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
Josh Brown …It was a few days ago at around 7 am when the sun peered over Fairview Mountain to kindly balance a rude 40 km/h south wind. It happened while I was neurotically leaning over the hood of my van trying to pick out a slightly different noise in the engine (of all things)… Keep Reading
Eva-Lena Lang Growing up on a family farm in the Mabel Lake Valley, in the North Okanagan, I experienced the many rewards and challenges that farmers can face. I left the region for several years, but whenever I returned for visits, I would notice new struggles confronting the farming community. Certain challenges stand out in… Keep Reading
Anna Helmer The bell rings to start the market day. Relentless and demoralizing rain has been falling since the tents came out of the trailer and we began the set up, two hours ago. The gutters now strung up between the tents are working well, emitting a steady stream of water into the growing pool… Keep Reading
Intergenerational Soil Stewardship: Our Only Hope? Marjorie Harris BSc, IOIA V.O. P.Ag Soil, specifically topsoil, is the foundation of life on this earth. Earth is the only planet with healthy fertile soil on it that we know of yet, in the whole of the universe. Fertile soil is a little-understood mixture of biology and geology… Keep Reading
Plant Health Diagnostic Support for BC Producers Emma Holmes, P.Ag While we always hope that every farmer has a successful season and bountiful harvests, the reality is that there are endless factors to potentially derail those harvests. For me, the hardest part of farming was finding my crops decimated by pests or struggling to survive… Keep Reading
From Farmer to Family Renée Hartleib There can be major advantages to getting lost. Just ask Lovena and Ryan Harvey, owners of Gathering Place Trading Company, a family run company in BC. Fifteen years ago, they were travelling in South Africa, Ryan’s birthplace, in their vintage VW camper van. On an afternoon jaunt through the… Keep Reading
(Not Until You Understand the Message) Av Sing This article first appeared in The Canadian Organic Grower, with thanks. All too often when farmers start talking weeds, a common first question is “How do I get rid of a bad case of…?” when a more appropriate question is “I wonder why my field has a… Keep Reading
