Yannick LaPlante

Student, Faculty of Agriculture

I didn’t really know what I was going to do. My identity since I was 17 had come crashing down.

I joined the military when I was 17, straight out of high school in Quebec. I got my bachelor’s degree in Kingston in physics and space science in 2003. I worked from 2003 until 2019 in the Navy, learning to become a naval officer onboard a ship. I was specialized in two other types of military training. I was controlling aircraft around the ship. I was also controlling a group of people who do warfare, so controlling the weapons systems onboard. I basically made my way up to about third in command of the ship.

I had the opportunity to go to Afghanistan as well to learn to work in the headquarters in Kabul in the international headquarters where all the big decisions were made. I was a staff officer there for six months. I was deployed two more times. Before that I was deployed in preparation exercises for many, many days. I was gone a lot.

I was kind of burned out with all the high operations tempo, a lot of stress, and I got sick. I decided, or the military decided — it was a joint decision — to say that I should transition to something else in the civilian world.

And I came across farming by total luck. I mean, I didn’t really know what I was going to do. My identity since I was 17 had come crashing down. I came across a guy in Quebec. He was about my age. He had this small little market farm; it was organic. It just opened my eyes to the possibilities. It just seemed like everything sort of clicked and aligned with a property my wife had in Pomquet. The desire for me to be working more with my hands and being outside as opposed to in front of a computer. I could stay home, working with my hands, animals. I didn’t know anything about farming, but I said: ‘Let’s learn it.’ I mean, I’ve learned how to do other skills in my life, I can learn it too.

I enrolled in the plant science diploma program at Dal to give me the basic knowledge about plants and farming and agricultural processes work, and get to network with other people in business and also small farms and other farmers and stuff like that. Really everything just aligned. I was so lucky.

It took about two years of me being sick, a year and a half I would say, to find a bit of a purpose. When suffering from depression, your mental state deteriorates quite a bit — my cognitive state, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t think to talk, it was difficult to go from a high tempo, high cognitive thinking all the time to not being able to do much. But I realized there are a lot of skills from being in the military that I was using every day that I could be using in farming.

I joined the military to get an education at first but then it gives me this, the values of helping others I was always attracted to you know, helping my community, helping, you know, making the world a better place. So, joining the military, we did peace operations, we did humanitarian work, we also worked around Somalia making the world a safer place. That was what I was identifying myself within the military and that is what I was doing in the navy.

What I like now is that I will be able to do the same sort of thing but as a smaller scale actually being able to be within the community of Pomquet, which is an Acadian community, where my wife is from, a French community.

I’m hoping to start slow and make my way up starting in vegetables, only vegetables, organically and depending on the size of my farm following all the principals of organic agriculture without being certified first till I make a bit of a profit.

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