FarmFolk/CityFolk in Vancouver, has just launched FarmFolk/CityFolk Heroes, a 6 minute video homage to 27 sustainable farmers and city growers. Please click here to enjoy the show.
Photography: Brian Harris / Music Liona Boyd.
November 11th, 2009
We are excited to tell you about a great upcoming opportunity for new farmers (of all ages) in east central Ontario. Mark your calendars for SATURDAY NOVEMBER 7 and come to Lindsay for a day-long discussion around training and education needs. Click here for all the details. The day is free (except for a $5 contribution to lunch), so please come and bring all the new farmers you know!!
Here are the steps:
1. Contact Anna at (705) 740-9383 or apetry@kawarthaheritage.org to pre-register ASAP. Registration is LIMITED.
2. Log on to http://tinyurl.com/FarmerTrainingSurvey and complete this survey as soon as you can. It only takes 10 minutes.
———————————————————————————————–
FarmStart and the FarmON Alliance have partnered with Sustain Ontario, FoodNet Ontario and other partners to organize BRING FOOD HOME – Connecting Ontario Farm and Food Networks, a provincial conference that will be held at the Kitchener Delta from March 4-6, 2010.
The conference will bring together participants from diverse regions and sectors, including farmers, food enterprises, health promoters, community groups and government organizations. The purpose is to facilitate our learning and working together to create food systems that are healthy, just, accessible, culturally appropriate, financially viable and sustainable.
To date we have confirmed Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm and of Food, Inc. fame as one of several keynote speakers, as well as Martin Gooch from the George Morris Centre who will lead a workshop in Value Chain Management. The FarmON Alliance is planning a whole day of events related to farmer training. It is shaping up to be an exciting conference.
For more information please contact the Program Committee Co-Chair at bringfoodhome@sustainontario.com or 647-348-0235 or visit Bring-food-home-2010-conference for updates.
October 26th, 2009
MONROE – There was a time when rural women often got together to help each other preserve fruit, sew quilts and make soap.
Thursday night, about 20 rural and county-loving people, mostly women, attended the “See Jane Grow” seminar at Kookaburras, a culinary and gourmet food shop locally owned by Laura Winters, on the north side of the Monroe Square.
Dani Gierhart, Brodhead, came to the seminar for more information. She had become unemployed April 4 when Woodbridge Corporation, an auto seat cushion manufacturer in Brodhead, shut down.
“My big dream is to own an Alpaca farm,” she said. “All by myself.” To read the rest of this article, click http://themonroetimes.com/.
Note: There is a growing movement of socially responsible women who combine their love of local food, family, their environment, and community change to run their own farms. In the USA, women entrepreneurs are expanding at twice the national rate. Tired of the corporate recessionary life, women are coming together to share their knowledge and stories of creating their own livelihoods. The article above from rural Wisconsin USA examines this societal trend. Please click here for a link to the article. *MR *Maya Roy is a contributing editor to Foodforethought.
June 12th, 2009
The By The Bushel Community Food Co-operative “is a way to grow your growers,” said local grower Paula Anderson at the official launch last night.
The co-operative is made up of growers, consumers and community food organizers, helping bring everyone together to enjoy locally grown food, she said.
For complete article, please go to: http://www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1502941
April 8th, 2009
Growing Organic Agriculture
Just yesterday, the McGuinty government pledged $24 million over the next three years to have provincial institutions buy and serve more locally grown foods. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2009/04/06/ontario-food.html?ref=rss The trouble is that organizations like Local Food Plus are already having trouble finding an adequate supply of local, sustainable food to meet the demand of the few institutional buyers that are already on board. The real push now needs to be on making sure that there are enough farmers ready to meet the growing demand for local food.
While much of Ontario’s farmland is used to grow commodity crops that neither feed the people of Ontario nor provide adequate income for farmers and their families, the University continues to pump out agriculture graduates who have no interest in growing food.
The University of Guelph Major in Organic Agriculture offers a glimmer of hope to future farmers and researchers who are not willing to accept the notion that agriculture is dead. There are exciting opportunities in agriculture today. There are organic farmers who are making a living providing Ontario with nourishing food; we owe it to ourselves, our children and our communities to support their work.
