers. For Suppan and Valberg, it has not stopped them from establishing a farm business, which, now into its third season, is a fixture in the Kingston-area CSA scene.

The CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) concept, which began in the US in the 1980s, is a way for farms to market goods by providing a weekly allotment of its product, for which customers pay in advance at the beginning of the season. While it was initially designed so that customers shared in both the benefits and the risks (meaning that they would go without if the harvest was poor), Valberg and Suppan ensure that customers receive their money's worth by planting a broad diversity of produce and developing value-added items.

Suppan, who got his first farm job at 13 on a peach and kiwi farm, has pruned, packed and picked in orchards of the Okanagan, and worked vegetable fields on Vancouver Island, where year-round harvests are possible. Aside from being the main driver behind Fat Chance's production, he currently works at a couple of local farms, milking cows and working vegetable plots.

Valberg, who has a degree in business and several seasons of farm experience, currently works full-time at Queens University but helps out “evenings, weekends, and vacation days.”

With their combined knowledge and experience, the challenge isn't so much figuring out how to grow food. Beyond the weekly dose of seasonal produce, the pair provide soft fruit and mushrooms, depending on the season, and rustic bread, as part of a food box program that spans 19 weeks in the summer. So far their harvests have been plentiful.

Furthermore, Valberg's business savvy and aesthetic sense serve them well on the marketing front. She designed their logo and does their promotional materials. For last year's season, they posted weekly professional-grade photos of their offerings on their Facebook page.

The biggest hurdle, initially, was around accessing land. In the spring of their first season – 2013 – they had hundreds of dollars of garlic and nowhere to plant it. After a long stretch of knocking on doors and answering ads, they found a place just in time.

Now that they have land, the challenge is in working within the vision that the landowner has for it. “We have had good relationships so far with renting, but lack control over what we can do,” says Valberg. Renting also means learning the lay of the land with each new property, and finicky crops can be hard to grow well when the soil and slope are unfamiliar to the farmer.

It is also hard to invest in equipment like tractors without knowing how they will fit in with the operation over the long term. This has prompted the pair to contract their plow work to other farmers, and that means having the work done on someone else's schedule.

Where they have an advantage is in their breadth of farming knowledge and interest, which has given them flexibility in their vision for what their farm will be once they have their own property. Says Suppan, “Each time we see a farm, we imagine what our business model will be based on what the land offers.”

They take a slow-growth approach, recognizing that with a lack of access to money and debt, their best bet is maintaining a stable income, including that of their off-farm jobs, which will allow them to invest in the business over the long term. As Valberg puts it, “We can't jump in with a 500-member CSA in year one...we can't hire staff and grow as fast as we could if we were on our parents' farm. We have to mobilize the resources that we have.”

Jonathan Davies is a farmer himself. He operates a small farm at Harrowsmith with his partner X.B. Shen. Jonathan is contributing a series of articles called Frontenac Farming Life, which profiles the lives of local farmers who are trying to make a living through farming, navigating struggle and hope. If you would like to have your story considered, please contact Jonathan at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..