In every way, the time seems right. Two big factors have helped spur innovation and growth in urban agriculture in Quebec, particularly in the areas of greenhouses and indoor vertical farming over the past decade or so. The first was the implementation of LED lighting technology, a more cost-effective and efficient system for greenhouses.

“Prior to LED lighting, we had to use fluorescent, high-pressure sodium, metal halide or external light systems,” says Dr. Mark Lefsrud, who leads the Biomass Production Laboratory at McGill University. It focuses on developing new sources of biomass for food, fibre and fuel, and on improving the energy efficiency of greenhouses and indoor plant growth environments. 

“They were very energy intensive and produced a lot of heat, so growers needed cooling technology and the lights had to be kept a long distance from the plants. Once LEDs came along, they had technology that allowed them to locate lights right up against the plants because their ambient temperature was much lower, which allows them to grow plants almost anywhere; they are no longer limited by a cooling capacity.”

Quebec also has the advantage of available inexpensive hydroelectricity, since exports to the U.S. have gone down in recent years. With dwindling demand for power, the solution has been to try and add value to the energy produced in the province.

“An easy way to (add value) is to do food production through either greenhouses or indoor agriculture systems,” Lefsrud says. “It allows us to be one of the cheapest electricity-providing locations on the planet, which means that people are now trying to grow almost anything for those reasons.”

Another big shift that has spurred interest in indoor farming is huge investments made by the cannabis industry in new controlled environment technologies. 

“It’s the confluence of low energy prices, LEDs, this huge investment on new technologies that have improved all controlled environment spaces, and then we have NASA as the poster child of how far we can push it and it makes it sexy to grow food indoors,” says Lefsrud. “Nobody really cared about it until all these things came together.”

And then there’s local food

Lefsrud was part of the design team that helped develop a vegetable growth unit for NASA to grow plants in space, and he also designed components for the Advanced Plant Habitat on the space station, so he jokes that people have always wanted and always will want to grow food, anywhere.

“It’s always been present, and people started seeing a lot of the drought issues that are happening in California, which supplies a lot of our produce, as well as some of the diseases that we’ve had like e-coli or listeria outbreaks and so people want to get back to the local food thing,” he says.

Without a doubt though, one of the biggest drivers of local urban food systems is the fact that people are increasingly searching out food that has been grown where they live and want to connect with the people that grow it.

“There’s a big local food movement, and people like the idea that they know where their food is coming from and they can go see these places,” Lefsrud says.

Lufa Farms, as an example, offers open houses so people can come and see how their food is grown and meet the growers.

Costs comparable to conventional farms

Although many people think that urban farms are less capital-intensive than large, rural farms, that’s not necessarily the case, depending, of course, on the type of operation. Certainly, indoor agriculture can require some deep pockets

“In the end, they’re fairly compatible,” Lefsrud says of rural and urban farms. “The difference is that you could possibly have a landlord, so you can rent, so the costs can be mitigated a little bit through that. But if you take an old abandoned or derelict warehouse and modify it, the cost to do that on a basic level looks low, but after you get into it and have to meet all the code requirements and such, it becomes almost the same as traditional agriculture. I don’t see any large savings on that.”

It’s also not cheap to run an indoor farm because there is a 24/7 energy requirement and other costs like labour and technology that add up and make it hard to compete with cheaper imported produce.

“In a greenhouse, we can control the environment but our problem is that in the middle of winter, we still get down to -20 C and that takes a lot of energy, so we don’t gain on those things, we lose quite badly there,” Lefsrud says.

But the big advantage, and the thing that helps make indoor farms competitive in the local marketplace is the lack of transportation costs.

“Growers don’t have to transport lettuce heads that come out of California and Mexico all the way across the country,” Lefsrud says. “Because of those savings, they can charge the same price.”

Challenges of indoor food production

Many of the challenges that traditional rural farms face are common to urban indoor farms, with a big one being labour, although, conversely, the urbanization trend that has robbed rural farms and communities of their traditional sources of labour is proving to be more of a benefit to urban farms looking for workers.

“Having these things placed into urban centres has provided a workforce that typically would have been employed locally to help out on the farms,” Lefsrud says. “When people migrated into cities, they seem to be migrating back into these urban-type projects that give them employment and food.”

Even though many people make a living from their urban farm operations, they aren’t likely to get rich.

“You’re still a farmer, you’re dependent on the production of the crops and some of the technology isn’t quite there yet,” Lefsrud says. “It’s economically beneficial but you’re never going to get wealthy doing this. There’s still a lot of improvements that have to be made and it’s one reason why I feel comfortable in my position is because I know that the growers always have questions.”

A future challenge for all agriculture, but especially in controlled, indoor environments, is likely going to be water, Lefsrud says.

“One of the things we have to work on in these indoor systems is how to recover some of the (water) that they use and that is vented into the atmosphere,” Lefsrud says. “They are not allowed to dump waste water into the sewage system; it’s too much for cities to handle, so we need to improve these systems.”

City and municipal planning authorities still have a way to go too in catching up with urban agriculture and its needs. When Quebec’s early pioneers of urban, indoor growing started to appear, the City of Montreal didn’t know how to classify them.

“The city didn’t want to classify them as agriculture. They were unwilling to be classified as pharmaceutical, so they had to create this new area which became urban agriculture,” says Lefsrud.

With the City of Montreal and the Ministry of Agriculture now investing in urban agriculture, a framework is starting to evolve, but there are still issues that urban farm operations run into that have to be figured out, like building codes.

“If you’re built on a third story of a building, is that still considered agriculture or should you be following full civil engineering and mechanical codes and everything else, even though the occupancy is almost zero, there’s just a bunch of plants in there,” Lefsrud says. “That’s one of the big arguments that they’ve been having. Obviously, they are not going to be in the agricultural building code, but they are not positive they should have to follow the full requirements that a traditional high-occupancy building does, so how do we vet those needs and requirements?”

Lefsrud says the urban indoor agriculture industry has a lot of work still to do to develop some standards and remove impediments to future growth.

“How much energy are we allowed to use per square foot? There are still debates on HVAC requirements, load requirements, building, CO2 management, all these things that we thought we had fairly well understood in a greenhouse, but once we put them inside a building then there’s a whole new set of challenges that we have to try to manage,” he says. “It’s still early days.”

Lots of investment happening

Regardless of the challenges still to overcome, there are some big players getting into indoor urban farm operations. There is a lot of interest in vertical farming from major food companies and other private investors. McCain Foods recently invested in GoodLeaf Farms, which has vertical farms in Nova Scotia and Guelph, Ont. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is an investor in Plenty, a California vertical-farming venture, and a major hedge fund management company recently invested heavily in vertical farming company Aerofarms.

So, with all this investment and growth potential for indoor food production in cities and towns, will it ever be a threat to traditional agriculture? Lefsrud says no, in fact the two can and do complement each other.

