In his role as managing director of Farm Boy Productions, Bruce Sargent wears many hats as an advocate, educator, marketer, journalist, activist, filmmaker and farmer.
It is a multifaceted role and one you might say he was bred to do.
“My family has been farming for seven generations,” said Sargent. “We started off as servant farmers in Ireland then settled in the Peterborough area in the 1800s. My great grandpa started milking cows and passed it on to grandpa and he passed it on to dad. So, I guess that makes me a fourth generation dairy farmer.”
Sargent is proud of his agricultural roots and of the contribution his family makes every year toward feeding Canadians.
“On our little family farm we put out about 2,000 litres of milk every other day,” he said. “We are average, size wise, but we feed a lot of people with less land and less resources than 20 years ago.”
It’s a contribution few Canadian consumers think about even though the average Canadian consumes about 70 l of milk each year.
“We’re blessed to live in Canada where only two per cent of our population has to farm,” said Sargent. “The remaining 98 per cent don’t have to think about it. For many of them food comes from the grocery store and it is always going to be there.”
Sargent believes it is essential to the survival of farmers that their story be told from their perspective.
“Businesses use us because we have the farming experience,” he said. “We know how to talk farmer. We know the visuals farmers want to see. We know how to operate within a farm. We know the questions to ask and the questions not to ask.”
His development as a storyteller and filmmaker is a result of both determination and serendipity.
His first significant exposure to multimedia technology was in high school at the newly minted Clarington Central Secondary School in Bowmanville.
“It was the same size as every other high school in the area but the shop space was used for computer labs and art space,” said Sargent. “Because it was brand new we had video announcements and infrastructure for all that so I was making commercials about our events. In Grade 12 we had to design a logo to brand all of our work for the year and I came up with the original logo for Farm Boy Productions.”
His teacher presented him with a fortuitous career opportunity after a local poultry breeder came to the school looking for help marketing their fowl.
“She said you’re the only kid I can send because everyone else would be too distracted by the smell to get any work done,” Sargent said. “That was kind of my first inkling that there was a need for this sort of work in agriculture.”
He studied marketing management and web development at the University of Guelph and operated Farm Boy Productions part time.
During that time he secured seed money through a Summer Company grant from the Ontario government and landed a video project working on a horse farm with Canadian actress Amber Marshall.
Publicity around the project helped Sargent grow his client base so when he graduated in 2013 he was able to commit to the business full time.
His clients have included many farming and agricultural organizations such the Ontario Agricultural College, The Egg Growers of Ontario and Farm and Food Care.
His advocacy for farmers took him out of the barn and into the political arena during the recent Federal Conservative Party leadership race. He helped direct a campaign against leadership hopeful Maxime Bernier for spreading what Sargent described as disinformation about supply management and Canadian dairy farmers. On one occasion Sargent confronted Bernier directly during a campaign whistlestop in Guelph.
“The reason I did all that was for my family,” he said. “They work really hard and they don’t have time to do all this stuff. I have a unique skill set in that I can milk cows and make videos so I decided to put that to use and try to do some good and change the outcome. If anything this experience has shown that I am far more effective in the private world doing my work rather than in politics and being a cog in the wheel.”