Thanks for taking the time to read this and I hope to see you this afternoon!
Women’s studies and organic agriculture among those eliminated
March 31, 2009 The University of Guelph’s women’s studies program and the organic agriculture major, two programs that aroused the most outcry from the student body, have been eliminated.The senate board of undergraduate studies made the decision yesterday. For remainder of article, please visit http://news.guelphmercury.com/article/460102.
April 7th, 2009
Diane Peters, National Post
October 24th, 2008
The backyard of this downtown Toronto row house looks like many, with a small patio and a rectangular lawn adorned by perennials along the border. But at the far end of the yard is the not-so-regular sight of a fenced-in wooden chicken coop.
Red, Ramona and Daisy, three 18-month-old hens, spend their nights in the enclosure and their days nibbling and digging in the yard. They eat a mixture of chicken feed, grass and kitchen scraps (the house’s green bin goes out nearly empty) and provide their owners Chris and Cara (who asked that their last names not be used) with three humongous brown eggs almost every day. His hens utter the occasional cluck, but their poop fertilizes the lawn and the neighbours, far from offended, show up at Chris and Cara’s front door with empty cartons.
“There’s really nothing to it,” Chris says as he eats his fried egg sandwich for breakfast. “You wouldn’t believe how good the eggs are.”
So why isn’t everyone living this locavore dream of having organic, free-range eggs for nearly nothing, right from their own backyard? Well, for one thing, it’s illegal.
October 30th, 2008
The farmers at Tourne-Sol Cooperative Farm sell at two farmers markets and produce food baskets for 250 families
It’s Friday afternoon, and the five members of the Tourne-Sol Co-operative Farm, 50 kilometres west of Montreal, are packing fresh-picked produce to sell at two open-air markets the next morning.
“Two hundred cukes for Finnegan’s?” shouts Emily Board, as she rinses fresh-picked cucumbers and packs them into plastic bins.
“Sounds good,” responds Reid Allaway.
Up since 6 a.m., the farmers, age 27 to 31, will have toiled for almost 12 hours by the time they lay down their weary heads to sleep.
They founded the co-operative market garden four years ago, after graduating in agriculture from McGill University.
Of the five, not one comes from a farming background. All passionately believe more producers their age need to repopulate the countryside.
For anyone interested in taking the leap to becoming a farmer, Reid Allaway and the team at Tourne-Sol Co-operative Farm offer these tips:
- Spend lots of time planning.
- Spend at least one season as an apprentice on another farm like the one you’d like to operate.
- Aim for direct marketing whenever possible (farmers’ markets, CSA basket programs, direct sales meat, food buying clubs, etc.), thus ensuring that every dollar spent on your products is yours.
- Assemble a strong business plan and use it to leverage start-up grants or wage support for start-up period.
- Budget carefully for start-up and establishment phases, making modest investments as necessary but maintaining solvency.
- Follow organic production rules and certify your farm organic as rapidly as possible.
- Pursue rental or barter agreements for land but protect yourself with legal leases or contracts.
- Find a way to live on the farm or very close by.
- Barter your labour or abilities against other goods or services when possible.
- Get to know your neighbours; they can rapidly become strong supporters and powerful allies.
- Keep lots and lots of records during the growing season, aka learning from your successes and mistakes.
- Aim for exceptional quality and freshness in all your products.
- Learn to live simply, thus avoiding need for off-farm income in establishment years.
- If you’re building a greenhouse or walk-in fridge (cold room) build as large as you can afford at the time – you’ll grow into it.
- Target markets at great distance or offer home delivery – farm tasks can’t get done if you’re stuck in traffic.
- Take the first land opportunity you find unless you know it’s ideal. Shop around and learn about soils, communities, resources, etc. before committing to put down roots.
- Enter into binding working partnerships with people you’ve never worked with before.
- Work 80-plus hours per week unless that is what you really want.
- Let weeds get ahead of you or produce seed.
- Spend a whole lot of money on a tractor, new or used, until you know what you really need.
- Take on debt or an off-farm job to service debt.
- Undercut other farmers’ prices at market.
August 11th, 2008
Click on the front page (below) to download the entire newsletter.