“If you take Lufa farms specifically, they can’t meet demand themselves, so they buy from local farmers in the area to meet their basket requirements,” Lefsrud says. “It’s taking away some of the production that is happening in California and Mexico that has been supplying us up to this point, but billions of dollars-worth of lettuce is brought into Canada every year. Even if Lufa doubles and doubles again, they are still not going to take away that market. And (urban agriculture) is never going to compete with cereal grains, potatoes or any of the products that can be stored. These are almost all short shelf-life products that are being produced.”

The post Quebec leads indoor urban agriculture trend appeared first on Country Guide.

Toronto Urban Growers (TUG), a non-profit network that connects growers and facilitates knowledge sharing between them, will work with Seneca College and Greenest City over the next three years to collect data on the current status of urban agriculture in the city, identify challenges and opportunities, and develop strategies to move the sector forward.

TUG completed an initial scoping report into the questions that this kind of research will need to ask, and a big one is about pathways to employment and the many training opportunities that urban agriculture offers.

What may come as a surprise to mainstream farmers, though, is that these urban farm workers have their eyes on the countryside from the very start. They have what you might call bigger dreams.

“For someone who is a young person just getting into the field of farming, or for someone who has come from another part of the world and has agricultural experience but is new to Canada, doing urban farming is a way to transition into larger-scale or rural farming because right now it’s so difficult for people to get access to land,” says Rhonda Teitel-Payne, co-coordinator with TUG.

“If you want affordable land, it’s pretty much a three- or four-hour drive out of Toronto, so there are a lot of barriers to start up,” Teitel-Payne says. “This is a way for people to both generate some income and do some learning as they prepare to do that move to a farm.”

Urban agriculture allows people to explore the multifunctionality of food growing in an urban setting, which offers unique opportunities that don’t always exist in a traditional, rural farm setting.

“When you’re growing food, you could do many other things as well,” says Teitel-Payne.

“There are lots of other things that you can do as well as farming,” she says, then adds “Some of them co-exist with farms better than others.”

Workers need to do the work that’s available to be done, so, for instance, young urban workers might create pollinator gardens, or get involved with opportunities for social interaction, education, tourism or health programs.

Teitel-Payne recognizes the irony. “In some ways there are a lot more opportunities to do that kind of thing here because the population is close at hand.

“It’s easy for people to access your farm compared to going out to a rural farm,” she says.

It also gives farm newbies the opportunity to experiment with growing different foods and to explore different markets.

“What is it that people are looking for, how do you make those different uses co-exist in a functional way?” Teitel-Payne ponders.

“I still see this is a big experimental lab for that kind of thing.” 

She knows of course that if these city workers do transition to a rural site afterwards, the conditions will change, and what worked in an urban context may not work as well in a rural area, “but at least you get some sense of how agriculture works.”

An early start in Vancouver

Across the country, in today’s Vancouver, urban agriculture offers the same diversity you see in Toronto. But about 10 years ago, two pioneers of urban ag, Ilana Labow and Gray Oron, founded Fresh Urban Roots Farming because they wanted to test the idea of how many people could be fed from a backyard garden.

That grew to two backyards, then more backyards, and the story goes that one day, they were farming in a backyard that was adjacent to a school and a teacher called them over to invite them to grow their crops at the school so the kids could see food production first-hand.

They eventually built the first schoolyard market farm in Canada at the Vancouver Technical Secondary School in partnership with the Vancouver School District. Today there are similar gardens and programs all across Canada that teach kids about food production and agriculture, but Fresh Roots laid a lot of the groundwork for developing shareable teaching resources and ideas because at the time, no one really recognized the potential to integrate what they were doing into the curriculum, or knew how to do it.

“We slowly discovered it was a big stretch for a lot of teachers and schools to figure out how to take their class outside and do math or science on the farm,” says Alexa Pitoulis, executive director of Fresh Roots Urban Farm Society. “The school system isn’t really set up for that. What Fresh Roots has done is develop a whole suite of programs and opportunities that build capabilities in kids, youth and teachers around how to do experiential hands-on learning on the farm.”

Fresh Roots offers professional development for teachers as well as trips for elementary school-aged kids, plus programs that are connected to the B.C. curriculum, including “A Year on the Farm,” where an elementary school class signs up and visits the farm every month during the growing season. Then, during the winter months, a Fresh Roots educator comes to the classroom to offer things like seed workshops.

“It starts to build a relationship with the space, the land and the seasonality, and builds capacity for the teachers because they can work with educators that are more trained in outdoor experiential education over the course of that year,” says Pitoulis. “We find that these types of programs have the biggest impact and provide deeper learning.”

Fresh Roots runs two schoolyard farms in Vancouver, one in Coquitlam and one in Delta. Each relationship is different, just as the land on which they grow, the things they grow and the communities they serve are different. Apart from the fact that kids love the farm, love getting their hands dirty and enjoy eating the food they produce, it also helps the kids and the communities they live in imagine the possibilities for growing food right where they live.

“We can create vibrant urban spaces that have these rich pockets of ecosystems,” says Pitoulis. “It doesn’t have to just be a grass field or a vacant lot down the block.”

But the magic ingredient in all of this is how much the kids learn about themselves and each other.

“By being outside in that non-traditional, hands-on learning environment, you see them making connections with each other that wouldn’t happen in the regular classroom,” says Pitoulis.

It also increases their confidence. Many diverse youth come for a six-week youth leadership program called SOYL (Sustainable Opportunities for Youth Leadership) in the summer. “These are sometimes youth that aren’t necessarily ready for a part-time job, maybe don’t quite fit in,” says Pitoulis. “There’s a space for them to connect, find a place in a peer community and step away with this confidence.”

Older youth then sell the produce at market, which helps them develop valuable business and interpersonal skills. Says Pitoulis, “The growing of the food becomes a platform for some beautiful development.”

The post City-bred farm workers appeared first on Country Guide.

There’s still that question in the air, though. Is it for real, or, to put it politely, is it only for eccentrics?

Well, maybe in a world that is being pushed to sustainably produce food for an expanding global population against the backdrop of climate change and increasing urbanization, urban farming may become as valid and essential as any other kind of agriculture, especially since it is innovating and expanding so rapidly.

And urban agriculturists take exception to the idea that they’re just hobbyists. In fact, they come at the job with all kinds of strengths. They might have backgrounds in engineering or teaching or any other career path. But something truly distinguishes them, says Dr. Mark Lefsrud of McGill University, which operates a number of urban farms and gardens on its campus and throughout Montreal. It’s that to succeed, they must develop “the mindset of a farmer,” he says. “This is hard manual labour done on a smaller scale, but it’s still the same style of farming … if they want to make it commercial, they have to go full-in and they are true farmers at that point.”

• Read more: A new SPIN on urban farming

What is urban agriculture?

Any food production in a city, town or populated community is a form of urban farming, but urban agriculture is also characterized by its diversity of people, types of operation and motivations.

