A John Deere Publication

Three people in black shirts standing in front of a meat counter.

Vincent Blondin, his wife Josiane Prince, and Vincent's mother Nancy Kirk are following Blondin's blueprint to direct market the beef they produce on their 180-year-old family farm through their farm store and butcher shop.

Agriculture, Livestock/Poultry January 01, 2025

Beef on the Outskirts

Young Quebec couple builds a thriving freezer beef business at the edge of Montreal's northern suburbs.

by Lorne McClinton

Is it possible to develop a profitable beef operation on small acreage in modern times? Vincent Blondin, his wife Josiane Prince, and his mother Nancy Kirk, at Ferme Kirk in Sainte-Sophie, Quebec, are proving it is. Blondin developed a business plan while getting his agronomy degree, as a blueprint to build a direct marketing beef operation for their 180-year-old farm. After four years of operation, they're selling all the Charolais beef they can raise to consumers in the adjacent Montreal metropolitan region through their farm store and their Facebook store. It's exceeded all their expectations.

"We launched our business just before Covid hit," Blondin says. "It caused our sales to skyrocket overnight. People were scared they weren't going to be able to have enough food, so they started coming to the farm to buy it."

"While we still don't have a website, we get a lot of business through our Facebook store," Josiane Prince says. "A food influencer bought a half a beef from us and her post about our store went completely viral. My phone blew up for a week; we had people coming from up to three hours away to buy halves of beef."

They quickly developed a loyal customer base with lots of repeat customers and friends of customers. Part of this, Prince says, is due to the high quality of the meats they sell. They are also very conscious of the price point for their products. They make sure their ground beef, especially, remains affordable for struggling families in their community.

Even the offal, organ meat, and bones that similar operations in more remote areas struggle with, weren't a problem for long. Montreal's North Shore suburbs are less than half an hour away. That gives them access to a large clientele that seek out these specialty cuts. As soon as it became known Ferme Kirk had them, they started to fly off the shelves because they are so hard to find elsewhere.

"The problem was we were getting a constant stream of customers stopping by our home looking for beef," Josiane Prince says. "We decided to build a butcher shop so we could have space away from our house where people could come to buy our meat."

Getting their facility built wasn't easy. One of the biggest problems was the location they planned to build on was zoned agricultural. They were able to get an exemption by making sure they produce at least 50% of the products they sell. The construction process during the pandemic also came with its own challenges.

Above. The pandemic inspired many people to try to source their food directly from farmers. It caused demand for Ferme Kirk's beef to explode. Demand increased so much faster than anticipated that they're scrambling to keep up.

A solid plan. None of their success came by accident. Blondin had researched and mapped out every step of the way. He started by investing in himself. Besides his agronomy degree he has an agriculture business management diploma and a certificate in animal production. He's also a licensed butcher.

Currently they have a 25-head purebred Charolais cow/calf operation that are raised under a grass-fed beef protocol. Their land base is very limited, so they buy hay and silage from other farms in the region, and top it off with a small percentage of distillers' grain donated by a local micro-brewery. Animals are custom slaughtered at a large processing facility in Terrebonne just 30-minutes down the road.

Their direct marketing operation has been so successful that they now sell all the animals they produce on their land base. This too was part of their long term strategy to build the market first and then expand their production to meet the demand.

"Perhaps we were too conservative with our growth forecast," Blondin says. "Our small land base is a big limitation. We'd initially talked about buying more land, but it's very expensive, so we decided we'd build our store and butcher shop first to generate cash flow. We've arranged to lease adjacent land from a neighbor to expand our calf production. In the meantime, we're buying Charolais cattle from other farmers using the same grass-fed protocol to meet our shortfall.

"In the long term we're considering buying additional land to increase our herd as well as contracting other farmers to raise the cattle we need," Prince says. "Our growth has happened so much faster than we anticipated that all options are on the table." ‡