A question I get asked a lot is, “How did you get into farming?” I sometimes wonder myself. I know that I spent long hours in high school daydreaming about communal living. I sought out books on alternative living at every opportunity and I was attracted to agricultural courses at university. Something resonated within me about the rightness of being self-sufficient, which was contrary to the problems of overconsumption, corporatization, and being out of balance with nature. However, I think it was the time I spent travelling and working on farms in South America that really cemented the notion. I was heartened by the families who were working together on the land. I loved the tranquility of their lives, the fun of community, the practicality of growing one’s own food, and the age-old traditions of the farmers’ market. While small-scale farming worked well in the South American setting, the challenge was to take this model home with me. Fortunately, it already existed.
I attended a farming conference in 1998, shortly after arriving back in Canada, and I learned of an organic-farming community on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. I was offered an opportunity to apprentice, and I accepted wholeheartedly. During the apprenticeship, I learned farming and marketing skills but I also participated in the farm community, helping to organize a barn dance and attending farmers’ meetings, work parties, and potlucks. I found the company of like-minded people inspiring and very welcoming. When the season on the farm ended, my mentor helped me find land to lease. Ten years later, I am still on that same piece of land. Every year, the farm becomes more productive, more profitable, and more fun. Challenges still side-swipe me when I least expect them, but that’s what farming is all about.
The farm has grown to a full acre under cultivation: three-quarters of an acre at the original Prospect Lake site, now affectionately referred to as Feisty Field, and a quarter-acre at Northbrook Farm. I have a very secure arrangement with a long-term lease. I added the plot at Northbrook when Andrew, my last partner, also started farming full-time because we were concerned about making enough money to support us both. What happened when we started working together was that we became more than the sum of our two parts: having Andrew on board more than doubled production. Now that I’m back farming on my own, I’m certain that output is a function more of labour than it is of land. An acre is plenty of work and provides enough income for me to live simply. I have no plans to expand, although the dream of land ownership, or at least a life-lease arrangement, remains alive in my heart.
I can’t say enough in favour of this type of hands-on learning. When you’re taking on a practical occupation like farming, the benefit of experience makes all the difference. Why make your own mistakes when you can learn from someone else’s? Apprenticing can take many forms: full-time or part-time, over a season or for very short periods. I lived on Tina Baynes’s farm for about four months and worked full-time in exchange for learning, room, and board. I loved every minute of it. It is a truly blissful way to farm: having all of the experiences and none of the worries. Combined with great, home-grown, organic meals, it makes for a pretty nice summer. Of course, it’s not always possible to take a block of time off to learn farming, but it may be possible to work out a schedule with a nearby farmer to go there once or twice a week.
A farmer once told me to apprentice at a farm that makes money. I thought this was a bit shallow at first but now I see what he meant. It definitely doesn’t mean choosing farms that are flashy with new equipment and well-dressed farmers; it means choosing a farm that is working successfully. Farms that make money are running purposefully, and the skills you learn from those farmers will translate into a career for you. There are always apprenticing horror stories, like slaving away for some rich folks at a hobby farm, or ending up helping to fight someone’s losing effort at farming. Before committing to anything, go and visit the farm, and possibly work for a few days. Ask where they are selling their food and how regularly. This should give you a sense of what they are about. Remember that you are not a slave, and you should be treated as a welcomed guest, if not part of the family. Your labour is fair trade for any questions you have. You should be able to try out your suggestions about how to proceed with certain jobs. Farmers often give apprentices more help after they leave the land. They will sometimes visit your new site and give you suggestions; they might even help you market, or problem-solve when you come to a roadblock. A good apprenticeship is a lifelong relationship.
Starting my own farm was a very exciting time. There were lots of highs and lows, but it was always challenging and intensely real. Looking back on that time now, as a hardened veteran, I see how very insecure I was: I worked so hard, and I was so proud. The smallest threats to my success were crushing and tears came easily. I felt tested in many ways: endurance, creativity, problem-solving, budgeting, and more. I also felt very much on my own as I embarked on this adventure, against the counsel of many people I respected. At the same time I felt a network of neighbours, new friends, and colleagues, who really wanted to see me succeed, crystallizing around me. They were cheering on the sidelines and ready to help when they were called upon. Although I can recall wiping away tears with muddy gloves, I look back on that time fondly, and I see it as a very formative experience and a time of great confidence-building. I think three elements have to come together to make a farm work: soil-building, personal farming style, and business skills. For me, the incubation period for these fundamentals was about three years.
Getting the soil primed to grow annual crops was my first task. This involved a delicate balancing of the main soil elements: humus, pH, and fertility. I had a soil test done right away. Most agricultural-supply stores will take your samples and help you to interpret the test results. I paid special attention to building the soil, especially in the hard, rough spots, to ensure good, even production. I started out with a pretty balanced soil test, but it still seemed like I was just pouring my money and sweat into the ground as I dumped bag after bag of potash, rock phosphate, and lime on the land. All that compost that I hauled out into the field just disappeared! It was truly fortunate that I believed in the process, because it sure didn’t seem like it was going to make a difference.
Then, in the spring of year four, I realized that I wasn’t having to smash up the clods of earth with the back of my shovel to get enough loose dirt to cover my transplants. The weeds were actually being pulled up with their roots intact. I was getting big spinach leaves consistently down the rows. The soil was loose and loamy in my hands. I dug my hands in deep, and brought the beautiful, dark, rich earth to my face and breathed deeply: the sweet smell of success!
The second element that had to incubate was my relationship to the land and how I work as a farmer. Over the years, I have visited and talked with many farmers, and I’ve come to the realization that each farm is a unique combination of personality and physical elements. A farmer’s individuality really shines through his or her operation, and when it’s a good fit, it’s a beautiful thing. The challenge for me was to figure out what I liked growing and what grew well for me. I experimented with veggies, chickens, and livestock. I settled on mostly vegetables and strawberries but I tried many varieties of many different veggies, and this learning process continues. I also developed a style of how I do things—systems for watering, harvesting, et cetera—and favourite tools that help me do my job. This all takes time, and farming gets easier over the years.
Markets can always be built, so make sure to try crops that are easy and successful for you. Is your site windy, hot, cold, wet, dry, rocky, shady? There are ways to use all of these conditions to your advantage, or at least there are ways not to be constantly fighting what you can’t change. Windy sites may have fewer pests, so you might be able to grow crops that are susceptible in other areas. Hot sites can yield sweeter tomatoes; cold sites may be more productive for broccoli and cole crops. Don’t look at extremes as handicaps, but rather use them to your advantage. This is the whole key to marketing: what can you grow that others can’t?
