FarmStart

FarmStart Program Coordinator, Patrick Habamenshi, will be spending a lot of time at the CBC over the coming week. Patrick has an interview, a panel discussion, and a town hall speaking engagement scheduled over the next few days. Friends of FarmStart can tune in on Thursday and Friday at the following times to hear Patrick speak on the topic of diversity.

Thursday March 6^th 2008:

• CBC Radio Canada 7:30 am (French): “Il y a pas deux matins pareils”; SUJET: la diversité torontoise et ces défis.

• CBC Radio One, 7:30 pm: Town Hall on diversity with Andy Barrie. The event will be held at the Glenn Gould Studio, CBC Broadcastng Centre, 250 Front St. West. The event will begin at 7:30, doors open at 6:45. Other panelists will include:
  • Uzma Shakir, community activist, recently named Economic Justice Fellow by the Atkinson Charitable Foundation.
  • Raheel Raza, writer and diversity consultant and interfaith advocate.

Friday March 7^th 2008:

• Téléjournal de 18h00 (French); Other guests : Marc Lesage (sociologist) and Mohamed Boudjenan (director Fédération Canado-Arabe).

FarmStart not only supports new farmers, we also promote viable markets for local food. We brought further attention to this issue in October 2007, when we hosted a Local Food Pavilion at Canada’s Ethnic & Specialty Food Expo. The pavilion featured local farmers’ products, Buy Local maps, and materials from FarmStart, the Hamilton Eat Local Project (HELP), and Toronto’s FoodShare.

Anyone curious to learn more about the Expo and about food industry trends in Canada can now view a new report, “Ethnic & Specialty Food Expo 2007: Key Industry Trends.” This document, released by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in January 2008, highlights the growing market for local food, and shares a lovely picture of FarmStart’s local food display!

Guru asks why our ethnic diversity hasn’t prompted local farmers to grow the world’s most savoured grasses

By WAYNE ROBERTS
NOW Toronto

I’m sitting in Addis Ababa, an Ethiopian restaurant on Queen West, trying to do a selling job on an ethnic farming specialist.

Try this, I tell Rutgers University’s Bill Sciarappa, offering him a piece of injera, the tart flatbead served with beans, veggies and meat. I’m hoping to convince him that teff, the grain from which it is made, could be grown in Ontario instead of imported, as it almost all is, from Idaho.

“Oh, you mean Ethiopian lovegrass,” he says, as he and the owner joke about the fact that the grass is treated as a weed in New Jersey and fed to livestock.

Sciarappa’s business is repositioning ethnic food as what he likes to call “world food.” That’s why FarmStart, an org promoting the needs of immigrants who want a career in food production, invited him in the last week of November to address three southern Ontario workshops in Toronto, Guelph and Durham Region.

Sciarappa, who wants to let a thousand bitter melons bloom, likes to tell farmers in New Jersey, the Garden State, to “get progressive or get out.” The phrase is a jab at the infamous slogan of 1950s agribusiness: “Get big or get out.” His mission is to help local farmers start serving an untapped billion-dollar market for “ethnic” fruit and veggies.

Read the Full Story

In the fall, Patrick was on CBC’s The Current talking about the FarmStart New Canadians, New Farmers Program.

Patrick runs the New Canadians, New Farmers Program for FarmStart. Patrick holds a Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine from University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar, Senegal (he loves horses and wildlife) and a Master of Arts in Economics from University of Toronto (he loves numbers).

Patrick is an outspoken advocate for minorities’ rights, the integration of immigrants in the Canadian society and the economic empowerment of African-Canadians. He also counts agriculture, economic development and food security in his areas of expertise. Patrick recently returned from his native Rwanda, where he worked as a visiting lecturer at the National University and occupied senior positions in the Government including being the Minister of Agriculture.

Patrick was recently on Metro Morning with Andy Barrie talking about his experience emigrating from Rwanda to Canada and the experience of new immigrants to Canada. You can list to the interview below.

