Local farmer leaves corporate world, discovers love of livestock
by Greg Anderson
If You Go:
Breakneck Acres
2743 Summit Road, Ravenna, Ohio
Open on Wednesdays, 1 – 7 p.m.
Owners: Ami Gignac and Tim Fox
http://www.localfoodmarketplace.com/breakneck/index.html
Breakneck Acres is a 35-acre self-sustainable farm in Ravenna, Ohio owned by Ami Gignac and Tim Fox. After four years in business, they have moved from growing vegetables to producing humanely-raised, pasture-raised chickens, hogs and cattle. Sales are up 65 percent from last year at this point in the season. Ami answered questions about how the farm has evolved and the lessons she has learned as a small farmer.
One of the owners of Breakneck Acres, Ami Gignac, smiles as she talks about how much she has come to love raising livestock. “I didn’t realize I had such a passion for animal husbandry,” Gignac said. Photo by Stephanie Weiss
Q: Is the farm your main business and source of income, or do you have supplemental income?
A: The farm is my business full-time, and my husband owns a business that he will do contract work part-time. We’re not in a position yet where we’re profitable, but I will argue that five years ago when I got here, Tim was doing some things as a hobby that he was probably losing or expensing $15,000 a year. Now, that’s okay in a hobby, you know? I mean people do that, like sailing or whatever…
But my goal was to quit the corporate job I had, and I thought, ‘I’m going to at least make this break even, and we have in fact been able to do that. So that’s a huge improvement and, you know, we’ll see. I mean, you’re not going to get rich doing this, but it’s not always about the money, right?
I came from a fast-paced corporate environment…I was an executive for a mining company and health was taking a toll. I was 35 years old and I was probably 70 pounds heavier than you see me today, and my blood pressure was about 160 over 110. I was killing myself, and for what? A six figure salary and a title? And I thought, ‘That’s the dream, right?’ So I just had to take a moment, and I thought, ‘Alright. I’m gonna go back to the farm and chill for a moment.’ And it’s been a four-year minute.
But I was able to take my experience as an executive manager and utilize that in this small-scale entrepreneurial situation…We have a balance sheet here, we have a profit and loss statement. I manage each piece and part. If somebody’s not pulling their weight, we have to figure out, “Is this possible?’
Chickens gather around Ami Gignac as she refreshes their water supply. Gignac converted an old school bus to a chicken coop, christening it the “Free Range Rover.” Photo by Stephanie Weiss
Q: Because food produced by small farmers is often more expensive, do you face “sticker shock” with your customers?
A: You always have the new customer who clearly has sticker shock, and one of the neat things for me at the farmers market is, if they verbalize that shock, there’s always someone standing right there who says, ‘Oh. Oh no, you have to invest the money in this; it’s worth it.’ And so really it becomes word of mouth.
“Our goal is to service that 10 percent that’s willing to make a budget and part of their budget is for local, sustainable food. And yeah, it’s higher, but It’s all about making choices. I’ll have someone come up to me and complain that the price of our eggs is too high, but they’re holding a $6 Starbucks. It’s all about priorities, right? And I’m okay with that. It used to bother me, but now I’m just looking for the 10 percent.
A Barred Rock hen peers out from her laying pen in the “Free Range Rover” chicken coop. Customers can find fresh eggs and pasture-raised meats at the Haymaker Farmers Market in Kent on Saturdays, or at the farm which is open on Wednesdays from 1 to 7 p.m. Photo by Stephanie Weiss
Q: So, your husband convinced you to do chickens…
A: Yeah. And hogs, and cattle.
Q: So, how do you feel about it now?
A: I am the mother of 800….I am the one up in the middle of the night laying with Maybelle as she’s delivering piglets. I didn’t realize I had such a passion for animal husbandry. I didn’t have a dog or a cat as a kid. I just didn’t know; I never was really that interested. But there’s something that happened once they got here. So I’ve become meticulous about their feed, and making the recipes for what they eat, and really just caring for them.
Q: Were vegetables once part of your operation?
A: Yeah, but it’s a small part of the deal now. You know, I’m here alone. I’ve got a little bit of help, but (the livestock) has really taken over my time. So the produce is just a side thing now. And with all the rain this year, most of our stuff got flooded out anyway. We’re pretty thankful that we aren’t focused heavily on the produce this year.
Q: Does the weather make it tougher for the livestock?
A: It does, and it’s tougher to manage them and that can be tricky at times. You know, we’re very worried about hay. I mean, we should have already had our first and second cutting of hay. We just barely got off our first, and that’s unheard of in this area. And so everybody’s very nervous. It’s just been rain, rain, rain, rain, rain.
Our grains have been doing okay, so we’ll be okay. They do fine with the rain. It’s a little tougher with the chickens, but they do okay. The hogs love it. They may not look good; there’s a lot of mud everywhere, but they love it.
