Supporting the Entire Organic Food Chain by Increasing Awareness of Organic Products Nationally Karen Squires This year will mark the big 10th year anniversary of Organic Week occurring September 9-15, 2019! Please check out Canadian Organic Trade Association’s (COTA) website for more information on Organic Week 2019, our online contests launching in July, our IQ… Keep Reading
What price do I charge? What can I grow to make money?… and other questions. Randy Hooper This piece is really dedicated to every fruit and vegetable grower in BC who is producing for their own sales at market, to retailers, or sales to wholesalers. There is a premium to be paid for supporting BC… Keep Reading
Anna Helmer Hello and welcome once again to The Biodynamic Farming Experience for the Celestially-Challenged: a partly-formed, poorly-articulated, and over-hyphenated chronicle of a particular journey in which a woman-farmer-of-a-certain-age-and-experience (me) delves into the theory and, more importantly, the practice of Biodynamic farming in search of fun and the future of farming. Rambling along here, aren’t… Keep Reading
Sproule & Sons Farm: Past to Present Neil and Jacqui Sproule with gratitude to Marjorie Harris Garnet and Charlotte Sproule bought a raw piece of land in Oyama in 1946. They built a small shack and started planting a few fruit trees. They also started their family, which eventually grew to five children, all raised… Keep Reading
Stacey Santos One snowy Sunday morning in Vernon, I found myself contemplating a selection of bolt guns. I listened as a panel of organic farmers explained their uses, their modifications, and the proper way to ensure an ethical death. You only have one chance to learn how to do it right and do it properly.… Keep Reading
Anna Helmer Here’s a question I hear a lot: So, what are you going to do now that winter is here and there is no more farming? Leaving aside the irony that I most often hear it while selling potatoes at farmers’ market, not to mention its (alarming?) assumption that farming is not a full… Keep Reading
Michael Marrapese Agriculture as we define it today has existed for roughly 12,000 years. Though the practices have been refined over millennia, modern farmers would still recognize the intent and the activity as ‘farming.’ We can find examples of plants we recognize as cereal grains, peas, barley, wheat, rice, and squash dating back 10,000 years.… Keep Reading
Lennea Durant A solid health and safety program is important for any agriculture business, but workplace safety doesn’t always come naturally. Often safety practices are implemented after the fact, once a worker has been injured. There are over 26,000 agricultural workers in British Columbia and 550 organic farms operating in the province.(1) Between 2013 and… Keep Reading
A Two-Wheeled Ride through Gabriola’s Growing Local Food Economy Hannah Roessler Graham Bradley is a busy guy. I catch him on a rare day off to talk about the Gabriola Food Hub, but we end up delving into the importance of cultural shift, decolonization, green transportation, feeding passions, and systems thinking. The spill over into… Keep Reading
Challenges to Localizing Meat Production Tristan Banwell Consider for a moment the complexities of the industrial meat supply chain. Livestock could be born on one farm, sold and moved to another location for finishing, trucked to yet another premises for slaughter. The carcass will be butchered and processed at a different location, and sold at… Keep Reading