July 15th, 2008
The New York Times follows its March profile of young, hipster farmers with an article on second-career farmers abandoning high profile careers for a future in sustainable agriculture.
“In recent years, as the local food movement has grown and farmers’ markets have proliferated, a new breed of back-to-the-landers has emerged. Some, like their predecessors in the 1960s and ’70s, are earnest, college-educated young people, turning their backs on professional career paths in favor of a life of hardscrabble idealism. But many others, homesteaders in their 40s and 50s, have already enjoyed the perks of professional life, and may even have made a fortune, or at least a comfortable nest egg.”
July 3rd, 2008
ON Organic is shaping up to be a useful, informative publication for organic farmers! The latest edition shares 2006 StatsCan figures on the changing face of agriculture in Ontario and the steep increase in organic production since 2001. It provides an article on smart marketing for organic producers, and features links to resources on the benefits of good soil management, pasture management tips, and options for emergency wind control, among other topics.
Click here to open the newsletter as a pdf
May 22nd, 2008
RON BULL/TORONTO STAR
It’s an idyllic scene in a sunny backyard in North Toronto. The forsythia is bright as springtime, and Sally, Heidi and Clucky wander by contentedly. They are plump, vigorous, egg-laying hens that, despite their beauty and utility, are illegal in Toronto.
Nonetheless, their owner has kept them quietly in her backyard coop through the winter and now lets them range freely in the yard, which is shallow but 15 metres wide.
“It makes total sense to me, rather than getting in the car, driving to the grocery store and buying eggs trucked in from a far away farm, to go to the back yard and get eggs,” says “Alice,” who asked that her real name not be used. A middle-aged mother of two teenagers who works at home in the food business, she had identified herself on the telephone as a “renegade” chicken owner. “Besides, I know they are healthy and what they’ve eaten.”
May 6th, 2008
OMAFRA has recently released a new newsletter, written with the organic producer in mind. ON Organic features articles relevant to organic producers, prepared by OMAFRA staff and University of Guelph researchers. It also offers links to resources on organic production, marketing and financial planning, information about funding opportunities for organic farmers and more.
April 28th, 2008
Sally and Hybie in their Toronto backyard coop. They supply a family of four with eggs year-round.
By Carolyn Young
carolyn.cay@gmail.com
From Greensboro, North Carolina to Anarbor, Michigan, to Vancouver, BC, the practice of raising urban chickens for eggs ruffles more than a few feathers. Even in a town of 6000 such as Chester, South Carolina, individual poultry proprietors are prohibited from raising urban chickens by city ordinances and bylaws. In response to the widespread ban on chickens in the city, urban farmers across North America are pushing for change.
Toronto and its surrounding municipalities are part of a majority of cities that uphold bans on urban livestock. GTA residents are permitted to raise up to six rabbits or pigeons in their back yards, but are otherwise prohibited from keeping animals other than traditional pets. Only the Toronto Zoo, High Park, Riverdale farm, Black Creek Pioneer Village, and the GTA’s ever-diminishing agriculturally-zoned land are exempt from this regulation.
Brampton, a small city in the GTA with a rich agricultural heritage, is one of the few Canadian exceptions to the rule. There, the rule states that two chickens (or rabbits, pigeons, or game fowl) can be kept “on the premises of or in the dwelling unit located on registered plan of subdivision or a built up urban area,” provided that the coop is well-maintained and set back from any dwelling by eight meters. The by-law also stipulates that feed be stored in a rodent-proof container and that chicken waste be buried so as to prevent odour. Members of the Brampton and Peel County Poultry, Pigeon and Pet Stock Association must meet the same requirements with respect to coop maintenance, location and waste disposal, but may keep “any number of rabbits, game fowl or domestic fowl”.
Brampton is not alone in its more enlightened regulatory approach to backyard flocks. A precedent has also been set by some big US cities such as Des Moines, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Seattle, Omaha, and Redwood, California, which all allow chickens to be raised within city limits. Most place a limit on the number of hens that can be kept by a single-family household, and regulate their distance from the neighbours’ property line. Most do not allow roosters. Seattle has even changed the status of miniature goats from farm animals to small animals, thus allowing them within city limits.