Test the boundaries of your plot and get to know your land. What planting dates are reliable for your site? While local farmers might tell you to plant squash out on May 24th, you might have a sheltered microclimate that gives you a week’s advantage. Only experience can tell. Do you like growing in the winter? If you can handle the cold, and have a suitable climate, you may want to extend your season. All this getting to know your land and yourself is a lifelong learning process, but in year four, I found myself with more confidence ordering seeds, contracting to grow in quantity, and planning for continual supply at the market. Obviously, I still had crop failures and surprises, but I had more understanding of cause and effect.
The third element is business skills. Never forget that your farm is just as much a business as any other commercial enterprise. Building up the reputation of your business and establishing yourself as a reliable supplier takes time. If you haven’t run a business before, you might want to consider taking a business course. I ended up taking one as part of a community skills-training program and I was surprised at how much was relevant.
I was very hesitant to write a business plan, but I did it as an attempt to secure investment in my farm. This failed, because my bank didn’t recognize organic farming as a viable business and I didn’t have any collateral. So I threw my business plan in the recycle bin and moved on. Now I have a different view of business plans and their role for the beginning farmer. The key is to write the business plan for yourself. It is a great way to harness your creative energy in the planning stages, and, very importantly, it helps you explain your ideas to others. This is very necessary if you are leasing land from a land trust or from landlords who are not familiar with sustainable agriculture. It can also help you communicate with partners, family, and neighbours so they can understand what you are proposing and see where you need help. Don’t be afraid to leave blank spaces or write in pencil. Just be honest and open, and the plan can really help you define your business in your own terms and problem-solve into the future.
There are many styles of running a business, and you have to decide what works. In the beginning, I was convinced that I was going to do all direct marketing, to maximize my profit. I did farmgate sales, a box program, and farmers’ markets, plus sold to grocery stores, and a restaurant. I called everyone myself and delivered to each customer. I enjoyed meeting all my customers and I found it very satisfying to get their feedback. It was a great learning experience to get to know what people wanted, and how they wanted it packaged. It was only after I started wholesaling to Saanich Organics that I realized how much time I was spending on the marketing end of things, and how that translated into lost production on the farm. This is an equation that only you can figure out, and it will change over time. It is important to constantly reassess what your time is worth, and which parts of the business you enjoy.
With all businesses comes recordkeeping. This is an area that I desperately avoided in my first years of farming. I wasn’t making any money, and I really didn’t want to see exactly how much I wasn’t making written down on paper. My other jobs funded the farm, and I didn’t want to think very much about it. This was my big problem. It is amazing the clarity that comes when you tally up everything at the end of the month, or as I do, at the end of the year. If paperwork isn’t your forte, it might be worthwhile hiring a bookkeeper to make sure that you are on top of your finances.
You get to see very clearly which crops are worthwhile and which are not. I like to calculate the return of each hundred-foot bed. For me, a bed can’t make less than $600, and preferably $800, in a season. Some people think about it in terms of square footage. I farm more intensively than most. Last year, in addition to Andrew’s and my full-time labour, we hired a full-time student from May to September. That meant there were three of us working an acre. Again, I believe income on an organic farm is related more to labour than it is to land area. When your beds are nicely balanced with fertility, seeded on schedule, well germinated, thinned and weeded at the right time, and harvested promptly, the sky is the limit. When you write it all down, you can see how to hone your crops until you are satisfied with your income. But be aware that things do look better on paper.
Of course, it isn’t all about money. Some crops, like eggplant, are just aesthetically nice to have, while others, like purple sprouting broccoli, are a drawing card for customers who will then buy an assortment. However, it is not wrong to want to make money. A farmer works really hard. Why shouldn’t he or she have a good standard of living? I was just scraping by for a number of years because I somehow believed that I should be poor, that by choosing a farming lifestyle, I was choosing poverty. It wasn’t until I decided that I needed money or I was going to crack that it started to change. Attitude has a lot to do with the flow of your business. Make sure that you are being fair to yourself and to others, and your business will flourish.
I think all farmers face ethical questions when it comes to the prices they charge. Food is different from other commodities. It’s really hard to think about the beautiful, nutritious food that I grow and to know that it is priced out of reach for poor people. I wish that everyone could experience the vitality of locally grown food. Many people choose not to; they will spend their money on other luxury items and then complain about the cost of my produce. I don’t worry about them, but I really feel that people need to value food more and prioritize differently, because cheap food from afar has severe consequences for society and the environment. I do worry about the people who genuinely don’t have access to good food. As I’ve pondered this situation, I have come to the conclusion that it is really a social problem, and more than any one farmer can shoulder. As a farmer, I have a clear conscience about how hard I work, and what I need as a person to sustain myself financially. I think we need to continue to work for justice in the food system, but we must also earn a fair living so we can continue that work.
The more thought you can give to your site, the more it will pay off down the road. Because I was leasing, I had more options than someone who already owns land: I could take my pick between several plots. In retrospect, I wouldn’t have chosen the piece on which I now work, because it is very low-lying. We are the first in the community of farmers to get a frost and the last on the land in the spring because it takes so long for the soil to drain. We have good sunlight in the summer, with only the top section of the field shaded late in the day, but in the winter, my sunlight is really limited by trees, and this slows the growth of the greenhouse crops. Had I chosen a south-facing slope, I would have more options for extending my season and fewer trenches to dig for drainage.
If you are looking to lease, it may be worth your while to study a map of the area that interests you. Take a drive down the rural roads with the prime farmland, and put flyers in mailboxes, describing who you are and what you’d like to do. You never know who might call, and it can’t hurt to have many options.
Some aspects of my site are so ideal that they almost make up for my less-than-perfect locale. For one, I have great landlords, who understand the long-term nature of my project and are supportive in helping with infrastructure and emergencies.
Another great aspect is the close community surrounding the farm. Quite a lot of traffic must pass by on the way to the main road and as a result, many people have observed the progress and feel a bond to the farm. They really cherish the farm as a community resource, and I get a lot of friendly waves, volunteers, and enthusiastic customers.
Clear communication is key to a good lease arrangement. It is essential that you verbally paint a picture for your prospective landlords about your plans for the land. I was able to present my landlords with a business plan that I had written up. While I felt a bit nervous because I had no idea if the proposal I was presenting was even possible, the landlords got the impression that I was very serious about this endeavour. Even more important, I was able to convey the amount of labour I was about to invest, in anticipation of long-term gain. If landlords can’t guarantee you at least five years, you’ll have to think very seriously about whether or not it is worth your while. One of the big problems for tenant farmers is that our society is very transient and unstable. Many people who think they are settled will get a better offer from elsewhere so they up and move. Try to feel for groundedness. (See Appendix B: Robin’s Lease Agreement)
I believe that one of the most essential skills for a tenant farmer is diplomacy. In my situation, the family lives on the land and must pass by the field several times a day. In other situations, the farmer may rarely see the landlord. I can’t say enough about keeping communication open and friendly. Make it easy for them to plan around you by giving them all the information they could possibly need. Share your long-term plans so there aren’t any surprises.