Urban agricultural ventures vary in size and intensity and encompass everything from open-air or greenhouse rooftop farms to indoor and vertical farms, community gardens, hydroponic or aquaculture operations, edible walls and landscape projects, backyard gardens and peri-urban farms (those located on the perimeter of cities).

Urban farmers don’t necessarily come from farm backgrounds, although they do all seem to share the same passion for growing food that rural farmers do. They operate on smaller tracts of land that they may own, lease, rent or access by engaging in some kind of reciprocal agreement with the owner, such as a share of the food produced, or use of a growing area in return for maintaining the property.

Some farms are located on vacant lots and municipal land, sometimes even city parks. Urban farms may be managed by an individual, couple, family, friends or a community or non-profit group. They produce a diverse range of foods, often including ethnic crops that reflect the diverse cultures of the urban community they serve and those involved in its management.

Most urban farms sell directly through different (and multiple) sales channels such as farmers markets, online stores, CSAs, food buying clubs, pick-up food boxes, retail stores, restaurants and even wholesalers, but their customers are generally local, loyal and increasingly eager to understand the story behind their food and the people who grow it.

Urban farmers build a relationship with their customers that is vastly different from those involved in commodity agriculture, where crops are sold to grain buyers or processors distant from the end-consumers.

The origins of urban agriculture

Urban agriculture has experienced a renaissance over the past 10 to 15 years but its origins date back more than 11,000 years as people began growing crops and raising livestock to support a human population that was evolving from being nomadic, hunter-gatherers to permanent dwellers of emerging urban settlements.

The first large-scale urban agriculture development in North America was in Detroit in the 1890s when vacant lots were converted to food production. During the First World War, with food imports from Europe no longer available, governments in North America encouraged small urban farm plots and Victory Gardens for people to grow their own food, and their popularity continued through the Depression and the 1940s.

Why today?

Wartime efforts to encourage people to grow their own food may be perfectly understandable, but what is driving people to do the same today, and to actually adopt urban agriculture as a means to make a living?

There are many factors, including increasing urbanization, which means more and more people are becoming ever more distant from rural farming and its way of life. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations says at least 55 per cent of the world’s population currently lives in urban areas. By 2050, it will be 68 per cent.

It’s not hard to see that urban agriculture and innovative approaches to food production of all types will be needed to meet growing food demand, not just in affluent, western societies, but rapidly growing poorer countries too, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

If there is one thing that we’ve all learned in the last year and a half during the COVID-19 pandemic it’s how fragile our global food system is and how easy it is to disrupt food chains that supply our urban centres.

This has put the issue of food security more firmly in the minds of governments at all levels, so growing and processing food more locally is firmly on the agenda.

Similarly, individuals, families and groups of people around the world have become more interested in growing their own food, spurred on by reasons that are as varied as the people themselves. It could be because of food security concerns, ethical, environmental or health considerations, to generate income, or simply because it’s beneficial to a person’s mental health and well-being.

Whatever the reason, people are planting, weeding and harvesting food in cities and towns around the world, for themselves and their families, or as part of community gardening projects.

In Canada, we are seeing evidence of this with the tight availability of garden seeds this past spring from many suppliers, and the popularity of events like “Seedy Saturdays,” an initiative of Seeds of Diversity, where people all over Canada come together to exchange seeds and knowledge.

Policies and regulations, which in the past have often hindered growth in urban agriculture, are slowly changing to help facilitate urban agricultural enterprises, although there is still a hodgepodge of regulations across Canada and the U.S. as some jurisdictions are quicker to recognize and get on board the urban agriculture express than others.

Urban agriculture in Canada

Urban farming takes many forms and comes in many sizes, and it exists in every province across the country. As always, though, if you want to understand any kind of agriculture, talk to the farmers, and over the next few issues, Country Guide will highlight urban farm operations in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec, showing their diversity and innovation.

Grow Calgary, which began in 2013, is Canada’s largest non-profit urban farm, involving close 25,000 volunteers growing food and non-commercial hemp on 11 acres of land west of Canada Olympic Park. It donates all of its produce to over 40 food programs in Calgary, with 95 per cent of the food recipients being women and children.

Besides such non-profit urban agriculture initiatives (of which there are many), there are increasing numbers of small commercial businesses that are adopting innovative production methods to make earning a living off the land not just feasible, but attractive.

One of the new commercial farm models that is gaining in popularity is SPIN (small plot intensive farming) an idea that originated in Pennsylvania, but that has been adopted and enhanced for Prairie growers by Canadian SPIN pioneers Wally Satzewich and Gail Vandersteen of Saskatchewan. (Read more about them in the following story).

These types of small-plot farmers are utilizing the same principles that larger commercial farmers focus on too. They aim to produce more yield and net revenue on the same land resource through the adoption of practices that help build and maintain soil health, boost productivity and increase profits and sustainability at the same time.

The similarities, the differences

How does urban farming differ from the conventional, rural farming?

Operating costs and overheads are obvious difference between the large, rural farm, with land, buildings and equipment that keep increasing in value, compared to the small plot — typically less than an acre — that generally uses more intensive management methods and more manual labour than technology.
But while costs are lower for many small, urban farm systems, the notable exception is indoor farms, whether that’s hydroponic operations growing food in containers, commercial rooftop greenhouses or large vertical farm systems, which, despite their potential to produce huge yields in a very small area, are slower to develop largely because of the cost to establish and operate them. 

A 37-floor vertical farm at Germany’s University of Bonn cost a whopping 201 million euros (approx C$300 million) to build and equip (in 2014) and operating costs are another eight million euros (almost C$12 million), making the average cost of the raw food it produced between 3.5 and four euros (around C$5 to C$6) per kg. Although that figure is likely to come down with advances in technology, vertical farming has a long way to go before it catches up with other forms of urban farming.

While there are differences between urban farms and conventional, rural farms, there are also a whole lot of similarities, and number one is that these farmers, big and small, urban or rural, are passionate about growing high-quality food and proud of what they do. Satzewich says the fundamental difference between urban and conventional farming is the proximity to and relationship with the end-consumer. 

“The difference is what arises out of engaging customers face-to-face as opposed to more distant marketing. If you go to a farmers market, you have to explain how to cook with your ingredients a lot of the time,” he says. “You become like a cooking coach, and you also become a friend. A farmers market is so many things besides just selling, it’s fellow vendors, long-time customers and the relationships formed with them.” 

The post This is urban agriculture? appeared first on Country Guide.

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 for generations as the headquarters of General Motors Canada.

General Motors aside, today’s Oshawa is evolving into a post-manufacturing medical and educational centre with a quite different economic future.

Now it wants a different food future too.

Durham College’s Centre for Food is a hub for a number of the college’s food-related programs including culinary, horticulture, hospitality, and special-events-management programs. It also features a store selling food grown or produced on site, and a fine dining restaurant that is open year-round.

