Oak Haven Organic Farm
“A wood-burning oven of this size is completely suited to human bread baking,” says Doug Brown as he pulls loaves of bread from the oven of Oak Haven Organic Farm’s bakery. The one-room bakery is a recent addition to 130 year-old farmhouse where Doug lives with his wife, Joy Elliott, and their four children.
Only 300 square feet in size, the bakery has a large island in the middle of the room, which now holds sixteen loaves of steaming bread. The counters and shelves around the room are covered with measuring cups, pans, racks, bags of flour, but no mixer. Doug mixes and kneads all of the bread by hand. And these aren’t fluffy white loaves. Instead, they are naturally-leavened hearty breads made with spelt and kamut flour. Doug also makes pita breads, granola and sweets, and all of the baked goods are certified organic by Maritime Certified Organic Growers.
“If I had the demand for more bread, I would rather hire someone who needs an extra day’s work rather than buy expensive equipment. To do that, I would need to get a loan and then pay interest to the bank, just to get something to make the business run faster,” He says. “Then if business slows down, I’m stuck with an expensive piece of equipment - I’m just not into that.”
Doug likes the pace of the wood-burning oven, even though baking days are long and strenuous. He gets up 5:30 a.m. and starts the fire in the four-foot deep oven. The wood comes from a neighbour who makes runners for lobster traps. Doug buys the hardwood slabwood in four-foot lengths.
While it burns, he has time to make the dough for the bread and pitas. When the fire has burned down somewhat, he pushes the coals to the back and bakes pitas at the front. While this is happening, the bread is rising. After the pitas are taken out, he rakes the coals over the bottom of the oven, closes the door and lets the oven absorb the heat. Later, he cleans out the coals and puts in the loaves of bread. This happens around 1:30 p.m. From 6:00 a.m. until the bread goes in, Doug works constantly, not even stopping for lunch.
After the bread goes into the oven, he makes the sweets, such as sunflower squares. While the bread is baking, he can spare a few minutes, sometimes even taking a 20-minute nap. But as soon as the bread is baked, the sweets have to ready to go into the oven and it’s time to make the granola that is baked after the sweets.
Throughout the day, the heat of oven drops and the baking order reflects the temperature requirements of the various products - an order he has fine-tuned with years of experience. For example, he found that it is important to bake the maple flax granola before the honey sesame granola. The maple granola is wetter (because of the maple syrup) so it needs higher heat. Honey tends to burn at high heat, so the honey granola works well at the end of the day after the oven is cooler. Usually there is enough heat to do four batches of granola, with each batch producing 15 kilograms of finished granola.
The day finishes around 9:00-10:00 p.m. and the baked goods cool on racks overnight. But the next morning, Doug can’t sleep in. Instead, he gets up at 4:00 a.m. to slice and bag the bread, and package everything for the courier who comes at 8:00 a.m. to pick up the food. Because the days are so intensive, Doug only has one or two baking days a week.
“I enjoy baking bread but couldn’t do it five days a week,” Doug says. That said, two of his baking days involve about forty hours of week (each baking day is 14-16 hours long, and there are five hours of work the following morning).
On his ‘days off,’ Doug needs to do the paperwork needed to keep the bakery working. Also, Doug and Joy have an organic farm outside of Belleisle, near Annapolis Royal in Nova Scotia. They grow fruit and vegetables for their family and to sell at the farmers’ market in Annapolis Royal. They also home-school their four children (14 year-old Trinette, 11 year-old Coburn and the five-year-old twins Nita and Amber). Joy does landscape architecture, and Doug does an incredible amount of volunteer work, mostly for organic organizations.
Doug never accepted the idea that businesses need to have continual growth. In fact, he vows, “The bakery is never going to get any bigger.” Over the six years since Doug started the bakery, it has grown to a size that he is now comfortable with. Now, Doug’s organic bread is sold in health food stores throughout Nova Scotia, and his granola is sold throughout the Atlantic region at Sobeys, the Atlantic Superstore and Co-op Atlantic stores. Granola sales are booming.
Doug never planned to have granola be the major part of his business. But five years ago at the first conference of the Atlantic Canadian Organic Regional Network (ACORN), Doug provided the granola for the conference breakfast. Afterwards, Stu Fleischhaker (then manager of Speerville Mills) approached Doug.
“You made that granola?” Stu asked. When Doug said he had, Stu asked for samples. At the time, Speerville was considering carrying a line of someone else’s granola, someone who wholesaled it at a cheaper price than Doug. Stu gave samples of the granola to buying groups, retailers and others, and they all said that, not only did it taste better but it was worth the extra dollar per kilogram it cost. Speerville then started to offer it to buying groups and health food stores, and now major grocery chains.
All of the ingredients are certified organic and almost all of them come from Speerville Flour Milling Cooperative in New Brunswick. Some of the ingredients, such as the oatmeal and spelt flour are from grain grown by members of the Speerville cooperative and other ingredients, such as the sunflower seeds, are retailed by Speerville. Doug wishes that there were enough organic growers in the Maritimes to supply Speerville with even more products.
For Maritime consumers who want to buy local baked goods, Oak Haven bread is the perfect choice. Not only is made by a Nova Scotian, but the grain is milled in New Brunswick, the maple syrup for the granola is from Maritime trees, and the fuel used to bake the bread isn’t electricity or propane, but is local wood. Even the courier used to deliver the bread is a local courier, not a national company with headquarters in central Canada.
Buying local may be a vague concept, but it hits home when you see a farm family like Doug and Joy’s managing to live on a beautiful organic farm thanks to the support of their customers. The bread label for Oak Haven’s bread states “Bread that’s good for the body, soul and planet.” I couldn’t agree more.
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