Don’t forget that there can be advantages for the landlords. One main reason people lease out land is for tax purposes: if they are savvy about taxes, they can save a lot of money. You should educate them about that if they don’t know, because all the advantages you can bring to them will only help the relationship. To find out all the possible benefits for landlords in your area, talk to other farmers and agricultural organizations.
An issue that can wreak havoc on tenant farmers is water. One of our friends started out on a promising bit of land, but was soon held hostage by a water shortage: she had to share the limited water with three households, and after a season of water-deprived crops, she was given her notice. Ask about water, about the possibilities of connecting to city water if a well dries up, and if the landlords have any plans for emergency backup. Ask about traffic on the land, which can be a big bone of contention. You will want to have work parties, perhaps host a few garden tours, and possibly even have a farm stand. Discuss this and create a working vision. It’s really important to understand that there is a huge reality gap between the public perception of farming and the real thing.
Be sober and realistic when entering a lease agreement. It’s tempting to be romantic and idealistic, but think of the everyday farm operation and don’t make too many concessions. You will be spending many hours on this property and it needs to work for you.
I was fortunate that I picked out my site in November and got to roam around the land almost daily through the winter. Putting a lot of thought into how you lay out your farm will benefit you through the years. There are many books about design, and they will encourage you to think more thoroughly. Permaculture is an inspiring philosophy of ecological landscape design with a focus on food production. It is worthwhile taking a look at any of Bill Mollison’s books. I found Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual a bit heavy going, although fascinating and very relevant. His lighter, Introduction to Permaculture, on the other hand, was so gripping that I could barely put it down. While the concepts of permaculture are wonderfully thoughtful, they are hard to incorporate into a high-output, annual-cropping system like a commercial farm. Much as I wanted a permaculture farm, I realized that I wanted to farm for income, and I had to make money first.
Always imagine your enterprise growing bigger than you currently think is possible, and design for it. For example, I fully envisioned myself as a seasoned farmer, wandering the field, harvesting this and that into my basket, and turning over the soil with my shovel. The reality, five years later, is that I need two pickup trucks to haul the produce to market. I hire a tractor twice a year to cultivate different areas, but I am limited in the size of tractor that can get into the field because of my nine-foot-wide gate. A standard twelve-foot gate would have been a better idea. Thank goodness I listened to my landlord and left a truck path in the middle of the field, and factored in access for his tractor. I really did not want to—I was almost religious about not having machinery on the land—but I’ve changed, and I’m thankful that my site design was flexible enough to adapt. I know the only thing that we can count on in life is change, so plan for it.
Another important concept in design is how you plan to water. Water is crucial, and you need to think about the source of your water in relation to everything else. Think about the water pressure waning over distance and about whether you’ll be using drip tape or sprinklers to irrigate, and this will determine some geometry and dimensions. For example, drip tape distributes water reliably over no more than a hundred-foot span. This might influence the length of your beds. Some irrigation doesn’t work so well with contours, so straight beds will make things easier. When Rachel started out, she had a circular farm that was beautiful in form and function for its size and she watered with a rotating sprinkler that worked perfectly. Her farm design and watering system fit well together.
Think about light, the path of the sun, and how this might change over time because of trees or new buildings. It is a shame to see a greenhouse built in the wrong spot. Think about land-use patterns, and time- and energy-saving methods. If you have animals, make sure they are conveniently located so that feeding and watering them isn’t a big trek, especially uphill!
I have tried almost every type of irrigation. I have been known to refer to my watering system as my “irritation” system. In my experience, no type of irrigation, except hand-watering, works perfectly. If you start with that premise, you’ll probably be a happier farmer. Better yet, always assume the system is not working until you’re certain it is. The best irrigation system is the farmer’s footsteps. Don’t be sold by irrigation dealers claiming perfect distribution; it’s just not true. Irrigation is a lot of tweaking and fiddling and experimenting and maintaining.
Andrew gave me another view of irrigation. He loves it. He had a kit with millions of pieces, and whenever a problem presented itself, he loved to assemble all the bits like a big Lego set. He loved to talk to the dealers and find out what new emitters would spit out how much water per minute under what different pressures and sets of conditions. However, he didn’t have any illusions about perfect water distribution either.
Let me tell you a tale of woe that will instil in you a fear of automatic irrigation. Rachel, Heather, and I bought a greenhouse together with the hope of having huge returns on a salad greens operation. We set up an automatic sprinkler system with the perfect heads, on the right diameter of hose, running at the right pressure, set to go on at the optimum intervals. It couldn’t fail, right? It became clear that there were dry patches and soaked patches but when we checked, everything seemed to be running fine: the heads were clear, the filters were clean, the pressure was right. We had jumped on the salad greens operation because the irrigation seemed so easy. All of us were working full-time on our own operations so we didn’t have time to thoroughly monitor the big greenhouse. As it turned out, when we took off the timer to put it away during the fall clean-up, we realized the valve had only been opening halfway.
That cursed piece of plastic cost us countless hours of worry and frustration, and thousands of dollars in lost production. The moral of the story for me is not to trust technology. Just because it’s slick and expensive doesn’t mean it works. If you’re low on cash and time, stick with simple garden sprinklers for everything except tomatoes, which can’t handle overhead water. Sprinklers work well, and I think the produce looks nicer when watered from above. The drawbacks of course are that it takes a lot of time to move the sprinkler around, because you can’t properly cover a big area at a time, and the water can take a long time to reach the depth you need. You also waste a great deal of water spreading it where it does not need to go. When you’re ready to invest, I would recommend drip tape. It’s relatively cheap, and can be assembled with little skill.
There are advantages and disadvantages to any type of soil, except for the loveliest of loam. The important thing is to recognize your soil type, and plan around it. Sand is harder to keep laden with nutrients because water runs right through it. However, weeding in sandy soil is a breeze. In sandy soil, plan for root crops, which can grow effortlessly and don’t need much nutrition. Experiment with greens but know that they have high nutrient demands and may not do as well. Most importantly, plan to get lots of water to your plants, possibly daily in the hot weather. Sandy soil and water shortages don’t work together.