Doyle is the associate dean at the Centre for Food. Opened in 2013, it’s a modern-looking building with a colourful glass facade that is becoming a landmark on an otherwise dreary and suburban stretch of Highway 401.

And there’s a surprise. Even though it’s set amidst roads, malls, and restaurants, the centre is actually next to a field of vegetables. There’s a melange of crops including cabbage, sweet corn, tomatoes, squash and small fruit, and even a greenhouse and a small apple orchard, too, on a former industrial site returned to agriculture.

You soon find that this isn’t the only combo in the works. The food and farming program, one of the horticultural programs at the Centre for Food, has just doubled its enrolment to 48, made up of students from the region, second-career learners, and some international students. “It’s a real mix,” says Doyle.

Core values

Doyle says the vision for the centre started when the college realized that many students left Durham region to pursue post-secondary studies in the hospitality industry. At the same time, there was increased consumer awareness of locally produced food. Together, they contributed to a vision for an educational centre based on the concept of field-to-fork.

“We’re focusing on urban farming in urban areas,” says Doyle.

Doyle considers the community to be another key element of the Centre for Food. “We want to be a solution for this community,” he says as he talks about people using the facility as a community hub for weddings, bar mitzvahs and corporate training. Another connection is through its partnership with a local mental health hospital. When patients are ready to integrate back into the community, chefs at the college teach them about cooking skills and healthy, cost-efficient meals.

Agriculture is a big employer in Durham region. “Our mandate as a college is about making sure we’re connecting to industry,” says Doyle. Those connections include the advisory board for the food and farming program that consists of industry experts, an orchardist, bee keeper, cannabis industry representative, and a local restaurateur.

Food and farming program

The food and farming program teaches students small-scale and urban farming. Along with courses about growing, there are others such as entrepreneurship, food safety, and artisan product development. Labs include food production and the creation of value-added products.

Doyle says that an interdisciplinary mix of both courses and students is an important aspect of the program.

In a recent school-run competition, a food-and-farming student paired up with a culinary student to create the winning entry: a vegan, allergen-free, school-safe brownie. Then he gives the example of microgreens, a crop that food and farming students grow year-round, which is used by the on-site restaurant. “We have students who will pick out of our garden in the morning and serve on a plate at night in our restaurant,” he says.

The college hires 12 of the students to work on the farm for the summer. “The students feel really confident when they go out, they have this broad knowledge,” he says. “They can work in a lot of different places when they’re done.”

Signs of success

“We’ve had municipalities come to visit us to learn how we’ve repatriated the land and how we’re using it and producing thousands of pounds a year,” says Doyle as he talks about a growing recognition of the Centre for Food.

In 2016 Durham College named the Centre for Food after W. Galen Weston in recognition of a $1-million grant to the college by the W. Garfield Weston Foundation. Doyle says the Weston foundation has been very supportive of the focus on local food and the field-to-fork principle.

The values of the program are summed up in an annual harvest event. “Our harvest dinner is one of our signature events but it also captures everything we do,” Doyle explains as he describes the annual event that seats 130 members of the public outdoors, along a long table right next to the field.

Food and farming students grow ingredients. Ornamental horticulture students get the grounds in shape for the event. Culinary students prepare the meal. Hospitality and special-event-management students serve the meal.

It involves students from all of their programs, making it quite interdisciplinary. “People talk a lot about local food and the 100-mile diet,” Doyle says. “We’ve got a 100-foot diet.”

“I’m blown away every day I come here,” Doyle repeats. “What we’re doing is unlike anything that’s being done in Canada. The integration of food between programs, the complementary nature, the interdisciplinary study — it really makes for the most unique educational environment.”

Brad Abel is a second-year student in the food and farming program at Durham College’s Centre for Food.

Abel, who grew up near Ridgetown, Ont., says that while he wasn’t raised on a farm, “There was lots of corn.” Agriculture wasn’t new to him, having family members who had worked in the industry.

He is a second-career student. “I used to work in a machine shop,” he says. But indoor work wasn’t for him.

At the time, Abel was living in the town of Renfrew, Ont., where he had a large lot. He started growing lettuce, tomato, and eggplant. “The first year I did it to see how it went,” he says, explaining that he ended up with far more than he could use himself.

He liked growing. “I ended up building greenhouses on my property,” he says. The following year he got involved in a local farmers market. After selling at the market for a season, he came here to Durham College.

He says his classmates come from a wide range of backgrounds. Some are older than him (he’s 30), a few are in their 20s, and some are fresh out of high school. While some grew up on farms, others have always lived in the city.

Abel likes that the food and farming program exposes him to more than just growing. “You have this circle, this value chain, of experience,” he says. He also enjoys the direct connection to consumers. “People come out and they tell you this garden looks amazing,” he says as he talks about patrons of the campus restaurant, Bistro 67.

“It gives you this knowledge, ‘Yeah, this will work,’” he says. When Abel finishes the program he plans to return to Renfrew to farm.

“It’s a good way to learn how it will work in the real world — in a smaller system,” he says. “You can see every step.”

The post Gone to school appeared first on Country Guide.

Rainbow Community Garden is more than just a place to grow food and flowers as a hobby; it’s a place where newcomers to the country can grow food they are familiar with while saving on their grocery bills. Along with crops you can find typically find in Manitoba, producers here are growing leaves and vegetables from tropical parts of the world that are difficult to find in the city.

Ngarboui gives me a tour of the site, which is situated on the grounds of the University of Manitoba, not far from the stadium where the Winnipeg Blue Bombers play. It is divided into asymmetrical plots. The bigger the family, the larger the plot they receive. Along one side there is a row of raised beds, reserved for kids aged five to 10, and higher beds for those 75 and up. As we walk amid the rows, Raymond picks up a shovel that someone has left lying on the ground and later uses it to attack an unwanted weed.

Ngarboui speaks from experience when he says it’s hard to adjust to food in Canada. Even when vegetables native to the newcomers’ home countries can be found, they are usually of poor quality and expensive. Ngarboui collects requests for seeds from the growers and places orders with companies in Canada and abroad. He’s also made connections with local garden centres that donate seeds and seedlings once the early summer rush has passed. After the first growing season, seeds are saved for future planting.

According to the Government of Manitoba, of the 16,175 newcomers to the province in 2014, 9.2 per cent, or 1,495, were refugees. Manitoba received the highest number of refugees per capita in Canada in that year. When they first arrive, many refugee families live in apartment buildings in downtown Winnipeg. They may not be familiar with public parks, or know where to take their kids, so they stay inside. This affects both physical and mental health.

Ngarboui tells the story of the oldest gardener, an 89-year-old man, originally from India. He was diabetic and had high blood pressure. Two months after joining the garden, Ngarboui recounts that the man’s family doctor said, “‘Oh! Your health has improved a lot. Did you go to the gym? What have you been doing lately?’ And he said, ‘No, I did not go to the gym, but I’ve been gardening.’” The doctor encouraged him to continue as his health had dramatically improved. “That’s how he became even more interested in gardening.”