Hogs wallow in their mudholes to find relief from the midday heat. “The hogs love (the recent rain). They may not look good – there’s a lot of mud everywhere – but they love it,” Gignac said. Photo by Stephanie Weiss
Q: How did you start the farm?
A: You know, this farm was actually purchased as a hobby. Tim had driven by it many times, and let me just say, it was just a property. It had lain fallow for 15 years, there were buildings and barns that were collapsing, and he said, ‘I want to buy that property; I have a vision,’ and I’m like, ‘Um….okay.’
And then he cleaned up the property and planted some row crops like wheat, corn and soybeans. He said, ‘I want to do this like my grandfather did and grow it organically.’ I helped him get certified organic, and so it was a nice hobby, but we were losing money…a lot of money. And you can lose money doing hobbies…and I was okay with that, but when I got involved full-time I knew that we should find a way to break even.
So, Tim had the equipment and so we were ready there. I looked at the overall picture and said, ‘How can we make this more profitable?’ And the first step was, ‘Okay, we have these small grains that we’re harvesting and we’re taking them to an elevator down the road and then those guys are reselling them to people who are then reselling them to make flour, cornmeal, etc. Why can’t we do the milling here and sell direct to the consumer?’
Young hogs from the first litter raised by Ami Gignac enjoy the open pasture on the 35-acre farm. Photo by Stephanie Weiss
We then started growing special varieties of these grains, the corn and the wheat specifically, that were good for baking. And we invested in a stone mill handmade in Austria and we used that to then mill these grains and make the whole grain flour and the cornmeal to sell directly to the consumer. And now we’re cutting out that whole distribution chain and we’re able to put those profits back in our pockets.
So that was our first step in the evolution of this being a business. And with that milling of the grains, we met a lot of new people and we met a lot of new customers, and we started doing farmers markets and we started opening here at the farm. And we had a lot of byproduct from milling the grain, and some of it was healthy, nutritious stuff — wheat germ and bran as we were sifting out a fine flour for folks — and I was composting it. And so the simple thought was, ‘Let’s just get 50 chickens. And then we can make some feed from those by-products.’ And then that morphed into 800 chickens.
So that is kind of the slow road of how we got here. And by using those byproducts I got very interested in the science of feeding poultry. I worked on my own recipe to do that and so we do make the feed here on the farm from everything we grow.
Cornish Cross chickens wait to be taken outside to join a new flock. These two-week-old birds are being raised for sale for their meat. Photo by Stephanie Weiss
Q: What other lessons have you learned?
A: You have to be willing to take risks. I’m a businesswoman. I have an Excel spreadsheet for every single animal out here. Tim is an iron worker by trade, so he in his heart is a risk-taker. So he’s going to push me to take risks, while I’m chasing him around with a laptop trying to calculate the internal rate of return for cattle, but you know, it works because we’re a good team.
And so in October of 2013 there was a bad storm here and we were kind of pent up in the house and I took a shower and I came out and Tim said, ‘I just bought three hogs.’ Not the best way to make a business decision, right? But the neat thing I think is that he just pushes me. And so then, for me it was, ‘Let’s make this work, and if it doesn’t work we’ll just cut it out of the chain.’ But it does work, and so the evolution of the livestock has really just been growing the grains here, being able to feed them, utilizing them to fertilize the ground and having a full circle.
Q: What kind of learning curve did you go through?
A: You don’t know what you don’t know…. I will never forget having baby chicks and having a thermometer and making sure the temperature was 90 degrees, and if it was raining making sure no rain was getting in, and always kind of in this panic. And what was a huge learning curve for me was that these animals don’t need me. Really, I need them in a sense.
Young chicks huddle together to stay warm on the farm at Breakneck Acres in Ravenna, Ohio. Photo by Stephanie Weiss
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Let them let you know there’s a problem, and they will. You know, the rooster’s going to appear when there’s stranger danger. If their water has run out, I know because I see how they behave.
I think the other thing I learned from a business standpoint is: You have to listen to the customer. Our passion in the beginning was the small grains and the milling. And that will get us baking. But people don’t bake. You know, I had this business plan and we were going to make millions! We didn’t.
What I realized is that this community didn’t really have a good source for humanely-raised, pasture-raised meats. There are a few people doing eggs but not at the volume this community wants to consume. And so it was a good fit there also. And as I mentioned earlier, I didn’t know I had it in me for animal husbandry, but I do.
Q: What’s something else that you learned when you were getting started?
A: I think the biggest mess-up…was making some assumptions about the customer base. Deciding to become a small-scale farmer because it’s just so cool — ‘I’m going to raise chickens and have bees and do flowers’ — right? I hear this all the time. But you really have to sit back and say, ‘Okay. What can the market bear?’ If this is a business, we need to be able to sell what we make. It’s not about what you love. So if you say to me, ‘I’d really like to get into this,’ you have to understand what’s going on around you and what your market will bear. That’s been one of the more interesting things.
A freshly-laid egg waits to be gathered in the “Free Range Rover” chicken coop. Photo by Stephanie Weiss
KSU ASNE 