Heavy clay like mine can seem like a terrible curse, but as long as you can break it open and get the seedlings’ roots covered, they will grow, because clay has inherent richness. Add compost regularly and you’ll be well on your way to loam in a few short years. The good news is that clay holds water well, which makes for less summer stress on the plants. The bad news is that you’ll be twiddling your thumbs in the springtime, waiting for the soil to dry up while your neighbour with sandy soil is already planting. In clay so heavy that you can’t crumble a dry chunk in your hand, contrary to logic, your best bet is transplanted greens. Root crops can’t get any size to them under that pressure, but surprisingly, chard, kale, and even lettuce can do well.
I dug a lot of compost deep into the soil in my first year. With this method I had some amazing crops. I also worked wood chips and gypsum into the soil. Wood chips decompose slowly, which helps in the long term. The gypsum, a crushed rock powder, bonds chemically to the clay particles and prevents them from bonding to each other. While I can’t say how effective each method was on its own, I am certain the combination of these three things worked, because my heavy clay is now loamy clay.
My last partner once tried to persuade me to market my garlic as organic “shade-grown” garlic, because of my jungle of weeds. A visitor to the farm in the early years commended my commitment to the “One Straw Revolution” (based on the book of that name by Masanobu Fukuoka, about his natural-farming methods), because she thought I was trying for the never-weeded look. I failed to tell her that I was actively spending hours each day weeding the field. Visitors to my farm now comment on how there aren’t any weeds, and are full of praise for how tidy my field looks. What’s the difference? More labour certainly helps but I credit a lot of the change to the excellent condition of the soil.
When I started farming, the clay soil was rock hard, and so crusty that I really wondered how anyone could claim that a hoe was a useful tool for weeding. I literally had to pull weeds by hand, and then they would only break off at the soil’s surface, leaving a healthy mass of roots to regrow the following week. I couldn’t do anything about emerging weeds because the soil was so hard I couldn’t disturb the roots. I tried to mulch using hay, but I just ended up bringing in more weeds. I was pennywise and pound foolish, and I wouldn’t use enough to really suppress the weeds. I also tried mulching with composted horse manure, and I imported a grass problem because of the weed seeds in the manure. I remember looking helplessly around the farm in late July, as thousands of thistle seeds floated in the summer breeze, distributing themselves evenly over the farm. Newly seeded crops would be overwhelmed by a flush of weeds, and I would lose the whole bed. I used to cry about the weeds.
Then two things happened simultaneously: Andrew arrived in my life and the soil reached the stage at which it could be hoed. He spent hours the first spring hoeing the field, while I tried to convince him that it was useless. He hoed, and hoed, and hoed. He would show up with yards and yards and yards of fish compost (made from finely ground fish waste and wood chips) that he would use to mulch the newly weeded beds. He didn’t care about the initial cost of the compost because he knew from his years of landscaping experience that it would pay off tenfold in a few years. He was right, and I am forever grateful. Andrew’s touch definitely helped change the way I farm.
Now weeding is actually fun. Yes, I really did say that. The soil is loose and fluffy from all the compost. Weeds pull up with their roots intact—even dandelions and thistles. I can zip down a bed in fifteen minutes or less; with a gentle scuffing action I can get all the emerging weeds, and then I don’t have to do it again because I till or fork the bed over when I harvest. Every year, fewer weeds emerge because almost none go to seed. Smartweed (Polygonum persicaria) is hardly seen anymore, and I used to battle whole thickets of it.
The important lesson in all of this is don’t despair, and add compost. In your first years on clay soil, you may not be able to get ahead of the weeds. Try, but don’t kill yourself, because once your soil has a nice tilth or structure, everything will come together. I suggest that you not open up too much ground in your first year. Paradoxically, you can make more money on less ground because you’ll get way, way, higher yields from well-tended crops. A last tip is that if you have a bed that is overgrown with weeds, it’s okay to till it under and start again. It actually may be more prudent to do this, because the plants can get stunted from being shaded and strangled, and weeding can be very damaging to them because you’ll disturb their roots. It also takes a very long time to clear out all the weeds from an overgrown bed, time that might be spent more profitably elsewhere in the garden, or better yet, in the shade with a cool drink, repeating to yourself, “I am one with the weeds . . .”
While this may be an odd comparison, greenhouses are quite like livestock in the way they tie you to the land. They need a bit of attention every day: in the late spring and fall you need to get down to the field early to open them up, and you need to time their closing to catch the maximum warmth for the evening. In the summer months you can just leave them open all the time. In the winter, they need venting some days, and of course, they need to be relieved of snow load. If you choose to heat your greenhouse, this will require more daily maintenance.
Less than a foot of snow will damage a greenhouse on the west coast because the snow is quick-falling, cement-like, and likely to be followed by heavy rain. When it is too hard to get the snow off, it important to remember that the plastic is worth much less than the structure; if you have any doubts about being able to remove the snow, slit the plastic to release the pressure on the frame. To deal with a possible snow load on glasshouses where removing snow is awkward, I would recommend a heat source, lit as soon as the snow starts falling. Last year I bought a telescoping pole that extends to ten feet with a broom on the end. This is a great tool for knocking snow off a greenhouse and other farm structures.
It is a big job to build a greenhouse, no matter how simple the kit seems. I have experience with building three types of greenhouses and I will comment on each. But first, a general comment: either buy one that doesn’t require levelling or hire machinery to do the levelling. When I started, I had no money and an iron determination that I could do it all, but I know now that all the digging I did has taken its toll on my body. I found it quite intimidating to approach machinery operators to describe a project that I myself was not sure about. The good news is that most machinery operators have done many projects just like the one you may propose and can possibly give you good advice about how to tackle it. In an extra couple of minutes they might even cut you some drainage ditches or do some other side project that would have taken you a whole day. Ask your neighbours who they use for projects, and call them up.
When I first met with my landlords, they mentioned that they had rescued a glasshouse that was going to be demolished. I was ecstatic because I loved the idea of growing under glass. I was less ecstatic when I saw that it was in many bundles and stacks, in about a thousand different pieces.
The first step was to choose a site. I had read that it is best to orient a greenhouse east-west so that you get a good southern exposure. I chose a sunny spot, squared off the corners, and started digging. The next step was to build the cement foundation on which the glasshouse would be set. I had to dig out a four-foot-wide, three-foot-deep footprint around the fifteen- by twenty-foot area of the greenhouse. This took about three days. To help you get into the spirit of the thing, this was in January, a particularly cold and wet January. On the morning of the third day, a dear backhoe driver named Bob just happened to be passing up the driveway to do some septic work. I must have been a pitiful sight because he stopped and motioned me out of the way. In a mere five minutes, he had completed the task, squared off all my edges, and even removed the middle so that we had a flat, empty square where we could begin building the form.