Turning the soil

The story of the Rainbow Community Garden cannot be separated from Ngarboui’s own. Ngarboui was born in the early years of Chad’s decades-long civil war. Chad is situated in central Africa, and is the continent’s fifth-largest country. Despite having to regularly flee his home throughout his childhood, Ngarboui completed Grade 12 and studied agriculture at the university level. In his mid-20s, he fled Chad for neighbouring Cameroon, one of tens of thousands of Chadians seeking refuge in that country.

In Cameroon he received a bursary through the United Nations to return to school and he graduated with a degree in business and co-operative management. Another bursary followed, and this time he studied human resources. At the same time, he was working with his fellow refugees to start gardens and raise chickens to help families get income to pay for their children’s school fees. His work didn’t go unnoticed.

On a visit to the country, a delegation from the United Nations Development Program was told about the project Ngarboui had initiated, and they made a visit. The head of the delegation asked Ngarboui if he was interested in resettlement in Canada.

The Canadian immigration agent who interviewed him told him that he’d be a good fit for three locations — Laval, Winnipeg and Edmonton. He was advised that as a French speaker the integration process would be the easiest in Laval. After hearing about the three places Ngarboui declared that he wanted to go to Winnipeg. He was told that it was very cold there and while he wasn’t being advised not to go, he was warned that the adjustment period would be difficult.

“I asked if there were people living there. She said, ‘Yes, there are people living there.’ I said, ‘If there are people living there, it means I can live there too, so I will go there.’” Since high school, Ngarboui had been interested in learning English, but hadn’t had the opportunity.

After touching down in Winnipeg in September 2005 he enrolled in English as a Second Language classes and started to look for work opportunities.

“At that time I gathered information about farming here, the possibilities and opportunities. I realized that farming here was more of a family enterprise… So I said, ‘Okay, it’s better to do something else.’” He was on a break during a night shift as a cleaner at the University of Winnipeg when a sign on a bulletin board caught his eye. Lower-income individuals were invited to apply for a program on community development offered by the Community Education Development Association (CEDA) at Red River College. As soon as his shift ended he raced to CEDA to express his interest. Since then, Ngarboui has gone from being a student, to board member, to being hired as an employee of CEDA in 2009, where he still works today.

For his school assignments, Ngarboui would talk to Indigenous and newcomer families to find out what their needs were and what facilities and infrastructure were lacking in their neighbourhoods. He was also volunteering at a market in downtown Winnipeg where people were asking for fresh food. “That’s how the idea of the garden came out, to supply the market with produce. And also to find a place where newcomer families and refugees could take their kids in the summertime, and to grow their own food and save on their groceries.”

Sowing the seeds

Together with members of his church, Ngarboui approached the City of Winnipeg to see if they might have land available that fit the criteria for his envisioned garden. It had to be accessible by bus, and in a place where families could spend time without being disturbed. The city didn’t have any land that fit the bill, but referred Ngarboui to the University of Manitoba, located in southern Winnipeg.

The university provided land that was previously used as a garden by their plant science department. It ticked a lot of boxes that Ngarboui was looking for: it was remote, quiet, and removed from the bustle of downtown. Kids could run around freely.

The garden was named Rainbow Community Garden, borrowed from the metaphor of the “rainbow nation,” used to describe post-apartheid South Africa. In 2008, its first season, 16 families had garden plots. In 2017, there are over 300 families gardening on six sites, representing 29 nationalities. About 60 per cent of the gardeners are ethnic Nepali refugees from Bhutan who were expelled from the country in the early 1990s. Another 30 per cent are from African countries, and the remainder are South American, Middle Eastern or Canadian-born.

Priority is given to single mothers, then families with at least four members and a senior, then families of six or more. Immigrants with a background in social work are also given priority, and are available to talk to families who may need advice about problems they’re encountering. Most of the gardeners arrived in Canada by way of refugee camps. “When they meet here, they open up, sharing their memories from refugee camps and from their home, the atrocities that they went through. Many times you can see them talking and starting to cry. You can see the tears coming. And after a while they start laughing,” Ngarboui says.

Demand quickly outpaced the supply of garden plots available at the university site, and it was difficult to find more land. Ngarboui started to approach churches and schools about using their backyards. He also put out the call to individuals, asking if their empty backyards could be used.

“The first person who responded to my call was the former lieutenant governor, the late John Harvard. He said ‘Okay, I heard what you’ve been doing and I’m very excited to have you use my backyard.’ It’s a huge backyard. I went there and found that five families can use his backyard. We used it for three years before he sold the house.”

Ngarboui has also worked with building owners and managers to get raised beds built near to apartment buildings where newcomer families live.

Help from a farmer

The families are gardening on six sites in Winnipeg and dotted throughout southern Manitoba. And this is still not enough. “We’ve been working on finding more land, because we have a waiting list this year of 49 families,” Ngarboui says.

One of the six sites is on the home farm of Peter Nikkel, who farms 1,200 acres with his brother, close to Landmark, an hour’s drive southeast from downtown Winnipeg. The two first met when Ngarboui was trying to get the downtown market off the ground. Nikkel had had good yields that year and wanted to check out the potential of selling surplus vegetables at the market. One thing led to another. He was invited to the spring and fall celebrations at the garden and then Ngarboui asked if he might have land available for gardeners to use.

For the past four years, Nikkel has provided two to three acres of what used to be a cow pasture, surrounded by a windbreak. It’s divided into plots for four different groups to use. He says that some years are better than others. “One year you’ll have really good production. You have your reliable crops, like potatoes, carrots, onions, peas, beets. Those are almost one hundred percent. Then the next year you’ll have a cooler weather year, like two years ago, when the warm-weather crops like beans, tomatoes, peppers, often don’t do well.” The Red River clay and the climate aren’t always amenable to growing preferred plants like okra. “So sometimes it works and sometimes not. Sometimes it’s disappointing to drive out of the city, put all the trouble and work into it and in the end get very little or nothing.”

As to why he provides a few acres for the gardeners, Nikkel says, “It’s a bit of charity, it’s a bit of a hobby, it’s self-sufficiency.” He says that most farm people have a long history with gardening. “We like to have that independence of growing our own food. It’s the same as with these people.” And Nikkel’s own mother arrived in Canada as a refugee from Ukraine in the 1940s.

Nikkel says that charity work is part of the fabric of life in the area he lives in. A lot of his neighbours visit projects in Haiti, Bangladesh, or in different countries in Africa, but for him, that work happens just beyond his front door. In the process, he says he’s “learned a lot of stuff, a lot of things about how life works. About different cultures and how difficult it all is. It’s very tough.”

For many of the gardeners, Nikkel is their link to rural Manitoba. On different days throughout the summer he’ll cook some of his chickens over a fire and the gardeners will prepare dishes. Nikkel says this sharing of food outside can remind people of home, an experience they’re no longer able to have living in a downtown apartment. And for him, the expense of travel for new experiences is a non-issue. “I don’t need to go to the country to get the taste, it comes to me.”