Patrick runs the New Canadians, New Farmers Program for FarmStart. Patrick holds a Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine from University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar, Senegal (he loves horses and wildlife) and a Master of Arts in Economics from University of Toronto (he loves numbers).

Patrick is an outspoken advocate for minorities’ rights, the integration of immigrants in the Canadian society and the economic empowerment of African-Canadians. He also counts agriculture, economic development and food security in his areas of expertise. Patrick recently returned from his native Rwanda, where he worked as a visiting lecturer at the National University and occupied senior positions in the Government including being the Minister of Agriculture.

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Patrick Habamenshi, who runs FarmStart’s New Canadians New Farmers Program, was recently interview on Radio Canada International’s The Link.

You can listen to the complete interview below.

About Patrick:

Patrick holds a Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine from University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar, Senegal (he loves horses and wildlife) and a Master of Arts in Economics from University of Toronto (he loves numbers).

Patrick is an outspoken advocate for minorities’ rights, the integration of immigrants in the Canadian society and the economic empowerment of African-Canadians. He also counts agriculture, economic development and food security in his areas of expertise. Patrick recently returned from his native Rwanda, where he worked as a visiting lecturer at the National University and occupied senior positions in the Government.

Currently, Patrick is consulting for the International Federation of Agricultural Development (IFAD). Alongside this position, Patrick is working with FarmStart to identify the needs of New Canadian farmers.

About the Link:

The Link is a two-hour daily radio show aimed at connecting new immigrants to Canada and Canada to the world. Plug in to our show for immigration news and stories. Find out what’s new and exciting on Canada’s cultural landscape. And get the pulse on what’s happening in Canada today. Whether you live inside or outside the country, just click on The Link and get connected.

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When the older folks retire, will there be anyone left to till the soil and grow our crops?

Catherine Porter
Environment Reporter – the toronto star When Kurtis Andrews walks into his family’s barn, he can’t just ask one of the employees where his dad is. He has to ask for “Mr. Andrews.” That’s because few of the market staff know Kurtis anymore. They think he’s another customer.

Andrews spent 20 years working on the farm. When he was seven, he bought a bicycle with the money he’d saved weeding the fields by hand for $1 an hour.

He’s climbed the trees, built a swimming raft for the irrigation pond, and rumbled across the fields on a tractor.

But now, he’s a stranger here.

“It feels odd,” says Andrews, 34, examining a 20-year-old family portrait that hangs in the barn. In it, he, his two sisters and their folks pose in a raspberry field, each of them dressed in red-and-white checkered shirts and holding a basket of berries. It’s full of joy and optimism – hardly the picture of farming today.

“I do feel nostalgia about the farm,” he says.

Andrews is no longer a country boy. He lives six hours away, in Ottawa, where he’s in his second year of law school. And he has no plans to return to the fields.

Full Story from The Toronto Star

Immigrant farmers face steep learning curve, many barriers to working the land in Canada

Sep 07, 2007 04:30 AM

Catherine Porter
Environment Reporter
You’ve heard about the Indian doctor driving a cab in Toronto. But how about the Indian farmer making ends meet as a lawyer?

When Lakwinder Gill came to Canada 11 years ago, he was both a qualified lawyer and farmer. Amazingly, he found it easier to navigate his way into the Canadian legal system than work the land as a farmer.

“There is no way to get into it, unless you’re a millionaire. I couldn’t find anyone to guide me,” Gill said yesterday.

That’s about to change. Two new training farms will open soon in Greater Toronto to help immigrant farmers. Yesterday, the non-profit Greenbelt Foundation announced a $400,000 grant to start one in Ajax. And in Brampton, two non-profit organizations are negotiating to lease a 20-hectare piece of land.

Come next spring, both farms will be opened for immigrant farmers to learn about the Canadian climate and growing season, and try their hand at growing crops indigenous to their home countries.