I worked with a carpenter for the next part of the project. The form was built with two-by-eights, three high, which we braced with stakes every two feet or so. I remember thinking that all that bracing was extreme overkill, but when the cement truck came and the form started filling with cement, we had some tense moments thinking the boards might blow out.
Once the cement dried, we took off the forms, put some perforated PVC pipe around the foundation to help with drainage, and then filled it all in with drain rock. Unfortunately, I hadn’t communicated properly that I wanted a soil-floored greenhouse and not drain rock, so it was more expensive than it needed to be: I ended up just covering the rock with soil so that I could grow plants on the floor.
Then it came time to assemble the thousand or so pieces of the actual glasshouse. It took me about ten minutes to decide that there was no possible way I could figure it out. Fortunately, the glasshouse had been made by a local manufacturer who was still in business. BC Greenhouse came to the rescue and the whole thing was assembled in a morning.
After we finished building, I realized a fatal flaw. I had set it up only a stone’s throw from the road, along which dozens of children walk to the nearby school. I figured I had erected an unbearable temptation that would only lure young boys and girls to take aim. Thank goodness, not one child, or adult for that matter, has ever thrown a stone. This might be because they all saw me toiling away, digging the foundation . . .
A commercial nursery down the way was closing, and they were selling off their twenty-year-old wood-frame greenhouses for next to nothing. The deal was that you had to take down and haul away the hundred- by thirty-foot structures. Always game for a bargain, my then partner and I jumped in wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, I hadn’t realized that the base plates, on which all the trusses sat, were treated wood. This is not allowed by our organic regulations, so we had to replace them, and opted for cement footings.
Since we were dealing with quite a slope, and we had decided on footings, we chose not to level the site but to level the footings. This was a very time-consuming undertaking, and if I could do it again, I would choose metal footings (like Long John, see page 132). We decided that we wanted to raise the greenhouse a bit higher so that we could capture more hot air in the structure. However, the geometry of the situation got ahead of us, and when the slope was factored in, we ended up with a thirteen-foot-high greenhouse, instead of a nine-foot one.
Building a structure this tall proved to be more of a challenge than I could handle. Again, to get into the spirit of it, it was another January; we had started in October but that is how long it had taken. We required scaffolding to join the half-trusses in the middle. We would abut four half-trusses onto the top plate, set their heels into the cemented footings, and then hoist it up in stages until I was on top of the scaffolding, holding the set above my head at the right level. Richard then nailed the footings in, and connected the trusses to the rest of the spine that we had already erected. Images that stay with me from the process are heavy wet wood, perching precariously on two-storey planks, and being very cranky because progress was always being hindered by wood that needed de-nailing, rotten bits that needed cutting out and replacing, and warped bits that needed reorienting, et cetera, et cetera.
On the plus side, it is definitely the coolest-looking greenhouse around, and I am very proud of it. It is a great community conversation piece, and has served us really well. We covered it with a heavy grade of vapour barrier that lasted three years. It was a fine substitute for very expensive greenhouse plastic while we were honing our greenhouse-growing technique. When you get your greenhouse up to optimum performance, and every little extra bit of light you get equals big bucks, then it is well worth investing in the clearer plastic.
If you really enjoy the process of building, and the creativity it requires to use recycled materials, then by all means, it is a worthwhile project. However, if you just want somewhere to grow food, save up and buy a metal greenhouse kit.
Long John—The Aluminum Kit
I wish I could relate a story of a single afternoon’s work party resulting in the erection of a lovely prefab structure but this is not our story. A few years ago, Rachel, Heather, and I bought a hundred-and-sixty- by twenty-foot aluminum greenhouse from a company called Harnois, in Quebec. We were assured that this was the Cadillac of all greenhouses. Unfortunately, Harnois was better at engineering greenhouses than at writing directions, and the diagrams mystified us.
We had gone together with several other farmers to purchase several greenhouses at a bulk rate. The pieces all came, more or less clearly labelled, on a big transport truck. The first step, although it is truly the last thing you want to do, is to take a careful inventory. Most companies only give you a certain time in which to report damaged or missing parts. One of the farmers in our group was missing quite a few parts, which he failed to notice within the time window, and he had to replace them out of his own pocket.
Next came the levelling of the site, which was done by tractor. Even a slight slope becomes quite significant when you are levelling, and we ended up with a water-catchment area on the uphill side of the greenhouse. This has led to perennial flooding problems during winter rains and has required a drainage ditch outside the greenhouse. If you need to level, think carefully about the topsoil. Levelling the site helps square the foundation but in order to level out a slope, you inevitably have to scrape off some topsoil. If you decide your site needs levelling, scrape off the topsoil, put it in a separate pile, and then do the levelling. Replace the topsoil evenly afterward.
Once we had the site prepared, we began to hammer in the posts. This time we were working in June, just after the soil had dried up. We had a problem in that the soil was very rocky and we kept hitting rocks that would knock the footings off-centre. Some posts wouldn’t even go in all the way which was frustrating, because having everything level is important. We ended up correcting our error by adjusting all the posts to match the one that couldn’t go down any farther. By doing this we compromised the structure’s anchor but we just had to get on with it.
We were so busy with our own farms that we had little time to devote to this project; we resorted to Sunday evenings, 6:00 pm until dark. Each week we would forget what we had figured out the previous week, so we ended up wasting a lot of time. We finally got the last door on in mid-November.
Having a new, well-engineered greenhouse has really made clear what the old wood greenhouse is lacking. For one thing, the shape of the trusses is such that it allows lots of headroom right out to the sides of the greenhouse, so there’s room to manoeuvre a rototiller through the whole area. The pitch of the roof is better for managing snow load, but we still have to keep a close eye on it.
Another great feature is the roll-up sides with gears. The sides roll about a third of the way up the side walls of the greenhouse to allow air to circulate. Greenhouses can get too hot in the summer, which can cause all sorts of trouble. Roll-up sides are essential, and having a safe gearing system is a nice touch. Old-school models of roll-up gears were under so much tension that if you let go of the crank, they could smash your knuckles. After all the glitches, we are very happy with our Harnois greenhouse.
Pros and Cons of Greenhouse Growing
Greenhouses are a boon to any farm. The climate conditions that you can achieve in a greenhouse, namely spring warmth and summer humidity, can provide perfect growing conditions. Greens grown under plastic have a luscious, velvety finish that restaurants love. Greenhouses also keep plants dry in the late summer rains that can cause blight and other catastrophic diseases. Depending on your soil and climate conditions, and your ability to vent the greenhouse, you may run into challenges, such as mineral build-up, with greenhouse production.
