Reading Time: 7 minutes Quebec is already a leader in urban agriculture. It has many small urban farms and a number of community-led rooftop gardens, and is home to the world’s first commercial rooftop greenhouse operation, Lufa Farms, which recently expanded into a new 163,000-square-foot greenhouse atop a former Sears warehouse in the St-Laurent area of Montreal. The Quebec […] Read more
Quebec leads indoor urban agriculture trend
Guide Canada: LEDs plus cheap electricity opens new opportunities
City-bred farm workers
Is your next employee working today on an urban farm in Toronto?
Reading Time: 5 minutes In cities like Vancouver and Toronto, urban farms are creating a new pathway for the next generation of Canada’s farmers and farm workers, whether these young people see themselves destined for city or, indeed, rural operations. Toronto Urban Growers (TUG), a non-profit network that connects growers and facilitates knowledge sharing between them, will work with […] Read more
This is urban agriculture?
CANADA: If you want to see eyes roll, just ask Country Guide readers (and writers) if urban farmers are actually farmers. Since when was a pot of tomatoes on a balcony a farm? But maybe we need to think again
Reading Time: 7 minutes Not surprisingly, urban farming is generally defined as agriculture that is done in a city, usually on a small plot of land but really it could be on any available nook. That’s what separates it from conventional farming. But then, it’s also done as a business, producing food for commercial sale, which is what links […] Read more
Gone to school
Guide Canada: For a growing number of Millennials, the place to learn about agriculture doesn’t have a conventional farmer anywhere in sight
Reading Time: 5 minutes “I’m energized every time I walk into this building,” says Tony Doyle. “And so is everyone else. They know we’re doing something unique here.” The building Doyle is talking about is the Centre for Food at Durham College in Oshawa, the city on the eastern edge of Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe that has been best known […] Read more
Putting down roots in Canadian soil
With farmers like Peter Nikkel helping Raymond Ngarboui, refugees from the world’s trouble spots are getting a new chance
Reading Time: 13 minutes Before we even exchange our first word, I get a sense of Raymond Ngarboui. When we meet, he’s on the phone with a refugee settlement counsellor who asks if he might have garden plots available for two families from Burundi, recently arrived in Winnipeg and feeling stressed and isolated. This is 43-year-old Ngarboui’s side-project but […] Read more
Unconventional
Maybe it’s time to take Canada’s new crop of non-conventional farmers a lot more seriously
Reading Time: 7 minutes Change is coming to Canadian agriculture, and judging by the numbers, it’s coming fast. Our country’s food supply, our rural landscape, much of our GDP and a major part of our national identity all depend on Canadian farmers. But the average age of those farmers has now reached 55, with more farmers over 70 years […] Read more
Urban agriculture in Germany
Could Munich’s urban farm be a model for Canada, helping improve quality of life in our cities and narrow the urban-rural divide?
Reading Time: 6 minutes If you have never heard of the now-extinct Schlüter tractor brand, what you need to know is that the company produced some famously unique looking machines during its corporate life. Now, this was the first opportunity I’d ever had to see a working Schlüter tractor, and it came in a city — although still on […] Read more
Is it time to drop the term ‘commercial farmer?’
When you call yourself a commercial farmer, consumers may hear ‘factory farm’
Reading Time: 6 minutes Labels are a tricky business, especially in an agriculture where there is a dictionary full of words you can use to describe other farmers, or that you can use to call yourself. Are you a farmer, or a producer? Or are you a grower, or a rancher? More to the point, what do you call […] Read more
A message from April Stewart, Country Guide's Associate Editor
