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Evelyn Ernst, co-founder of Terra Beata Farms Ltd.Darren Calabrese

Evelyn Ernst, 48, with her husband David, is co-founder of Terra Beata Farms Ltd. in Lunenburg, N.S., grower and processor of specialty products and cranberries sold worldwide.

I never expected to be a cranberry farmer – it was not on the list, at all. I started university in chemical engineering, switched to biology, then music and education, starting out as a high-school music teacher. I'm so thankful I took a biochemistry course at Mount Allison. It's amazing how that one course made so much difference – I'm sure [Professor] Jack Stewart never realized how much help his course would be to me.

I was born in Lunenburg, grew up near Chester. We spent the requisite few years living in Ontario after university but I'm an ocean person and it was hard to be that far away in the summer – on a hot day, I need to know I can run down the hill and go for a swim.

This land, 40 acres, was up for mortgage foreclosure in 1998. David wanted to buy it and plant a cranberry farm [initially with a partner]. David was an engineer – he wasn't sure about the stability of the fishing industry because one task was to tear down a fresh-fish processing facility. At that time, the price for cranberries was high; they grow well and wild here and it was a chance for him to buy an excavator and play in the dirt. The idea was to sell to one of the two packing houses, about 2,000 pounds that first year, but both [buyers] said no. We bought deep freezers out of the newspaper and sold those cranberries locally.

The next year, I went to markets and the fall fair – our now 15-year old in a car seat on the floor by the table. I made jars of cranberry sauce and recipe cards. The idea was people would sample food, pick up a recipe and buy cranberries. I got, "I don't want to buy cranberries – how much a jar?" That caused us to change direction to be processors because one big farm was very strong in the fresh market, the other significant farm in the frozen market. Nova Scotia's a small province – we didn't want to go head-to-head with neighbours. Customers kept asking for other products, like dried cranberries with less sugar than other brands. We developed a process to dry cranberries, a tricky thing because the skin is waxy, designed to hold water and protect the cranberry. Our process keeps vitamins and the juice, with 40-per-cent less sugar.

We started with used equipment – a colour sorter [was] the first major item we bought new in 2008. It cost more than our house. We harvested 250,000 pounds last year and receive cranberries from a dozen Atlantic Canada farms. We handled about 5 million pounds with $4-million in sales last year. Our community still doesn't have high-speed internet or three-phase power, so we adapt.

Atlantic Canada has only 10 per cent of Canada's population – we can't eat that many cranberries – so we looked to Ontario early. We're better known in Europe than Ontario, about 90 per cent of fruit now sold internationally for 80 per cent of revenue. Our audacious goal is to grow our branded business until half our fruit goes into retail products and half to international sales in the commodity market.

A market not being met was pure cranberry juice, no added water or sugar, but grocery stores don't like when a producer only has one product, especially a small bottle lost on shelves. We made pure blueberry juice, then a sour-cherry farmer came to us and we made dried cherries – they were delicious. But, their pitting machine is old, doesn't get every pit. "May contain pits," means "Guaranteed to contain pits," so we paid for the tooth of the lady from Prince Edward Island and only make cherry juice. The market's grown so we'll take whatever Atlantic cherries we can, but we also buy from an Ontario farm.

Part of my philosophy for our u-pick is being accessible for people to learn about cranberries. After I put a newspaper ad in the first year, our insurance company called to increase insurance because we'd have the public in. I had to complete a form, one question "What type of ladders do you use to pick your cranberries?" It was hysterical. I sent a photo saying "these are cranberry plants."

As told to Cynthia Martin. This interview has been edited and condensed.

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