Photography: Brian Harris / Music Liona Boyd.

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.

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Bring Food Home

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.

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.

 Local food co-op holds official launch

Posted By FIONA ISAACSON , the Peterborough EXAMINER STAFF WRITER

Article ID# 1502941

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

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!

Guelph Mercury Article

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.

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.

Continue reading…

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The fresh, young face of farming

The newest back-to-the-landers are a little different from the wave of idealists who decided to go rural in the 1970s

MARIAN SCOTT, The Gazette

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.

Continue reading….

SO YOU THINK YOU’D LIKE TO FARM?

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:

DO:

- 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.

- 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.

DON’T:

- 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.

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.”

Continue reading…

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