Our Story - History

Natural Farmworks Ltd. was started in 1996 when Brad McNish strove to balance a busy and stressful life as a police officer with the sanctity and hands-on requirements of a farm.

Brad was born and raised in the city of Calgary but he always had an ardent yearning for the land.   The more Brad spent learning the ups and downs of farming, the stronger his curiosity grew to understand the opportunities nature provided. Brad intuitively rejected the status-quo approach that many of his neighbours employed; feeding their livestock inorganic minerals and saturating their soils with chemical fertilizer. It just felt counter to his innate belief that nature could somehowprovide better.

Brad started educating himself by reading exhaustively about sustainable agronomy, natural husbandry and soil fertility. He attended lectures, courses and farming demonstrations around North America. Ultimately he saw opportunity to bring all of this information together and to develop his own line of natural mineral supplements for livestock. Natural Farmworks Ltd. was born.

The business officially started when Brad ordered an entire semi load of nutrient-dense seaweed from Nova Scotia. Once he figured out how to get it all off the truck, with no fork lift, pallet jack or any equipment at this early stage - he started selling this nutrient rich plant to local farmers and ranchers. The business at this point was not remotely good for Brad's bank account but it was very good for his physical fitness level and his spirit.

Along the way Brad met Lori Wheeler, a farm girl from Manitoba, who also had a passion for nature. Together the two of them, with the help of others, grew the little farm business into a progressive entity marketing throughout Canada and the USA. Within two years, they become the largest seller of seaweed in Canada.

Natural Farmworks evolved beyond seaweed to develop an entire line of natural mineral products for livestock with the foundation always firmly placed on plant based nutrition. At the same time Brad became passionately involved in the organic industry, serving as president of one of the associations and helping to start the 'Field to Fork' concept in Alberta where local organic farmers sold directly to progressive restaurants.

Innovation was always a focus of Natural Farmworks in the early years. On one of Brad's many exploratory trips, he met a retired vet that conceived the idea of feeding lush, green sprouts of barley to confined animals as a way of providing them with the valuable nutrients of living whole food. Although the idea was good, the method of growing was cumbersome on a larger scale.  

The idea was so good that Brad couldn't shake it, so he soon began experimenting with field grown barley harvested when it was in the immature, green leaf stage. It was on a trip to the field one sunny day that Brad and Lori realized, as they viewed their green carpet of barley leaves, that this would also be an ideal product for people.

Brad had a personal stake in creating a viable green product. The Chron's disease that had plagued him throughout his policing career continued to afflict him on a weekly basis. The one food that he could rely on to minimize discomfort was young barley leaves. Brad was compelled to produce a high-protein, nutrient-rich product that he could drink every morning to ease his pain. He saw a solution in his fields of green.

Natural Farmworks' first pilot plant was set up in 1999 and the fledgling staff began to prove out the process of extracting juice from the young leaves of barley and drying this juice into a stable powder. Although this sounds simple enough, it is not easy and it is during this time that we all learned a great deal about nutrient retention and equipment operation. We also learned a great deal about each other i.e. who manages sleep deprivation well and who doesn't.

In early 2001 an incredible opportunity presented itself and the founders of Natural Farmworks were able to purchase a former dairy facility in Barrhead, Alberta. This was the start of Sepallo Food Ingredients a company devoted to manufacturing health ingredients for the human health market. Over the years, Sepallo developed into a premiere manufacture and supplier of bulk greens, fruits and veggies as well as a custom processor for the food and natural product industry. The business that started on Brad's farm had become an international supplier of organic ingredients housed in a 25,000 sq. ft. state of the art processing facility.

Sepallo continues to thrive, however the original company and its founders remain largely invisible because the high-quality ingredients supplied by Sepallo are unexposed beneath the banner of third party brands. As so often happens in life, people migrate back to their passion. The energy that drove Brad, Lori and the Natural Farmworks team through the early years has always remained and they eventually chose to channel their ingenuity and knowledge back into their own Natural Farmworks brand of products.

This passion and Brad's devotion to farming that lead him to leave a career that he loved in law enforcement manifested itself once again in the purchase of agricultural land in the Barrhead area. This investment now serves as an ever-increasing land base for their operations. Controlling their own land enabled Natural Farmworks to oversee the quality of their plant-based products by managing everything right back to the seed. Learn more about our sustainably managed farm operations and our own compost facility by clicking here.

Natural Farmworks is an inventive group who is able to make the most of the fact that they own and operate their own farms as well as their own production facility. They can readily turn ingenious ideas involving new delivery systems for nutrients into finished products. And they can pioneer new processing methodology for plant-based products that arise out of our in-house science and expertise. This flexibility, knowledge and ingenuity combined to produce products never before introduced into the health food world. One example is, a Leaf Protein powder that Natural Farmworks launched in early 2007. Check it out and explore this website to learn more about our current activities.