While the battle for birds is being waged on a political level, many poultry promoters are challenging bylaws by keeping their roosts below the radar. One Torontonian keeps chickens in her backyard throughout the winter.
“The chickens are outside during the day and go into the little coop at night. It is amazing how their feathers have filled out in response to the weather,” says Susan, an urban egg enthusiast.
Her small coop is one of many models available commercially through various online companies such as the Eglu from Omlet. While Susan may not be supported by Toronto City Council, she can find support through online blogs, websites, and even a facebook group, which help urban chicken and livestock activists to share tips on policy change, coop cleaning and chick rearing.
Although domesticated livestock were an integral part of the cityscape into the last century, with industrialization and urbanization the distance between field to table has grown. However, with the resurgence of interest in ‘local food’, urban chicken coops could be the next frontier on the journey to a sustainable local food system.
Urban Chicken Websites:
The City Chicken: Home.centurytel.net/thecitychicken
FeatherSite: www.FeatherSite.com/Poultry/BRKPoultryPage.html
Backyard Chickens: www.BackyardChickens.com
Biosecurity for the Birds: www.aphis.usda.gov/vs/birdbiosecurity/
Mother Earth www.MotherEarthNews.com/eggs
The Omelet http://myurbanchickens.blogspot.com/
Coop Sales:
March 28th, 2008
The Metcalf Foundation recently commissioned a paper on local sustainable food in Southern Ontario. This paper aims to contribute to a broader understanding of food system dynamics in this province, and is intended as a backdrop for discussions on how Ontario could move toward a truly local sustainable food system through collaboration and the identification of key leverage points for food system change.
OMAFRA’s Policy Capacity Secretariat is hosting a presentation of the report’s key findings by Ruth Richardson from the Metcalf Foundation. This will be followed by a panel discussion in response to the report. There will be ample opportunity for dialogue between the audience and the panellists.
March 27th, 2008
Eating breakfast toast: a simple ritual to start the day. The bread probably came from a bakery or grocery store, but beyond that who knows where the wheat came from – never mind the seeds that grew the wheat. Do we need to know? A new documentary, “Hijacked Future” says yes, because those seeds that became the toast you ate this morning are being hijacked – right into a looming world food security catastrophe.
While our industrial system of agriculture is providing abundance and variety today, this Global Currents documentary warns us that it’s an unsustainable system that will not be able to nourish and provide for us and our grandchildren in the future. It’s a system that literally runs on oil, from fertilizers and pesticides, to the trucks and planes that transport food. And the source of our food – seeds – is being hijacked by a handful of corporations from the farmers who have for millennia, grown and saved them.
The documentary looks at the increasingly fragile base of our North American industrial food system in order to bring all of us consumers of food to a better understanding of just what’s at stake with our daily bread. It asks us to question the wisdom of a system precariously based on oil and corporate seeds while we’re at the same time witnessing the impact of climate change.
March 21st, 2008
Young urbanites, learning that dirt can also be soil, are using their overalls as originally intended.
Raised on the Upper East Side by a father who is a foundation executive and a mother who writes about criminal justice, Mr. Shute graduated from Amherst and worked for an antihunger charity. But something nagged at him. To learn about food production, he had volunteered at a farm in Massachusetts. He liked the dirt, the work and the coaxing of land long fallow into producing eggplant and garlic.
He tried growing strawberries on his roof in Brooklyn, but it didn’t scratch his growing itch.
And so last week, Mr. Shute could be found here, elbow-deep in wet compost two hours north of New York City, filling greenhouse trays for onion seeds. Along with a partner, Miriam Latzer, he runs Hearty Roots, a 25-acre organic farm.
“I never thought I wanted to farm,” Mr. Shute said. “But it feels like an honest living.”
His partner, Ms. Latzer (the two are not a couple) is 33 and a former urban planner. Her parents, a professor and a librarian, “think its crazy that I’m a farmer,” she said. “They wonder what planet I came from.”
