Michael Doucette got an early start as a farmer in Bloomfield, PE. Mike’s grandfather, who made his living from farming, greatly influenced his grandson’s interest in growing food. When he was as little as six years old, Michael started selling yellow beans to a neighbour. As time passed he sold his mixed veggies around the entire neighbourhood by wheelbarrow. Eventually, he went to college to study electronics and he managed to pay his way through school by farming intensely through the summer months – hiring his three sisters to do harvesting and weeding.
Afterwards, Michael spent nine and a half years working for the telephone company in Nova Scotia before moving back to rural life on the Island. "I suffered in Nova Scotia because I didn't have a place to grow. It was a relief moving back to the Island and buying some land," he explains. First, Michael and his wife Linda purchased a house on 1.5 acres of land just 12 minutes outside Charlottetown in Johnston's River, PE. This provided just enough room for a garden and it wasn't long before the wheelbarrow emerged again, parked at the end of the driveway with veggies for sale. With the demand for his vegetables increasing, they bought their current 97-acre property with 54 acres of prime flat farm land at Johnston's River in 2002, and have been cultivating it since.
While Michael continued to grow mixed vegetables on his new farm, he also began to look for more specialized farming business ventures. That led to a nine-year partner project growing high generation seed potatoes. He sat on the fence about organic certification for a while, but when his partner in the seed potato business retired, Michael was happy to abandon the chemicals and began adopting more and more organic methods. After attending a meeting with local organic growers advocating for the organic berry market, Michael got all the motivation he needed to commit himself to organic production. He began the transition process for his entire farm immediately and a year later, in 2007, planted over 350 black currant plants, followed by a further 2000 black currant plants in 2008. Believe it or not, he achieved all this while working full time year-round as a telecommunications technician and continuing his extensive vegetable production.
Year after year his production increased, and the little box at the end of the driveway that he began selling his produce out of in 2002 was soon barely big enough to hold even his potatoes. In 2004 to the delight of his neighbors, he built a farm stand at the end of his driveway with plenty of room to host his garden-fresh veggies. But as his production continued to increase, Michael found himself farming with a headlamp, or watching the sunrise from his fields in the wee hours of the summer mornings, before he had to head off to his day job.
"Yes, farming is my passion, it's definitely more than a hobby at this point," says Michael as he explains how he’d love to support his family of 3 children from work on the farm alone. Despite the fact that he has not yet been able to give up his electronics career to become a full-time farmer, Mike has maintained big dreams about his future prospects. He sees plenty of opportunities in the PEI organic community for collaboration and he dreams of setting up organic processing facilities and a warehouse, of working closer with the retail and restaurant industries, and generally increasing organic production and consumption on the Island. With years of agricultural leadership ahead of him, a knack for business and a philosophy of hard work, his future, as well as the future of organics on PEI are looking up.