Full Article

From the Guelph Mercury – Full Story

Tarrah Young knows that most kids don’t dream of growing up to be farmers.

But this 30-year-old from the suburbs is about to make that leap.

She admits it’s an unusual career choice in an era of factory farms. But the idea came to her in an epiphany, via a fourth-year organic agriculture class at the University of Guelph.

It’s been a long and winding road. Next growing season, Young will quit her day job and set out as the first graduate of the FarmStart program at Ignatius Jesuit Centre.

Full Story

For those of you that speak french – here is a link to a radio interview with Patrick Habemenshi who is working on FarmStart’s New Canadians, New Farmers Program on Radio Canada International.

To listen select the first hour of the show. Patrick’s interview starts near 45 minutes into the hour. He will also be doing an English interview which we will add to FarmStart News once it is aired.

The Toronto Star farm series looks at how migrant and immigrant labour gets local produce to market and includes information about FarmStart.

Full Story from The Toronto Star

“Farms near Andrews are selling for $50,000 an acre – the down payment on one of the new homes replacing it in the area. You can rent land for as cheap as $30 an acre, but then there’s still the infrastructure costs for irrigation pipes, seeds, fertilizer, tractors.

FarmStart, a Guelph-area non-profit organization, is launching a program to bridge the gap. It’s already rented 38 acres of land from the Toronto Region Conservation Authority. Starting next year, it will bring aspiring immigrant farmers there for a subsidized, five-year program. They’ll learn about local farm conditions and till small plots with specialty crops from their home countries. They’ll also be linked to established farmers in a mentorship program.

“We have to rethink how we do agriculture in Canada – from a production perspective and an economic perspective,” says Christie Young, FarmStart’s director. “We can learn a lot from farmers from other parts of the world.”

Full Story from The Toronto Star

[tag] FarmStart, New Canadians New Farmers, farming[/tag]

Mike Shook, FarmStart’s Program Manager, was recently a guest on CBC’s Ontario Today. You can listen to the clip and then please come back and add your comments below.

• What are your views on local food?
• What do we need to do to ensure more local production?
• What crops would you like see grown locally?

Add your 2 cents to the mix. Just click on ‘Comments’ below to get started.

Click on ‘Listen to the Clip’ above and it will open in Real Player. Don’t have Real Player? Click Here

Geographer leads project to bring new breed of farmers to the land

BY ANDREW VOWLES – at Guelph

Graduate student Christie Young

A longtime business consultant stands in a field within view of a new shopping complex and a busy highway in north Guelph and surveys his freshly planted hops and barley. A Sikh immigrant in a Toronto grocery store cocks her eyebrow at produce trucked in from who-knows-where. In U of G’s Hutt Building , a 28-year-old newish mom who’s doing a master’s degree in geography arrives at her desk. These are the new faces of farming in Canada ?

“There’s a whole new breed of people coming to farm,” says graduate student Christie Young, a Toronto-born-and-bred social activist who has big plans to shake up how we grow and provide food. The self-described “do-er” is studying nascent food markets and ways to help new farmers — particularly immigrant and second-career farmers — meet consumer needs.

But Young, herself a sometime farmer in France , is hardly sitting around waiting for the data. Leading a brand-new incubator project in Guelph called FarmStart, she is now eyeing two more locations for similar plots near Toronto where immigrant Southeast Asian farmers might one day learn to produce food for a few of the city’s masses. Call it “smart farming” — and perhaps a way for Young to channel any lingering anger and angst from her undergraduate days at McGill University, when she first began to look closely at how food is grown and distributed in this country and was appalled by what she saw.

These days, others see not anger but passion, determination and drive. Standing in a former orchard at the Jesuit-run Ignatius Centre in Guelph, FarmStart program manager Mike Shook describes her as “pretty amazing, a visionary. She’s networked into the local food system. She’s just full of ideas.”

Full Story from At Guelph