Farm stories
The berry that changed the plan
A fourth-generation farm near Beaverlodge needed a way to make the land pay for the next generation. The answer turned out to be very small, very blue and grown 20,000 plants at a time.
Land in Alberta has become expensive enough that inheriting a farm is no longer the same thing as being able to afford one.
That is the problem Broken Tine Orchard set out to solve. The farm sits southwest of Beaverlodge, on the western edge of the County of Grande Prairie, where the last of the farmland runs out before British Columbia. The Alde family homesteaded the land in 1926, and Kreg Alde farms it as the fourth generation.
About 2,300 acres are in production. Canola, wheat, feed barley and malt barley are the crops that have always paid the bills.
But succession planning forced a harder question.
If the next generation was going to take this on, the land would need to produce more per acre than commodity grain alone could deliver.
A succession plan that needed a new idea
So Kreg and Lee-Anne planted something different.
In 2011 they put a haskap orchard into the original homestead land, the same ground Kreg's great-grandfather cleared. Today the orchard runs to roughly 20,000 plants.
Haskap is worth understanding if you have not met it. It is a deep blue berry, tart and aromatic, with one of the highest antioxidant concentrations of any berry grown in this country. It also harvests in July, which matters more than it sounds: the haskap harvest slots into a gap in the grain calendar rather than competing with it.
One farm. Two businesses. No collision.
The orchard is not the only change underway. Broken Tine is moving toward regenerative practices across the operation, with the goal of making the soil as healthy as the farm can get it. That is a long project measured in decades rather than seasons, and it is being taken on by a family already thinking four generations back and at least one generation forward.
Six years of opening the gate
Agritourism is now a significant part of the business, and Broken Tine has been welcoming visitors for about six years. It is still growing, and the stated ambition is to widen the range of things a visitor can actually do on the farm.
Three experiences are on offer today.
U-pick. Visitors walk the rows and pick their own haskap berries, which is the most direct introduction to a fruit most Albertans have never tasted.
Wine tasting. A sit-down tasting of the farm's own haskap wines.
Wine tours. The tasting, plus the explanation of how the wine is actually made, from berry to bottle, on the farm.
What makes the tour work is that nothing about it is staged. The vinting, the bottling and the labelling all happen on the farm. When Kreg walks a group through the process, he is walking them through his own week.
What happens to a berry after it is picked
Broken Tine is not only an orchard. It is a processing operation, and this is where the economics of the succession plan really start to work.
Rather than selling fruit and letting someone else capture the value, the family turns haskap into finished products and partners with local companies to do it. Distillers, brewers and restaurants across the region all work with Broken Tine berries.
Wine and mead
Made from haskap, on the farm, with the vinting, bottling and labelling all done on site. Available through the Broken Tine website, at the farm itself, and in liquor stores around the Grande Prairie area. The mead, made with haskap and honey, has taken an Alberta Beverage Award.
Ice cream topping
Made with fresh haskap and supplied to established prairie ice cream makers. Foothills Creamery turns it into Haskap Prairie Berry, and Village Ice Cream has featured Broken Tine haskap as well. The resulting tubs turn up in grocery stores that most shoppers would never connect to a farm outside Beaverlodge.
Friceys
Friceys Prairie Fruit Pops are made on the farm, with a shell built from fresh local berries: haskap, raspberry, saskatoon and sour cherry. They are the newest product in the range and the most portable expression of the whole idea, a snack that tastes like the region it came from. Friceys are stocked in most local grocery stores and distributed throughout Western Canada.
Every one of these products starts with ingredients the family sources deliberately. The mission Kreg describes is consistent across all of them: promote local flavour, and add value to local ingredients rather than shipping them away raw.
The part that is harder than growing
Broken Tine is successful and still growing. That does not mean it is easy.
The biggest challenge is not agronomy.
It is marketing.
Kreg is direct about it. The farm needs better strategies for making people aware that the products exist and that the agritourism experiences are open to them. Producing something excellent and getting people to know about it are two entirely different skill sets, and only one of them is taught on a farm.
Growing the fruit was never the hard part.
There is a second problem, and it is regional rather than individual.
Banff and Jasper pull visitors by reputation alone. The Grande Prairie region does not yet have enough agritourism experiences clustered together to make people plan a trip around them. A single excellent farm is a stop. Several within driving distance of each other become a reason to come.
What the region needs next
Kreg's suggestion is glamping.
His reasoning is worth repeating, because it reframes who the agritourism visitor actually is. The people most interested in a farm experience are generally not looking forward to a hotel room. They want to be in the landscape. Right now, the Peace region has very little that lets them stay in it overnight.
Accommodation changes the arithmetic of a visit.
A day trip is one purchase. An overnight stay is dinner, breakfast, a longer tour and considerably more time spent in a rural community.
As an active member of Agritourism Alberta, Kreg has two asks of the association.
- Help member farms build marketing strategies that drive real traffic to the farm gate.
- Partner with the Grande Prairie Regional Tourism Association to promote local businesses across the region together, rather than one farm at a time.
Both point at the same underlying truth. Agritourism experiences and local food consumption are among the most practical growth levers available to small farms, and awareness is the bottleneck. Associations and tourism agencies have channels that an individual farm simply does not.
Take the drive west
Kreg's closing invitation is open to anyone: come and see Broken Tine, visit the other farms in the area, and buy the food made in the region.
The Peace Country, and Alberta generally, is full of local flavours that most people have not encountered yet. And there is a mechanism buried in that invitation worth naming plainly.
When Albertans choose the local option, retailers notice.
Demand is the argument that gets a regional product onto a national shelf. Every purchase is a small vote for what a grocery store decides to stock next year.
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Broken Tine Orchard
Haskap U-pick in July, wine tasting and wine tours at a fourth-generation family farm southwest of Beaverlodge, with the Rocky Mountain foothills in the background.
Also from this farm: haskap wine and mead, ice cream topping, Friceys Prairie Fruit Pops, bulk frozen haskap, plus canola, wheat and barley.
Haskap harvest is a July event and the U-pick window is short. Tastings and tours are booked ahead through the farm's website. One phone call before you set out saves a long drive.
A farm that plants 20,000 haskap bushes to keep itself in the family is not making a small bet.
It is making a long one.
Every visit, and every dollar spent at the farm gate, is part of what makes it pay off.
Taste the Alberta Harvest
Meet the growers in your region, walk their fields, and taste the summer harvest where it is grown.