This one. Steeped in years of talk around college campuses and in stylish urban enclaves about the evils of factory farms (see the E. coli spinach outbreaks), the perils of relying on petroleum to deliver food over long distances (see global warming) and the beauty of greenmarkets (see the four-times-weekly locavore cornucopia in Union Square), some young urbanites are starting to put their muscles where their pro-environment, antiglobalization mouths are. They are creating small-scale farms near urban areas hungry for quality produce and willing to pay a premium.
Read more…
John Steinman, host of the Kootenay Co-op Radio program Deconstructing Dinner, turned his attention last week to the challenges and opportunities facing new organic farmers. Steinman travelled to Sidney, B.C. in March 2008 to attend the annual conference of the Certified Organic Associations of British Columbia (COABC). On this broadcast, we listen in on one workshop titled, “Starting Your Organic Farm.”
Click here to listen to Deconstructing Dinner, via The Tyee.
March 18th, 2008
 |
 |
|
Switch grass, a high-yielding native grass adapted to much of the U.S., is one of the main feedstocks being considered for cellulosic ethanol |
The US organization, SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education), has recently released an excellent new 20-page bulletin: Clean Energy Farming: Cutting Costs, Improving Efficiencies, Harnessing Renewables. The bulletin is available for free download from SARE’s website. It features innovative SARE-funded research and examples of farmers who are improving energy efficiency while saving money, by implementing farming practices that both save energy and protect natural resources, and by producing and using renewable fuels.
While the examples used are from the US, Canadian farmers can also benefit from SARE’s research and recommendations.
For further information about SARE’s initiatives in this area, please visit their website.
March 11th, 2008
At 9 a.m. on a cool, bright Saturday in mid-June, Robert Burns and Diana Baldelomar set up a farm stand outside the YMCA in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. The stand is simple: a tent to keep out the sun, two folding tables set in an L-shape and a handful of zinc washtubs filled with two inches of water. In the tubs stand heads of green and red lettuce, greens, broccoli, and bunches of mint and basil.
When two women approach and ask the price of the greens, Baldelomar tells them that the turnip, mustard and collard greens are a dollar a bunch. “Honey,” the woman says, “in this neighborhood, if someone asks you for greens, they are only talking about the collards.” Her companion asks, “Did you ship it in from the country?”
“No ma’am. These are from right around the corner, West Cottage and Brook. We went out and harvested them this morning. You should stop by sometime.”
Burns and Baldelomar work with the Food Project, a community-based urban agriculture program founded in 1991 to get Boston’s youth involved in food production. Their West Cottage plot is one of four farms on vacant lots in the Dorchester neighborhood.
The Food Project is part of a growing urban agriculture movement to improve access to quality food in cities by creating local sources of fresh produce. The movement is showing that sustainable, local food systems are not only a way to ensure food security but also a means of addressing social justice issues
February 25th, 2008
February 29 and March 1 2008
Norfolk United Church
75 Norfolk St.
Guelph, Ontario
The Beyond Factory Farming Coalition’s 2008 Safe Food, Healthy Communities Conference seeks to deepen understanding of livestock issues in Canada, identify and examine keystone issues in Ontario and Canada, sketch out a road map for transition to socially responsible livestock production, reach new audiences and develop new networks amongst groups involved in the sustainable food movement
Keynote speaker
*Andrew Nikiforuk, award-winning journalist and author of Pandemonium: Bird Flu Mad Cow Disease and other Biological Plagues of 21st Century
Friday February 29
7 – 9 PM
Norfolk United Church, Guelph
Open to the public, free of charge.
Conference speakers
* Maxime LaPlante-Union Paysanne
* Fred Tait-National Farmers Union
* Mari Veliz-Ausable Bayfield Conservation Authority
* Dr. Ann Clark-Guelph University
* Dr. Jennifer Sumner-University of Toronto
* Ted Zettel-Organic Meadow
* Dr. Art Wiebe, MD-Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment
* Peter Katona-Foodlink
For more information, including registration details, please visit the conference website.
February 11th, 2008
While the consumer demand for local food is growing by leaps and
bounds, with new market opportunities increasing for value-added,
local, fresh, quality, and culturally-appropriate produce, production
capacity in Ontario is not keeping up. The net number of farmers
across the province continues to fall, local agri-food system
infrastructure declines (or is completely absent), and policies and
support services for new farmers are insufficient. Moreover, the
perception that farming is a viable, sustainable and meaningful career
path is missing. There simply are not the numbers of new farmers
starting to successfully meet the current, much less future, demand.