One spring, maybe four or five years after we built the greenhouse at my farm, I noticed a whitish crust on the surface of the soil. It reminded me a lot of the salination that I had seen in tropical soils. I had some standing water in the greenhouse over the winter, because I have a high water table, so I figured it was just residue. It “went away” when I watered so I tried to ignore it but when it was worse the following year, it was hard to keep pretending it wasn’t an issue. Concurrent with this problem, I noticed a drop in tomato production. I thought the plants were dropping their flowers because of the extreme heat so I bought hundred-foot roll-up sides with a geared crank. These were a good purchase because they allowed us to vent properly, but they didn’t solve the blossom drop.
I installed drainage (see next section) and that stopped the bulk of the buildup. What was happening was that the water was evaporating off the top of the soil, leaving the salts behind, and we were never watering heavily enough to rinse them back down. We finally decided to cut the plastic off and let the soil be cleansed by the heavy winter rains. This worked well, but the final solution was to install drainage ditches so I could prevent the pooling altogether.
My farm is in a low-lying area. I had put up with water pooling on the land in the winter for a long time, until Andrew persuaded me to try installing drainage. I was hesitant to shell out money for something I couldn’t imagine working. We started the first year with a hundred-and-twenty-foot pipe at the very top of our field which we connected to an existing length of drain tile (a segmented clay pipe that is laid in sections and used to drain water out of wet areas). We had a backhoe come in and dig a sloping trench two feet wide and three feet deep. We put a four-inch layer of drain rock on the bottom and then a four-inch perforated PVC pipe (perforations facing down onto the drain rock). We had to test the grade to make sure the pipe was properly sloped. We then filled the trench to the top with drain rock. We saved money by narrowing the trench on top of the pipe; we divided it in half vertically, filling half with soil and half with drain rock. The point is just to bring the drain rock to the surface so the water can funnel down through it. The trench paid for itself in one winter with the increased production in the greenhouse, because the soil remained dry.
The next year I did the entire periphery of the field in more or less the same way. One fatal error that I made was underestimating the capacity of the existing drain tile. We connected two pipes to the drain tile in a T-junction, but it couldn’t handle the increased volume during heavy rain. The water overflowed the trenches and ran across the land, causing massive erosion. The next year I had a wider pipe installed next to the drain tile so now there’s more than double the capacity. I think the soil is a lot healthier, thanks to the drainage. I also feel it paid for itself in a single season because it increased my capacity for extending the season.
A well-organized packing area is a very important part of the farm’s function. You should have tables to work on, and a large tub or two for cooling and rinsing produce. I have two old bathtubs that work well. The packing area should be covered, so that you can keep the produce out of the sun. Make this area bigger than you think you need, to allow for increased production in the future.
Sharp knives and scissors are essential for harvesting. If you find yourself misplacing them in the field, try tying bright flagging tape to the handles. Or, like me, you might just choose to have so many scissors and knives that you stumble across them wherever you walk. I use Rubbermaid bins for most harvesting, except tomatoes which are harvested into cardboard flats. We have standard sizes of bins, with the weights of each recorded near the weigh scale.
There is a real art to harvesting properly, to ensure that the produce looks nice and stays fresh, and we have an order of operations for our harvesting routine. We’re always pressed for time, and we want the produce to arrive as fresh as possible. Our orders for restaurants and the box program have to be filled by Monday afternoon, so we start on Sunday. We start with root vegetables: beets, leeks, onions, turnips, and carrots. We generally keep the tops on everything, so handling is important. We have a trigger nozzle on the end of a hose that we use to blast the roots clean while they are on a table. We lay them in a single layer, and flip them once or twice before plunging them into the bathtub for a final rinse and to clean the tops. Discoloured leaves are discarded and leeks are trimmed with three well-aimed snips.
We start Monday morning with lettuces, salad greens, and leafy vegetables. These are the most fragile, and benefit most from being picked in the cooler hours of the morning. Cut them, and let them sit in cold water for about ten minutes, but not longer. You don’t want them to absorb too much water, which will burst their cells, but you do want them to lose all their residual field heat in the cold water. It is paramount that greens be kept cool, moist, and out of the sun and wind.
Andrew steps over a perfect bed of kale. During his time at Feisty Field he revolutionized the way our salad is grown.
A story that has gone down in our collective history is about an epic order for a hundred heads of pac choi. I had never sold such a quantity and I didn’t have enough bins. I was so proud of the dark green heads that I didn’t want to crunch them into bins anyway, so I left them open in the back of my pickup and drove to town. When I arrived at the warehouse, the poor pac choi were wilted and so sorry-looking that I was ashamed to deliver them. Just thirty minutes earlier, they had been glowing with vitality. This was a good lesson in why you should always keep greens sealed in a bin! The happy end to this story was that the kind buyer offered to revive them for me by plunging them in ice water, so they were saved, but I had a good cry about the whole incident later that evening with Heather and Rachel.
Lettuces can be submerged and inverted as you grip them by the base. They can then be swished around under water with moderate vigour to get the dirt out from inside. Salad greens in volume are best washed with a two-tub system. First they are spread on the surface of a half-full tub in a single layer where they are rinsed and picked through. They are then transferred to a second tub in small quantities for a final inspection before being put in a bin. The bin, with its lid on, is then set on an angle to drain and the water is strained out by tipping the bin periodically.
Beans, peas, and cucumbers are picked next. It’s best if you don’t wash them. We put these into plastic bins immediately and set them in the shade. Long English cucumbers are especially prone to wilting, so seal them in plastic bags and refrigerate them, if possible.
Berries are last because they are fragile and can’t be picked wet with dew. Do not wash them. Our customers understand that we can’t guarantee delivery of berries, because they won’t meet our standards if the weather is either rainy or too cold. They don’t sweeten properly without the heat, and they don’t store with even a bit of dampness. When that’s the case we pick them anyway, cut off the stems, and freeze them immediately. We were pleasantly surprised to find that berries that didn’t meet our sweetness standard in the summer were delicious in the winter. Everything’s relative.
Be attentive to the needs of different varieties: pale-skinned cukes bruise each other; don’t stack heirloom tomatoes; don’t move summer squash around too much because they scratch. Make sure you’re always tasting the produce. This will prevent you from arriving at market with woody beans, bitter lettuces or overly pungent mustards.
