The family behind Sawler Gardens has been producing and selling top quality vegetables for 50 years
The packing plant at Sawler Gardens is a hive of activity on a grey day in early March. A crew of men and women sort through tubs of vegetables—carrots, parsnips, turnip, cabbage—selecting and bagging and weighing one of the most popular products that Sawler offers: stew packs. In another section of the plant, staff are grading onions, and in yet another area, carrots are going through the washing process. It’s a normal winter day at the Somerset, Nova Scotia facility, packing out last season’s crops to be shipped to local markets around Atlantic Canada.
Mark Sawler leaves the packing area to talk to me about the business started by his father, Ron, 50 years ago, and now run by Mark and his brothers, Peter and Roger. We sit in a meeting room that has a large window looking out at the packing plant and the employees methodically doing their work. Although it’s a hive of activity beyond the window, Sawler’s isn’t working at peak capacity at this time of year. When harvest begins in late summer or early autumn, the staff routinely clean, grade and pack as much as 100,000 pounds of product a day—enough to fill two tractor trailers with fresh Annapolis Valley vegetables. From around Christmas time until mid to late April, they package about 50,000 pounds each day, then they have a couple months on hiatus from packing, where all the previous year’s crop has been dealt with and they’re just waiting for the new crop to come in.
carrots going through a washing before grading and packing.
Mark’s father Ron Sawler “got bit by the farming bug” at a young age, starting to grow crops at the age of 12. He bought the Somerset farm in 1959 (where he still lives today) and operated it as a dairy farm for five years, “but he’s a natural tinkerer and engineer and inventor and wanted more challenge and variety,” Mark says. In 1964, Ron tore down the dairy barn, and began growing carrots, tomatoes and a few other crops. In 1968, he received funding from the Farm Loan Board to construct a vegetable packing plant, and Sawler Gardens began.
Today, Sawler grows and packs cabbage, carrots—including the popular rainbow carrots—parsnips, turnips, red beets and onions. They have some local farmers who grow for them, but have 750 acres of their own as well. Of that acreage, one third is in rotational cover crops and green manures each year, and crops are planted on the remaining 500 or so acres. Mark says, “Originally we grew tomatoes for some years but got out of them because you can get tomatoes year-round now. It used to be tomatoes were very much a seasonal thing. You bought 10 or 20 pounds in the fall, ate some fresh and preserved others, and that was it pretty much until the following year. Now, you can get fresh tomatoes anytime—not necessarily local, but customers want what they want.”
Of the fresh crops, the most popular by sales are carrots, either as peelers or ‘baby carrots’ or traditional-sized carrots in a variety of packaging sizes, but Sawler has half a dozen different packaging sizes for customers, from the two-pound bag up to 50-pound large carrots. These are all graded as number 1, 2 or cull; the culls are sold as an animal feed for cattle, horses, or to deer hunters, while the top-quality products find homes with markets around the region. All of their products are marketed throughout Atlantic Canada, and while Mark does a little exporting, he says, “There’s a saying in the vegetable industry, ‘the best market is the closest market.’ If you look at the price of vegetables, it’s pretty consistent no matter where you’re buying them, so the further away you go, the more you have to pay for freight to get the same price for your crop.” Likewise, if there’s a problem with a shipment and it’s going to a customer nearby, it’s easier to deal with the issue than if the shipment is going across the country or beyond.
Vegetables have a lot of labour involved in the growing, harvesting and packing processes, and while some automation has been developed to assist in the processes, Mark says there will always be a hand component to vegetable production. The Sawler operation has between 15 and 20 full-time, year-round employees, and another 50 to 55 full-time seasonal. Most of the labour costs come from packing, and many of the employees work in different jobs throughout the year. As Mark explains, “Farming isn’t like a factory where you bring in a guy and train him to do three or four tasks. Our jobs change every month! One month we do planting and then we don’t do that for the rest of the year…and then there are rain days and we do something different while we wait for the sun to come out.”