Christie Young, founder and Director of FarmStart will talk about the
challenges facing new farmers and a regional food supply. She
will also present the strategies that FarmStart is developing to
encourage and support new farmers to develop locally oriented,
ecologically sound and economically viable agricultural enterprises.
There are many challenges in agriculture today, but there are also many
exciting opportunities. By thinking about agriculture in new and
innovative ways we believe we can meet the challenges head on with a
variety of solutions that promote a sustainable, healthy and regional
food supply.
For more information about the Food for Talk seminar series, please visit the series website.
February 4th, 2008
The Growing International Conference took place on November 27th, 28th and 29th, and focused on how to develop a local food supply for the GTA’s ethnocultural markets. It was a fantastic three days that included dynamic presentations, critical dialogue and valuable networking opportunities.
For those of you who missed the conference – and those who want a refresher you can review the conference resources, reports and presentations as well as speaker’s bio and contact information for further research purposes.
January 25th, 2008
If the world unfolds as Lars Jorgensen thinks it will, January 2007 will go down as an historic moment in the Canadian livestock industry.
That’s when Jorgensen’s $400,000 baby – a 53-foot-long mobile abattoir – headed out of Fort St. John, B.C. for its first on-the-farm slaughter assignment. “I got into this because there was a need – the bottom line was there wasn’t enough slaughter capacity and in some parts of my province, farmers were getting out of livestock because they just couldn’t get affordable slaughter,” says Jorgensen, president of Gate to Plate Food Services Inc. “The other side of the coin is this is going to open up doors for producers. We’re offering traceability, we do organic, we offer more humane slaughter that gives you better quality meat, and we’ll (soon) have federal inspection so you can ship your meat anywhere – whether that’s the local grocer or a restaurant in Vancouver or Montreal.
“We’re never going to threaten the big boys in the slaughter business, but mobile abattoirs are going to create opportunities for small-scale producers that never existed before.”
That’s pretty big talk, but Jorgensen isn’t the only one to feel that way. Those are exactly the kind of benefits that proponents of mobile abattoirs have been championing for years.Full Story from FarmCentre.com
October 24th, 2007
Ever wondering what percentage of farms in Ontario are organic? Where the highest percentage of organic farms exist? You don’t need to wait any longer. The map below shows the percentage of certified organic farms in different regions of Ontario. Please click on the image to see a larger version.
October 21st, 2007
Store encouraging consumers to buy food grown close to home
October 07, 2007
Roberta Avery
Special to the Star
MEAFORD–The rich dark earth clings to the misshapen carrots and the irregular-sized tomatoes carry battle scars, but this is fresh food and David Harper, the farmer who harvested them just hours ago, is now selling them to an appreciative crowd.
“I think this is a fabulous idea,” says Andrew Leach as he fills his shopping bag Thursday at the newly opened 100-Mile Market in the Georgian Bay community of Meaford. Leach says the community is buzzing about the concept.
“I don’t think they’ll need to do any advertising,” says Leach, brother of Robin Leach of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous fame.
Harper and his partner, Barbara Kay, aim to offer one-stop shopping for followers of the 100-Mile Diet – the plan by Vancouver authors Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon that encourages consumers to shop for food grown closer to home.
Harper believes their 100-Mile Market is a first for Ontario, but hopes similar outlets will spring up in small towns across the province.
October 20th, 2007
FarmStart has started a bookstore featuring, you guessed it, books about farming.
We wanted to bring together a collection of useful books for new and old farmers as well as urban gardeners. We also receive a portion of the money from each book that sells to support our programs.
Some of the titles include:
Successful Small-Scale Farming: An Organic Approach
By Karl Schwenke
Fields of Plenty: A Farmer’s Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It.
by Michael Ableman
Square Foot Gardening: A New Way to Garden in Less Space With Less Work
by Mel Bartholomew
Including many more.
You can see all of them at http://www.farmstart.ca/store
But we could use your help. Do you have titles to suggest?
