By Mel Luymes
Just down from the Huron-Perth line near Listowel, a young farming couple are busy roasting coffee. Arend and Paige Haverkamp, owners of Boundary Roasting Co. have converted an old egg processing shed into a neat workspace: bags of green coffee beans in sealed containers, a five-foot tall roasting machine, totes of roasted coffee, empty bags and stickers, and various machines to weigh, de-stone and grind coffees.
“It started as a hobby,” says 30-year-old Paige, and for the last two years it has become a creative micro-roastery they both love.
Recently, they created a new line of coffee, called Grounds for Conversation, and now donate a portion of its proceeds to Agriculture Wellness Ontario (AgWO), an organization that supports mental health for Ontario’s agricultural community. While they have worked with local community groups to do fundraisers, this is a long-term commitment to supporting AgWO.
“This adds a new layer of meaning to the business,” says Paige, who has a background in public health.
She grew up on a beef farm near Lion’s Head, studied Public Health and Program Evaluation and worked in that field in Owen Sound for six years, and later for the Canadian Agricultural Human Resources Council (CAHRC).
Arend grew up on his family's poultry farm outside of Listowel. During his childhood, the farm had laying hens, broilers and turkeys. Today, it is where the family rears pullets. He studied construction at Conestoga College before he left to study agriculture at Olds College in Alberta. Much of his twenties were spent away from home, working on grain farms, ranches and dairies across Western Canada and even a stint working for the University of Saskatchewan. He and a friend also went to Australia for a year to work on various farms, even an almond and a mango farm.
“Travelling like that helped me to really appreciate Canadian agriculture,” says Arend.
Arend and Paige married in 2019 and moved to Arend’s home farm. They now have two young sons. The farm is raising pullets and the layers are up the road. They also have a cropping operation. Arend’s parents are both actively involved in the farm, along with his two brothers and their families.
While farming and raising kids no doubt takes up a lot of time, Arend was still determined to have a hobby, something else in his life that was a creative outlet. He tried a few different things, but found having a hobby on the farm, or as he joked, “a homebody hobby” was what he needed, something that would keep him close to his family and the farm.
So, he started roasting coffee on a wok. However, that didn’t last. Roasting green coffee can create a lot of smoke, making proper exhaust a necessity. So, he moved his little roasting set up to the porch and got an air popper popcorn maker. This method worked for a little while, but Arend found that only roasting one third of a cup of green coffee at a time was getting old. He found a new-to-him roasting machine that looked like a toaster oven with a bingo roller inside. That worked for a little while too, but Arend found that the roasting capacity still wasn’t enough, and the flavours weren’t there. After hours and hours of research, Arend found a small coffee roaster that had capacity to roast 1 kg of coffee and he thought that was the ticket. He asked Paige if he could buy it and naturally, she thought he was nuts, but she did like having fresh roasted coffee around. They agreed that if they tried to sell the roasted coffee and make a small business to help float the hobby, Arend could get the new roaster.
Roasting coffee beans is both an art and a science. It requires specific heat, time and listening for the “crack.” Coffee beans, like grapes, have different flavours from different regions and varieties.
Arend was hooked and he was happy roasting away on his little roaster. That is until their hobby business started to grow. Arend found himself roasting into the wee hours of the morning to keep up with incoming orders. Eventually, the couple agreed that they needed a bigger roaster. They found a used roaster on Facebook Marketplace, loaded up their toddler and drove to Casselman (south-east of Ottawa) to pick it up. They bought it from a business that was getting out of coffee roasting. It is a high-tech machine that has roasting software connected to it to help guide the roasting process.
“There are three curves to follow for a roast profile,” says Arend, who lights up explaining the technical details. “There is the exhaust temperature curve, the bean temperature curve and the delta curve, the increase of degrees per minute.” The roaster takes an hour to get to temperature and each 3.5-kilogram batch takes between 12-18 minutes to roast, reaching over 200°C depending on the bean and the desired roast.
Going commercial meant that they had to certify their workspace with the local health unit, and they needed to develop connections with coffee farms and importers from coffee growing regions around the world.
Coffee beans are actually the “pits” of coffee cherries (two beans per cherry, typically) and grow on small trees, explains Arend. The trees can grow 20 feet tall, though most farms keep them at picking level from the ground. “The riper the cherry, the more of its sugars are concentrated in the bean,” he continues. Coffee cherries ripen at different times on the branch and are either hand-picked when ripe or pulled off the branch and then colour-sorted later.
Then the fruit layer is taken off the beans through soaking and rolling, mechanically or by hand and the beans are dried, sometimes layered and raked on concrete pads in open-air patios.
“A lot of the work on coffee farms is done by women,” Arend adds.
The best coffee is grown in higher altitudes between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. It needs warm temperatures, moderate rainfall, volcanic ash-rich soil, and the proper balance of shade and sunshine.
Every area and season will make coffee with a unique taste. Arend and Paige get small samples of a coffee bean crop before they decide which one to buy. They brew small cups of each to test; it is called “cupping.” They prefer to buy from single origin farms or co-operatives. As farmers themselves, they feel very strongly that farmers be acknowledged and well-compensated for their labour.