Interacting with the newcomers and hearing their stories gives him something to think about as he drives his tractor around and around a field. It’s also made his dinnertime conversations more interesting. “You go to dinner and you have stories. I could talk about soybeans, whether I’ve harvested 38 bushels or 50 bushels, but who cares. The cropping, prices, and futures, I know all that stuff, but it gets boring pretty quickly. People just don’t want to hear about it. But with culture, religion, relationships, whatever people do, it’s huge, it’s what people like to talk about.”

But most of all, he continues to provide space for gardeners because Ngarboui asks him each year if he will. He admires Ngarboui’s skill in building up the project and getting the university, corporations and newcomers all on board, something most people wouldn’t be able to accomplish.

“I would’ve given up on it long ago. But Ngarboui doesn’t. He just keeps working at it. So it’s hard to say ‘No, I’m not going to help, I don’t care. I only care about making my own money, the rest of the world can go and do whatever it wants.’ Once you know somebody, you get along with someone, and you have the resources to help, why wouldn’t you help?”

Over the years, Ngarboui has been nominated for and won a number of awards for his work with the Rainbow Community Garden. This past April he won one of the 2017 Premier’s Volunteer Service Awards. He was told that the award was recognition of the fact that the garden — which has never received any government support — was a good example for both immigrants and Canadian-born of how newcomers can contribute to society.

It takes up a lot of time to find land, procure seeds, organize events, and build relationships with the gardeners, local businesses and supporters. But when I ask Ngarboui why he does the work with the garden on top of his day job, he doesn’t hesitate with his answer. “I’ve benefited a lot. If I’m who I am today it is thanks to the help that I received from people in my communities. I was seven or eight, walking distances to escape civil war, and I was being carried by adults for a distance. One picked me up, and then another one, to reach wherever we were going. And the food was always shared. I grew up in a situation where I couldn’t survive without help from the others around me.”

Sharing the harvest

A great deal of sharing happens within and across the garden plots. Many of the gardeners were farmers in their home countries, so grandparents and parents share their knowledge with younger family members. And then there’s the sharing of seeds and practices.

The gardeners from African countries have become hooked on eating the leaves of the sweet pepper plants, as the Filipinos do. “They found it so delicious and started eating it as well. Now, many of them, instead of the fruit, they rely more on the leaves. Sometimes you will see the peppers without leaves,” Ngarboui says.

He also tells the story of a woman from Liberia who was growing a lot of sweet potatoes in a plot close to his. He assumed she was growing them for the roots, as his family had done back home in Chad. “Usually we remove the leaves and throw them away and just eat the roots,” Ngarboui says. “So I asked, ‘How long will it be taking for you to get the sweet potatoes?’ And she said, ‘No, no, no, I am growing them for the leaves.’ I found it a little bit strange, but I did not say anything.”

Then, at one of the monthly potlucks Ngarboui tried a dish he found very tasty. Turns out it was made from sweet potato leaves. That night, he called his mother in Chad and told her, “‘You know what? The sweet potato leaves that we’ve been throwing away are a nutritious food and we should not throw them away again.’” His mother cooked it for her friends, and now all of them are eating the leaves.

Putting down roots

There was a 100 per cent chance of rain one evening when I visited the garden, so only a few families came by to tend to their plots. Ngarboui said that it’s usually full until sunset. There was a couple with their young son who had come to do some weeding. Ngarboui greeted them in Nepali. They were originally from Bhutan, but the man left as a young boy. His family lived in a refugee camp in Nepal for 20 years before being resettled in Winnipeg in 2011. He has four brothers and calls Ngarboui his fifth. They shared the news with Ngarboui that they had bought a house and would move in the next week.

It’s a moment I often replay in my mind.Ngarboui shakes their hands. As I watch, he congratulates them.

Other farmers, other projects

Harry and Kathe Harder
Clavet, Sask.

Harry and Kathe Harder have a 300-ewe flock in Clavet, Sask., 25 kilometres southeast of Saskatoon. Harry estimates that more than 50 per cent of their farm-gate customers came to Canada as either refugees or immigrants. The Harders have a map of the world on their kitchen wall, where they put a star on each country they’ve had a customer from. There are 75 stars on the map.

It’s a family-run operation, but when they need an extra pair of hands on the farm, such as to build a corral, they will hire recently arrived Syrian refugees. Many are skilled construction workers. Communication isn’t an issue, as Harry speaks Arabic, which he learned as a service worker with Mennonite Central Committee in the Middle East over 30 years ago.

“Many would like to farm,” Harry says of the newcomers he interacts with. “They have a different paradigm and could do something quite positive for farming in Canada.”

Quinte Immigration Services
Quinte Region, Ont.

Since May 2016 the Quinte Immigration Services of Quinte Region, northeast of Toronto, has been running the program Farmers Feed the World. There were two factors at play in starting the program: Quinte Immigration learned that 25 per cent of the Syrian refugees coming to Ontario had some farming experience, and several counties in the region faced a labour shortage in the agricultural sector.

The original intent of the program was to provide information in Arabic to Syrian refugees on agriculture in Ontario. It was quickly observed that finding a job was the top priority for the 150 participants, anxious to be self-sufficient as one year of government financial assistance drew to a close.

Arabic-speaking staff conducted one-on-one interviews with the project participants to gather information on their skills and agricultural experience in Syria. They were then matched with farmers and employers in the agrifood sector who had job opportunities available.

Another component of the project was an event in Belleville, where potential employers from the Quinte Region and Syrian refugees looking for work could meet.

“As a result of this project, 60 per cent of participants obtained some form of employment or self-employment in the agrifood sector,” says Orlando Ferro, executive director of Quinte Immigration Services.

Rod Olson,
Calgary, Alta.

Rod Olson is an urban farmer in Calgary, Alta., growing vegetables in 35 backyards across the city. He sells his produce to restaurants, farmers markets, and a harvest box program.

In the past he’s hired newcomers from Ethiopia and Eritrea to work with him, and last summer he and his business partner employed three Syrian refugees, one of whom had farming experience.

In late 2016 the Alberta government put out a Request for Proposals for 20 acres of provincial land on Calgary’s transportation utility corridor. Olson is a member of a group that submitted a proposal focused on making the land available for newcomers to Canada to grow and sell food. Their proposal was selected, and while there are still a few steps to go before it’s a fait accompli, if all goes according to plan, they will be on the land this spring.

Three initiatives are planned. The first is a community garden with 20 to 30 plots for newcomers, where they can grow food for their families. The second is an apprenticeship program which will be run by Olson and another urban farmer for two to four people, to teach both about farming in the city and on the sales side of the business. The final piece is to have five parcels of land available for entrepreneurs, where they could start out on their own with an agrifood business. There would be the potential to grow foods that newcomers to Canada are missing.