I was up at the crack of dawn to harvest my first offerings for the Moss Street Community Market: kale, chard, arugula, radishes, baby spinach, and salad greens. I skipped through the rows collecting all my beautiful vegetables; I scrubbed, bunched, polished, and bagged. I was thrilled to be going to the market. When I got to the school grounds where our market is held, I set up my table, placed everything lovingly in baskets, and wrote out the prices on my little chalkboard. Then I took a breather and walked around the market before it started.
My bright, shining smile started to droop as I looked at everyone else’s stands. They were beautiful! “How did they grow all that variety? And everything looks twice as vibrant as mine.” I returned to my puny table and made a resolution: I was going to stand behind that table and not cry. I was certain that nothing was going to sell and I was a dreamer for thinking otherwise. I was out of my league. All these farmers had been coming for years, and they were experts. Customers knew them and were going to buy from them, of course. When the time came to pack up, I would just load everything back in the truck and never, ever come back.
When the bell rang to announce the beginning of the market I was stunned as people sauntered by, stopping to “ooh” and “ahh” over my baby spinach. Everything was gone from the table in less than two hours. During the rest of the market, I wandered around and bought all sorts of delightful treats. I got to talk to the farmers, and related my experience. I got some very supportive hugs and encouragement. Over the years I’ve come to really value my relationships with the other market vendors.
Our friend Lana moved to a rural property and took to farming with her whole heart. She built the sweetest little chicken pen and she was very proud of her small flock of layer hens. When she was out in the garden one day, to her horror she saw a bald eagle swoop down and take a chicken. She must have been a threatening sight, because the eagle dropped the mangled bird before flying away. Seeing its innards turned outwards, she realized that she was going to have to put the chicken down. After some nervous deliberating at the chopping block, she decided to take it to her neighbour to do the deed. He was an eccentric old guy who took one look at the chicken and declared that all she needed was some surgery. Lana watched in dismay as he shoved the innards back in and sewed up the chicken’s front with rough stitches, feathers and all. This seemed like torture to the bird and a real long shot for recovery.
She reluctantly brought her dear little bird home and gently put her in the henhouse for the night. The next morning, when she was still in the same spot, Lana carried her to the water dish. She drank eagerly, but the water dribbled out from the sewn-up area. Thoroughly traumatized, Lana took the hen back to her neighbour and demanded that he put her down this time. Instead, the guy got out the thread again and put in a few more stitches. The next day, the chicken was as good as new and lived another three years or so. Lana named her Lucky!
I have also had a few forays into livestock and farm animals; none of them were very profitable, but they are definitely a source of great stories for friends and family. In the early years, Rachel and I decided to raise broiler chickens. Being vegetarians at the time, we knew less than nothing about raising chicken. I had never even had a pet before. However, we had read about sustainable-farming systems, and they all recommended incorporating animals into rotations and creating on-farm fertility with animal manure. We decided to try pastured poultry, the chicken tractor model, which involved a movable pen right in the field, where the chickens could scratch up beds and prepare them for planting. We called another farmer (who took us under her wing) for advice and she assured us that raising chicken was a profitable endeavour. Although she had never tried the movable-pen system she gave great advice and ongoing support.
We typed “chicken tractor” into a search engine and downloaded a picture of more or less what we ended up building. We had many laughs putting that structure together; it still wobbled, even with gussets and cross-bracing on every corner and joint. Rachel ordered the chickens through the mail. She set up a cardboard enclosure in her basement that was about six feet around with some wood shavings for bedding. She hung a heat lamp in the middle, added a standard chicken water dispenser, and used egg cartons to hold the feed.
Sometimes your decisions are just inconsistent with your values but you don’t realize it at the time. We decided that we would raise Cornish Giant hens, which are the standard in the meat-bird industry. These over-bred monsters are eating machines. They convert grain to meat at astonishing rate: after six weeks they weigh five to six pounds and are market-ready At $3.50 a pound, we figured we would be making great money with twenty-five birds. We were floored when the four-inch-tall chicks powered through a fifty-pound bag of feed in a little over a week. They were really cute at first. I remember leaning over the pen and getting a game of duct-tape football started by tossing in a fragment of tape, and watching them all run for it, and pass it around. By the second week, they had lost their baby fluff and started to grow their white feathers.
When it was time to move the chicks out to the field, they really didn’t know what was happening. I had heard that chickens were supposed to till the soil like little tractors, but all these did was compact the soil by sitting on it. What a joke! I tried to train them to dig, by turning the soil in front of them. They would shuffle around a bit and grab worms that were within reach, but basically they just wanted to chow down on the grain. They grew daily, and their huge thighs and lower legs reminded me of dinosaurs as they lumbered around when I scooted the pen forward. I have since learned that the chickens you want for tilling are layer hens, which are more agile and have higher energy levels, which enables them to scratch for food. While I was caring for the growing chickens, Rachel had ordered another batch of chicks that would be ready for the field when the first batch was slaughtered.
The visit to the slaughterhouse was pretty traumatic for us newbies. I don’t know what we were expecting but there was nothing muted about the experience. I’ll spare you the details but after the job was done, we looked at each other and exchanged a silent, “Oh no! We still have the next batch of chicks to deal with.” We got lots of compliments on the chicken, and we even ate some ourselves, but after we considered all the hours involved and the costs, we decided we wouldn’t do it again.
Raising chickens for sale on our scale is not profitable because of the cost of both certified organic feed and slaughtering. We are currently facing a regulatory regime that is impractical and prohibitively expensive.
Grin and bear it! Robin demonstrates the proper technique for gutting a chicken.
However, Rachel now raises sixty birds a year for our personal consumption. It is worth the effort for us, because we value chemical-free and ethically raised meat. Interestingly, slaughtering the chickens at her farm, with friends, is not traumatic like our first experience was. We felt that taking responsibility for this aspect of the process was the right thing to do; we slaughter the birds with the utmost respect and care for their well-being. It feels important to have this skill.
During my early years of farming, I worked part time as a field hand on a mixed organic farm. One day I was invited in for a meal, and they were serving their own lamb. I was a vegetarian because I disagreed with the industrial-meat industry, but I couldn’t find fault with the meat that was served to me, so I just tucked in. It was so delicious that it was a transformative experience. I reckoned that I couldn’t ever afford meat like that, so the only way I was going to get it was to raise it.
I went to the library to read up on sheep because I wanted to know how to choose a lamb. The book explained how to look for size and shape, and most importantly, to never, ever buy a bottle-fed lamb. Bottle-fed lambs didn’t have the immunity passed through mother’s milk and, since they had not been accepted by the mother, there was probably something wrong with them. Moreover, they were just too used to humans, which would lead to problems. Armed with my library book, I felt ready to go into shepherding.
