Many farmers structure their business around their greatest investment: land. The founder of Similkameen Nurseries flipped that script on its head over the past decade, building a business off a rotation of rented land in British Columbia’s southern interior.

“Land here is expensive. We have had to rely on social capital and trust in our community to piece land together,” said Josh Brown, a first-generation farmer who grew up far to the east in Toronto. 

Building those connections in the Similkameen Valley came naturally. The sun-drenched valley tucked in the mountains east of Vancouver enjoys a strong and welcoming farming community that produces much of the province’s organic fruit, and Brown wanted to be a part of it.

“The decision to farm was emotional, because I genuinely fell in love with the community in the South Okanagan,” he said. “There’s a pretty big economy of knowledge-sharing, and you can plug into that.”

He settled on the nursery business because he saw the demand for high-quality trees, and he attributes his success to support from an innovative community of farmers. 

“You are starting a farm in farm country. There were nurserymen and women in the valley who were able to mentor me. Packing houses were referring my trees, and growers were inspecting them,” Brown said. 

He worked with a land-matching program run by Young Agrarians, a Canadian nonprofit organization that provides resources to young and new regenerative farmers. One critical resource: free legal assistance on land leases.

It’s a win-win, Brown said.

“Someone’s extremely expensive investment is maintained by us,” he said. “And the soil health will be higher when we’ve left than when we started.”

The leasing model allowed a young business to invest in inventory, equipment and the skilled and talented employees needed to support growth. 

“When we started farming, land was affordable enough that you could purchase land, if you had the credit, and have a return on investment. Now, it may not even be viable to buy land,” he said. “But financially speaking, where you allocate sparse resources when you want to start a farm, or grow a farm that didn’t inherit a ton of land, matters. It is more important to build cashflow, build inventory and build wealth for your employees.” 

Today, Similkameen Nursery is one of the largest tree fruit nurseries in Canada, employing about 40 people year-round. The nursery produces about 75,000 finished trees a year and a similar number of bench grafts for other nurseries and growers who prefer to raise their own trees. 

What’s next for the 14-year-old business depends on where British Colombia’s fruit growers see economic opportunity. 

“We as a nursery, just like orchardists, are struggling to understand what to plant to service a market that is struggling to decide what to plant that will be profitable,” he said. “The tough part of this business is guessing ahead.”

A farm on the move

Rotating ground is common in nursery production, but Similkameen Nurseries takes mobile farming to the next level. Their office? Built into a fifth-wheel trailer. Their trellis system for supporting young trees? Rolled up and reused. Their fertigation system? On a trolley. 

Brown wanted to automate his drip irrigation to save on labor costs, but he operates some blocks off-grid and without the ability to invest in infrastructure. When Good Fruit Grower visited last summer, he showed us a DIY system, with Wi-Fi beaming from the fifth-wheel office to an Orbit B-hyve remote irrigation controller. He can take the entire system to new ground. 

Same with the three-tier trellis system, which they designed themselves to support young apple trees. While it cost more upfront, the reusable system saves 11 hours of labor per row of 1,000 trees, as workers clip trees to the wires rather than staking them with bamboo, Brown said. It also saves $20,000 in bamboo over the expected lifespan of the system.

“It removes a job nobody likes and helps us grow more consistent, quality product,” he said. 

The primary downside to his business model is that lenders don’t know how to value it.

“The one huge challenge of not owning land is unsecured capital,” Brown said. “Lenders have a very difficult time valuing inventory.”

The formal land leases he has in place help with that issue, but it also gives him some needed flexibility to plan ground for future production. That challenge echoes across nurseries everywhere, as growers reckon with rising costs and low returns.

The nimbleness built into his business, compared to larger U.S. nurseries built around economies of scale, does provide an advantage during this era of market uncertainty, Brown said, but only to a point.

In British Columbia, stone fruit plantings have been on the rise as apple prices have struggled. Late cherries seem to be doing well, and peach and nectarine growers in the South Okanagan continue to be profitable. 

“We have an easier time pivoting, perhaps because we only grow shy of 100,000 trees a year, but at any scale, abrupt change can cause real shocks to the system,” he said. “Right now, our nursery still has capacity to produce a quarter-million trees and a million bench grafts per year, but we can’t hold that same scale for the next two or three years with this kind of uncertainty.” •