“I know the value of having my own hand in the soil,” Olson says. “Because these people have been displaced, I think that there is nothing more profound than planting a seed, seeing it grow, and then consuming what the earth has given you. There’s a sense of home and stability that comes when you can do that, and that’s been ripped away from any newcomer. And so if we’ve got this land, then why can’t we let them have that experience.”

The post Putting down roots in Canadian soil appeared first on Country Guide.

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 than under 35.

A major transfer of land ownership and farm management is widely forecast as the older generation exits. But who is ready to step into agriculture’s driver’s seat?

And are we willing to give the new farmers the support they need — especially the ones who don’t quite fit our preconceived notions of a “real” farmer?

Stuart Oke and his partner Nikki Tesar have just finished their first season in the direct-marketing vegetable business. Though each has a decade of experience on other farms, the experience of operating their own agri-business for the first time has been fun and nerve-wracking in turns, a rollercoaster that Oke wouldn’t trade.

And it’s been busy. Ultra busy. Not only have they started a brand new business, purchased equipment, built infrastructure, stretched every dollar of input capital, and built up their direct market list and their wholesale clientele, along the way they’ve also found time to successfully coax top-notch vegetables from the five rented acres in St-Andre-Avéllin, Que., that they call Rooted Oak Farm.

This farming couple doesn’t measure their land by the hundreds of acres or their production in hundreds of tonnes. They’re not born-and-raised farm kids: both grew up in urban centres. And they haven’t been in the farming game long enough to prove their business model. So, do they count as “real” farmers?

But here’s the stumper. If we’re asking that question, are we part of what’s holding Canadian agriculture back, slowing down the growth of a profitable and healthy consumer-based sector?

Oke and Tesar believe they’re as real as the very biggest of conventional farmers. They’re investing time and money into the land; they’re fully committed to their agri-business, they’re working to promote agriculture, and they’re looking forward to a long future on the land.

“I certainly sometimes run into the opinion that because we’re not a large-scale commodity farm, we shouldn’t be taken as seriously. But farmers take all shapes and sizes today,” says Oke.

“Small-scale farmers, organic or otherwise, have been around long enough now that we’ve proven this isn’t a flash in the pan or a fad,” Oke says. “Lots of farmers out there can prove their success. There’s money to be found and a lifestyle to be lived… there are lots of different scales for people to be successful in agriculture.”

Given the skyrocketing costs of farmland, equipment and inputs, a commodity operation is no longer a reasonable dream for many young farmers. Oke and Tesar are just two of a whole subset who are getting started in small-scale, low-acreage, high-intensity, direct-to-consumer production.

But what do we know about new farmers like this farming couple? Surprisingly little, actually.

Julia Laforge, now a post-doctoral fellow at Lakehead University, is a geographer fascinated by socio-nature relationships and the role of knowledge and social movement in Canada. For her PhD research, she wanted to study the experiences of new farmers. But she quickly realised that there has been unexpectedly little public or academic research into who those new farmers are.

So, together with the National New Farmer Coalition, Laforge created a survey for new farmers that looked into everything from their backgrounds and their priorities to the stumbling blocks in their way. In February and March of 2015, the survey went to Canadian ag organizations of all types, university ag faculties, and social media (“pretty much everyone we could think of,” says Laforge). Within a month, 1,326 young farmers from four self-identified categories (new, aspiring, experienced and exited farmers) completed the online query.

Respondents farmed or aspired to farm in all parts of Canada. Most, but certainly not all, were under the age of 40, and almost all operated small farms. Interestingly too, 68 per cent of respondents identified as not growing up in agriculture. In the “new farmer” category, the number was even higher: a whopping 86 per cent of respondents weren’t farm bred.

According to Statistics Canada, there are just over 40,000 farmers in Canada under age 40. Obviously, 1,300 surveys from a possible 40,000 young farmers isn’t representative of the whole group.

But, says Laforge, the results “certainly capture… something.” And that something may have a fundamental impact on the future of Canadian ag.

“I look at those numbers — 86 per cent of new farmers not being from a farming background — and I think, how can that not be some kind of demographic change? It’s such a contrast to what we expect. There are so many implications of that in terms of training, land ownership, everything. If we don’t have a good handle on who young farmers are, we need to take a step back and say how do we get a better idea? It definitely warrants more followup.”

One thing that’s clear, she says, is that this group feels ignored by government and industry.

“We had an open comment section at the end of the survey. One of things I wasn’t expecting was a lot of comments saying ‘thank you.’ Respondents said things like ‘I feel really validated,’ and ‘I’ve never had opportunity to share before.’ There was a lot of resonance with what we did,” says Laforge. “Small-scale farmers, especially those who farm only part time, face challenges of being identified as farmers. That devalues a whole sector of food producers who really need support.”

Studying the survey results, Laforge says she felt both optimistic for agriculture’s future and sad about opportunities that have already been lost.

Laforge sees opportunities to better meet the needs of new farmers of all kinds. The respondents indicated that they did not know much (or, often, anything) about financial supports and education opportunities available through each province. Any business training they did manage to find they reported as being prohibitively expensive. Industry infrastructure like processing facilities and marketing opportunities was frequently described as inadequate, unavailable or difficult to access. And most respondents had little or no idea of what provincial extension is or how to access it.

“There are a lot of challenges but they aren’t insurmountable. There are opportunities to build supports that could make a real difference,” says Laforge.

Amanda Wilson, co-ordinator of policy and community with Food Secure Canada, agrees that the demographics of Canadian agriculture are changing and that industry and government need to respond.

“We need to shift our understanding of who new farmers are. They aren’t just young kids from rural backgrounds whose parents farmed. Some have had careers elsewhere and are interested in getting out of the city. A growing number are immigrants who had extensive farming background in the country they came from. The kinds of supports and tools these farmers need won’t necessarily be what works for large-scale, commodity producers.”

One of the big issues is that government isn’t yet responding to the changing priorities, operating structures and business models of new farmers.

“We need more concrete steps to support the diversity of farmers,” Wilson says.

For example, she says, last fall, the federal government announced a new loan program for new farmers. While excellent news, the loan was only accessible to new farmers operating at large scale.

“There are whole swaths of new farmers operating at small scale,” says Wilson. “We need to make sure programs and supports are equally accessible to all. We need to appreciate the diversity of agricultural practices. We want to see our food system move in the direction of sustainable, diverse and secure.”

Knowing the federal government is to release a new Ag Framework in 2018, Farm Secure Canada gathered various industry voices in 2015 and 2016, with 22 food and farming organizations signing off on a policy brief that calls on government to better invest in the next generation of farmers.

Specifically, the Farm Renewal Brief recommends:

• The creation of a farm renewal, business development and labour pillar in the next ag policy framework to address the diversity of new entrants to farming.
• Supporting programs to protect farmland that are accessible to all farmers.
• Increased access to start-up capital and financing.
• Training opportunities that are financially accessible to new farmers.
• Supporting best farm business management practices.