We are looking for books that old and new farmers have found useful. Or books about urban agriculture, cooking and canning that have helped you to use and preserve our harvest.
Please add your comment below with your ideas for the FarmStart Book Store.
October 17th, 2007
SARAH ELTON
Special to The Globe and Mail
August 29, 2007
MEAFORD, ONT. — The fields at the foot of Scotch Mountain are starting to turn gold. Soon, their grain will be harvested for the herd of cows that graze by the side of the road. It’s idyllic farmland here, south of Georgian Bay in Grey County, part of Ontario’s prime beef country.
But only a few kilometres from this bucolic scene, large refrigerated trucks speed down the highway, packed with American-raised beef on the way to the local grocery store.
This incongruity is something the two families who founded Scotch Mountain Meats, a farmers’ co-operative, are trying to change.
Since 2005, they have been promoting a local market for their naturally raised meats in a move away from the modern conventions of the North American meat industry.
October 16th, 2007
It sounds too good to be true. But experiments at Guelph University have resulted in double the crop yield in drought years
Toronto Star – Sept 15, 2007
Cameron SmithA farming practice that results in better soil, more earthworms, much higher capture of carbon dioxide, less nitrogen runoff, more birds and insects, and double the crop yield in drought years – it sounds too good to be true.
Yet this is exactly what experiments at Guelph University are suggesting.
The most astonishing conclusion is that if farmers adopted the practice throughout the 455,000 square kilometres of marginal or degraded land currently being farmed, Canada could come within a hair’s breadth of meeting its Kyoto commitment with an 18.6 per cent reduction in the nation’s CO2 emissions.
The practice is called intercropping – planting crops between rows of trees. At Guelph, the rows of trees are 12.5 metres to 15 metres apart, and this year the crop is soybeans.
October 3rd, 2007
The Centre for Land and Water Stewardship at the University of Guelph, and its partner FarmStart, are beginning a major outreach and training initiative to support involvement in agriculture by the GTA’s immigrant communities.
As one starting point we wish to fund a short initial literature and information review to develop a list of alternate crops and crop varieties (especially vegetables) that are both of interest to these communities and potentially grown in southern Ontario. The timeline is short, as we wish an initial report by Nov. 23, 2007; further phases of the research will be planned based on the success of phase one. Funding available is $3000.00 or $20.00 per hour.
September 28th, 2007
Part of my work with MarketLINK includes research into new market models for farmers. If you read the newspapers you’ll recognize the trendiness of ‘niche’, ‘local,’ ‘specialty’, ‘direct’ and ‘alternative’ markets. What I’m curious about are the practical ways that farmers access these markets.
An agricultural marketing co-operative is one interesting and viable option. Basically, these co-ops arise from farmers who jointly market their products. It can be as simple as pooling money for an advertising campaign to collaborating on a product delivery system. Market cooperatives come in all shapes and sizes, and I’ll outline three here.
In Canada, the Co-op Atlantic is a big success. This co-op works as an umbrella organization for smaller member co-ops across the Maritimes. Originally founded by a group of farmers, the co-operative has established extensive retail and grocery outlets. This way, the co-op maintains control of the entire food supply chain: from supplying seeds, to purchasing produce, to selling through the retail stores. The co-op also has a great website that introduces the producers who are involved: http://www.coopatlantic.ca/.
On a slightly smaller scale, there is Ontario’s own Quinte Organic Co-op. This cooperative consists of thirteen farmers who live between Toronto and Ottawa. The farmers recognize there are ample markets in these urban centres, but delivery is costly and time-consuming. So, each spring the farmers meet to divvy up production, and throughout the season, one person delivers all the produce to local farm markets.
Farmers in America are also experimenting with marketing co-operatives. One interesting venture is the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. It links producers to consumers through an online order form, and offers a wide range of products. The orders are delivered monthly to different points across the state, via a strong network of members and volunteers. As of May 2007, the Oklahoma co-op boasts over 1000 consumer and producer members.
These co-op marketing initiatives take a lot of hard work, vision, coordination and commitment. Yet at the same time, the pay-off is amazing. Farmers access all kinds of markets that are otherwise impenetrable, and consumers learn who and where their food comes from!
August 21st, 2007