Richard, my partner at the time, was from New Zealand, and he knew a few things about sheep, or so I thought. When we got to the sheep farm, the farmer put on a show with her sheep dogs, and soon the new lambs were lined up in front of us. I started walking down the line, looking at the build, stance, and shape of the lambs. When I glanced back, Richard was ringed by bottle-fed lambs: two ewes and a runty ram, suckling his fingers and snuggling his calves. His sheepish smile was a classic. We ended up driving home with three lambs on his lap in the cab of the truck, rather than in the back canopy as we had planned. What a mistake!
Before getting the lambs, we had divided the fifteen-foot-wide buffer zone between the peripheral fence and our cropped area into hundred-foot runs with recycled, four-foot fencing staked into the ground with rebar. The first lesson was that our spring clover and timothy grass mix was too rich for the lambs. Puku, the runty ram, was particularly susceptible to the gas created by the nitrogen-rich grass. His belly literally blew up like a beach ball, and then he’d fall over. He would eventually deflate, but when I got him to his feet again he would immediately start munching, so I’d have to lay him down again. I’d visit him periodically, because he couldn’t pee lying down. I’d right him and let him pee, but then I’d have to wrestle him down again. Once he deflated, he’d hop up again and happily go on eating, never learning from his experience.
I built the lambs a little shelter with a corrugated tin roof. One morning after a windstorm, I got down to the farm and Puku was missing. The tin was flat on the ground. I searched high and low for him, and finally, when I called him, I heard a muffled “Baahaaa.” He had been caught under the very thin piece of tin in a small hollow, and he was quite relieved when I lifted it up and freed him. To grasp the full humour of the situation, you have to appreciate how tiny the piece of metal was. What a runt! But I loved him.
Richard had assured me that lambs didn’t drink. “Can you imagine farmers in New Zealand wandering their thousand acres with a water bucket?” he asked. I tried taking the lambs water that spring, but he was right: they wouldn’t drink. Then, while visiting the lamb section at a fall fair, I saw, to my absolute horror, lambs drinking from buckets in their pens. I literally ran from the fair and drove straight home. I took a bucket out to my lambs, but they looked at me with that blank stare that only lambs can perfect and kept on grazing. As I sat on the grass, perplexed, I realized that the lambs I had seen were probably grain-fed lambs. In our grazing rotation, we gave the grass a good watering after the lambs had finished on it, and as a result, the grass was lush and green, much like the grass in sheep-raising areas.
One thing we learned shortly after getting the lambs is that they are escape artists. No matter how far I jammed the rebar into the ground, or how many fencing staples I used to secure the bottom of the fence, they always escaped. They broke the fence to get out, and they’d break it again to get back in. It was probably torture for them to be fenced next to veggies and strawberries, but I’ve heard from other people that sheep need good fencing because they are incredibly strong, and they can slither through any gaps.
A very interesting social feature of lambs is that they need to be around a bellwether. The bellwether is a natural leader, or in Puku’s case, the animal who has a certain magnetism that attracts the others. Whatever the reason, Puku was the bellwether, and everywhere that Puku went, the others were sure to go . . . If I was moving them, I just had to focus on getting Puku into the pen, and the girls would follow. If the girls broke out, and Puku didn’t make it through the fence because of his rotund shape or accident-prone manner, the girls would break back into the pen, by another route if necessary, in order to be with him. Once I figured this out, managing them was much easier.
On the day the lambs were slaughtered, Paul, my apprentice, found me teary and glum. He was surprised, because the whole season he had thought I had a grip on the fact that I was raising the animals for meat. I really did have an animal-husbandry mindset, which, for the uninitiated, seems paradoxical: I loved those animals even more because I knew I was going to kill them in the end. I really cared about all their life stages. I wanted them to be comfortable, secure, and well looked after at all times. (Okay, I did want to string them up by their hoofs when I caught them eating my strawberries, but that was just a fleeting thought.) I spent time researching the most humane slaughterhouse because I didn’t want them to suffer. Since I was responsible for their existence, I wanted it to be as good as it could be. I was sad when they were gone, but I ate them and truly enjoyed the meat. I don’t think I’ll cry when I eventually raise my next batch of lambs, but I think that my respect for the animals and my appreciation for their meat will never diminish.
I didn’t really think over the pros and cons of certifying before I applied, because I had been seriously indoctrinated into the philosophy behind the movement during my apprenticeship. I have never regretted certifying, although I respect those who opt out of the certification process. The movement for “beyond organic” has gained its fuel from the tragic watering-down of the organic standards in the United States in 1998. As British Columbia farmers, we have been fortunate so far to have ownership over our system, although this too could change. We are subject to a soon-to-be released national standard, but we have some freedom within the structure and we hope that it will evolve differently from the American process.
We are lucky in our area to have a local certification body comprised of farmers who really care about the integrity of our agriculture. They have put together a set of guidelines that are locally relevant and thoughtfully presented. I knew the organic guidelines before I started the farm so I didn’t have to change to suit them, and I found the organic farmers to be a welcoming community with whom I shared many values. They were open to sharing their techniques, sources for materials, and favourite plant varieties. They had good suggestions for marketing, and had even developed a listserv to help chefs and farmers connect. I feel my yearly fee of about $400 is worth it, just to be part of this network of growers.
The certification inspections are thorough but they are meant to be a teaching experience rather than a punitive grilling. Some of the guidelines can be open to interpretation, and the inspector makes sure that you are truly on the same page as everyone else. Some regulations may need to be broadened, and all the organic growers are encouraged to be part of the guideline-revision process. The inspection is also your opportunity to explain how and why certain guidelines aren’t working for you, and suggest alternatives.
There are many more stories I haven’t told about this adventure into farming, and there will be many more, I’m sure. As I start my eleventh season on this land, I’m excited about having a business partner—my farmhand from last year, Dennis, whom I’m inviting to be a part of running the farm. This is an exciting step—opening up and managing the farm for the benefit of two separate households. I think this is a strong trend in farming: away from the nuclear-family model and toward partnerships and various other arrangements that help agriculture fit with the realities of our modern lives.
I have great hope that new forms of agriculture will breathe new life into the old model and create space for different kinds of relationships to land and to food. I am inspired by community models like land trusts and the Community Farms Program that are allowing these new forms of farming to unfold in British Columbia. I think it is an exciting time to be in farming. Food sovereignty theory is infiltrating government policy, which is wonderful news.
Change is coming and farmers are leading the way.
Yugoslavian hardneck garlic is Robin’s favourite variety because it has strong, pungent flavour and large, easy-to-peel cloves, and it grows really well on her farm.