Mark and Peter Sawler in the onion storeroom. “I’m the farmer, Mark’s the packer,” Peter says. Their brother Roger also works on the farm.
He’s proud of the fact that the farm has a loyal, stable workforce—“There is some turnover, but I have people here who have worked for us for 20, 30 or more years. I am not sure I could run the farm without them,” he says. When it’s suggested that he must be a good boss to have such loyalty in a labour-intense operation, he is modest in his reply. “I am who I am and we’ve been able to work out things when there are issues. I always try to be fair with people.”
Canada is quite different in the vegetable production world because so many farmers harvest and hold their crops in storage facilities until they’re sold. In many European countries, producers can easily dig crops out of the ground in winter months due to milder climates with less snow; in the United States, everything is harvested as needed because of the huge variety of climates and areas with little to no real winter. The Sawler crews are harvesting crops well into November most years, depending, of course, on weather.
All of the crops that Mark and his brothers grow are biennial crops, meaning they produce a root one year (the carrots, parsnips, and such) and from that root they will produce seed the following year (if they were allowed to remain in the ground). This means the crops are a living product—they are harvested and continue to respire in storage, and they actually produce heat all winter, so the storage process includes keeping them cool. The storage facilities are high humidity cold storage buildings, where the temperature is just above freezing and basically puts the vegetables to sleep so that they respire very little and keep their sweetness and flavours better. Mark says, “Vegetables will dehydrate very quickly—put a turnip in your fridge, not in the crisper and not in a bag, and it becomes a sponge in a couple of days! Keep it in the crisper and it lasts longer.” As mentioned at the beginning, although very labour intensive—and hard physical work with little automation to help—the five-pound stew packs are very popular for convenience of use and storage. Mark says, “if you had to buy even a one- or two-pound bag each of carrots, parsnip, turnip and cabbage, it takes up a lot of room in the refrigerator, and people are afraid to lose some to spoilage.” He adds that the stew packs are now more popular than five-pound bags of carrots.
The Annapolis Valley is the agricultural heartland of Nova Scotia, especially for horticultural crops—tree fruits, berries and vegetables. Mark maintains that the soils in the Valley give crops a unique flavour profile, which is especially noticeable in the carrots he grows. “I can tell the difference between our carrots and some from the US, or even PEI, and it all comes down to the soils helping the carrot flavour. You might not notice it as much with our other crops—most people don’t tend to eat parsnips or beets raw—but we’re pretty proud of our sweet, flavourful carrots.”
In recent years, Mark says that retailers have become much more comfortable in dealing with local suppliers, and don’t tend to bring in vegetables from elsewhere that are only a few cents cheaper than what he sells. “I have to be competitive, of course, but that’s fair,” he says. And while technology has made some aspects of his work easier, when it breaks it tends to stop everything until it’s been fixed. “Growing vegetables is like making a chain,” Mark says. “It only takes one bad day in the middle of the chain to make a weak link.” Fortunately, the crops that Sawler Gardens grow and sell are quite economical to produce compared to others, and very forgiving of their environment, unlike other crops that don’t store well and can be ruined very quickly if there’s a problem with transportation.
Asked about Sawler Gardens’ future, Mark says, “We’ve succession-planned from our father to Peter, Roger and me, but not for ourselves. My two children work for the government, making far more than I was at their age, with fewer working hours and more benefits.” He says while there’s a certain amount of security and knowledge that you’re working for yourself, “As for being my own boss…the boss is my customers, who tell me what I have to do to satisfy them, and if I don’t do it and they don’t buy from me, I’m out of luck.” He continues, “I’m not sure I would want to start this business today. We’re still here because we have 50 years of experience and we use something from every year of that experience. A lot of it has been a process of building a bit here and there, and every year we improve a little here or there.”
He adds, “My brothers also have children and there’s potential for a couple of them to come into the business, but this life is not for everyone.”