They have developed a special connection with a Nicaraguan-Canadian woman named Maria who imports beans on behalf of her community. It is their coffee beans, grown in Las Sabanas, Nicaragua, that are used for the Grounds for Conversation coffee. Mauricio Paguaga is the grower; he is a young farmer who has recently started his own farm, Finca La Esperanza, establishing it separately from his father’s.
“Maria is really passionate about making sure her family and community gets a fair price for the beans,” Paige says. “And she doesn’t blend their coffees, she keeps them separate to each farm.”
Building a successful coffee business also means branding and marketing, which has become a passion for Paige. They hired local artist Kelly Stevenson to design the logo, and Paige runs the social media and makes local connections. Paige always loved to be creative, painting and quilting. The quilt on the company’s logo, and along the side of the bags is part of the brand. And Paige also hopes to make the logo pattern into a full-size barn quilt that will hang in their new mobile coffee trailer.
The couple spent the last few months fixing up an old horse trailer that Arend used out West and still had in storage in Saskatchewan. They hauled it home and gutted it, adding counters, plumbing and a top-of-the-line espresso machine.
“Everything you’d get at a coffee bar is in this trailer,” says Arend, who is also the head barista. The trailer had its inaugural booking at the Tullamore Lavender Co.’s, Lavender Bloom Festival in late June, selling lattes and other espresso-based drinks.
Boundary Roasting Co. is taking off and their coffee is available at their stand at Stratford’s Sunday market, local stores and cafés, including Play with Clay in Guelph and Fergus, The Kitchen Cupboard and Icebox in Listowel, Your Neighbourhood Table on Highway 86, and many more. It can also be ordered directly from their website at boundaryroastingco.ca.
“We both found passions for different parts of the coffee business,” says Paige. Arend loves choosing the beans and roasting, while Paige loves the branding and social marketing. They like to have fun with their coffee, and they recently tried putting green coffee beans into a whiskey barrel for a few weeks before roasting them. It gave a wonderful butterscotch and whiskey flavour to the coffee that is now called Whiskafé and sold at Our Stōr(y) Explorium Emporium, a retail space for locally made products, in Stratford.
They both believe it is important to make time for hobbies and a creative outlet, especially for farmers that deal with stress daily.
“It gets heavy trying to maintain and improve a farm,” says Arend. “And it is getting harder these days, because land prices aren’t getting any cheaper.” In supply-managed sectors, there are stresses too, maybe different than others, he admits.
It is different stress than the beef industry that Paige comes from, with its “ups and downs” she says. They look back to their families who built the farm and don’t want to disappoint them. “Perhaps we look back with rose-coloured glasses too,” says Arend, not really knowing how challenging farming has been for past generations alike.
Paige and Arend hope that the concept of Grounds for Conversation will help raise awareness. There are still some farmers who don’t understand the impact of the chronic stress they deal with. Mental health is an issue that affects every farmer in one way or another, either facing their own challenges with mental wellbeing, or supporting friends and family through difficult times.
“If you think you don’t need help, then you probably need help,” says Paige, “we all could use help at times.”
Farm succession is an added stress for families no matter what, says Arend, though that may have to be a topic for another article. Let’s get back to the coffee.
Grounds for Conversation is a medium roast with notes of chocolate and toffee. Proceeds from this coffee will go to supporting the work of Agriculture Wellness Ontario (AgWO).
“We want to give back, it gives us and the business a bigger purpose,” says Paige.
“This is a great opportunity,” says Michelle deNijs, Communications Officer with the program, and a well-travelled, Ontario “farm kid” herself. Run through Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), Ontario division, AgWO is funded in part by the Governments of Canada and Ontario under the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership (Sustainable CAP), a five-year, federal-provincial-territorial initiative. It offers a few key supports:
Farmer Wellness Initiative is a 24/7 number to call, for both crisis support or to access unlimited, free counselling for farmers, their family and employees, available in English, French and Spanish. The number is 1-866-267-6255.
In the Know training is a four-hour long mental health literacy workshop for those in the agricultural community, and shorter Growth Workshops, including a 30-minute introduction and a 60-minute workshop, Navigating Stress in Agriculture.
Guardian Network is a peer-network of volunteers who are mental health advocates in Ontario’s farming community. They have been trained in suicide prevention and meet monthly for networking and support.
International Agricultural Worker Wellness Program is geared for temporary international workers, offering materials in accessible languages and currently piloting in the Windsor-Essex and Brant-Haldimand-Norfolk areas.
Coffee brings people together, whether it’s the farmers you’ll find every morning at a rural Timmies or local coffee shop. It’s the relationships that help pull us through difficult times, knowing that we are not alone.
For Paige and Arend, the coffee business has brought relationships they couldn’t have dreamed about, with local businesses and with coffee farmers across the world. They are excited to see where they can take the business and hope to visit coffee farmers in Nicaragua in the future.
The couple say they usually have two coffees a day to keep them going. “But that becomes four cups during the field season,” laughs Arend. Paige loves the espresso maker in their kitchen and says there is nothing like a latte to get her through her busy days juggling kids and the business.
Grounds for Conversation, along with Boundary Roasting Co.’s other coffees can be found on their website at boundaryroastingco.ca and more information on AgWO is at agriculturewellnessontario.ca. Again, the number to call for free counselling is 1-866-267-6255, or if you or someone you know is in a crisis, call or text 9-8-8. When it comes to mental health, it is indeed grounds for a conversation. ◊