Instead of not taking new farmers seriously, government, industry and other farmers should strive — actively, consciously, and passionately strive — to see new farmers succeed, the group says.

“We need to figure out from a government program and policy perspective how we can help farmers not only start up a farm but grow and sustain a farm over the long term,” says Wilson.

“It’s really important to help farmers make that first step, but then we need to ask: how do we help them take second and third steps so that their businesses are sustainable, not just ecologically and socially but financially too.”

Stuart Oke agrees. When he isn’t working to build his farm, he’s busy as youth president of the National Farmers’ Union, a role that suits his commitment to other farmers and to co-operative and collective action.

Oke knows firsthand exactly how challenging farm startup is, and he wishes he and Tesar didn’t have to tackle each hurdle so entirely alone.

“None of us want handouts, but we are looking for supports because there are very real barriers to getting into agriculture,” he says.

Education and training opportunities are sorely lacking for aspiring farmers, he says. And banks are too risk-averse to lend capital.

“We’re not asking government to throw money around. But, for example, in Quebec you can take a business plan to an organization, get a stamp of approval, and then take that stamp to any bank and the government will underwrite your loan. That’s just one example of what a program could look like at a federal level,” he says.

For himself, Oke is contagiously enthusiastic. “We’re full steam ahead,” he says. “We’re looking at big expansion in the years ahead.”

The post Unconventional appeared first on Country Guide.

That’s because when that chance came to see a Schlüter in person, it was on the Gut Karlshof farm in Munich, Germany.

“This tractor is over 20 years old,” Alfons Bauschmidt, manager of the city’s farming operations said as he toured me around the Gut Karlshof farmyard. “We have one employee who loves Schlüter tractors. He cleans and maintains it with a passion.”

Such passion has greatly extended the life of this old tractor, and it mirrors the kind of commitment that drives this entire — and also very unique — farm operation.

The Gut Karlshof farm site is located well within the limits of one of Europe’s fastest growing cities, even though it would violate handfuls of bylaws, regulations and zoning restrictions almost anywhere in Canada. The historic farmyard is located on 273 hectares (675 acres) of prime agricultural land, and it and nine other sites called estates in and around the city add up to 6,300 acres farmed by the municipal government.

By German standards, such a farm operation is enormous.

“The city of Munich has 10 of these estates,” confirmed Bauschmidt. “Two of them are located right inside the city and we have an overall agricultural area of 2,549 hectares. We use 1,762 hectares for our own crops or animal husbandry.”

Why would a city defy convention and run its own farming operation?

It turns out there are multiple good reasons. To start with, the government already needs to maintain a fleet of agricultural equipment to maintain its large tracts of undeveloped land. Plus, at least one city department needs to buy agricultural commodities.

“It’s our job to supply grain and feed to the zoo in Munich,” Bauschmidt explained. “And we also take care of green spaces within the city. Most are large-scale parks, and we also take care of general areas.”

One remarkable thing about this farm is it gets those city maintenance jobs done without the typical drain on city budgets. Instead, the farm’s income covers those expenses, not to mention supporting 45 employees and running in the black.

“Every year we return a small profit to the city,” said Bauschmidt.

That “small” profit typically amounts to about 200,000 euros annually. That’s about C$300,000!

But there is much more behind the logic for having this urban farm than a cheap way of getting the grass cut in city parks. There is also a unique philosophy here that may be a template for major centres in Canada to consider.

Munich’s leaders see a very long list of benefits to be had by keeping tractors running around town. Helping to maintain a natural ecological balance within the city is one of the big ones.

“The landscape of the city is very beautiful, and we try to be a model of development for other cities,” said Bauschmidt. “The maintenance of our cultural landscape is important. These spaces help provide the city with fresh clean air. These areas provide urban residents with a better climate.”

The micro climate is important; on average, the temperature within the city centre is six to eight degrees hotter than it is at the farmyard, so the goal is to provide green spaces to soften the extremes.

“It’s also very important to have 360 hectares of so-called ecological balance land. We want to preserve the landscape, and there will always be agriculture going on in these compensation areas to make sure we have an ecological balance.”

And if you’re going to operate a city farm, why not let the public participate and get their hands dirty? To help those who don’t have a green thumb, the farm even prepares all the plots and seeds them before turning over maintenance of them to “an urban farmer” for a year.

“Local residents can get a small plot of land and do some urban gardening,” Bauschmidt continued. “We have six such sites where we offer 600 plots. We do the tilling and planting and hand the plots over to the resident who takes over responsibility for his or her plot.

“This is very popular with families with small children. That was our target group. But it turned out there were many other people who wanted to get involved as well. Many young singles who have a stressful job said they wanted to go do some gardening when they come home in the evening to relax.”

Each plot has 30 or 60 square metres. For 30, residents pay 65 euros (about C$100) per year. That includes the seedlings, use of the tools and the water supply. People just do the maintenance through the course of the year. In the fall the farm takes over again and prepares the plot for next season.

“People can come back the next year,” Bauschmidt added.

For those who don’t want to do that much work but still want to get some farm-fresh vegetables, the on-farm store at Gut Karlshof will sell them a bag and they can go out into one of the farm fields and pick their own on harvesting days.

“We always give people the opportunity to pick their own potatoes on our fields. We use our harvesting machinery, people buy a bag and pick the potatoes off the field.”

The operation also does a lot of direct marketing right from a farmyard store, which sells organic produce and beef from its feeder operation which finishes Simmental-Fleckvieh-cross cattle. It also sells directly to other retailers.

“In recent years we’ve seen a growing demand for regional produce, and organic produce in particular,” he said. “We work on the principle of producing regional, healthy foods. We grow wheat, barley and all kinds of grains (as well as corn, beans and vegetables).

“There are many consumers who want to know where their meat comes from, so they come to our farm shop. We have 500 feeders here. We have a marketing contract with a butcher in Munich. Every week they take six head. Our most well-known buyer is the Oktoberfest. During those two weeks, the equivalent of 110 head are eaten by visitors.”

City management hasn’t overlooked the fact that the farm provides a golden opportunity to teach the urban public about where their food comes from.

“Children who grow up in the city don’t have much knowledge about agriculture,” noted Bau­schmidt. “That’s why our estates are open to visits from schools. Even adults can come here and learn about agriculture. Once or twice a year we organize a farm festival. We invite farmers to display and sell their products. People can eat lunch, buy local and regional organic products. We usually get 6,000 to 8,000 visitors. We also organize lectures about topics being discussed in agriculture, and we invite politicians and agricultural experts.”

The farm grows all its own livestock feed and uses compost for fertilizer. As well, grass clippings from city parks along with some corn and grass silage support the farm’s other revenue source. “We have a biogas facility that has a 590 kilowatt per hour capacity,” Bauschmidt pointed out. “We produce enough energy to supply 1,500 households, and we also have solar panels on many of our buildings.”

Primarily, however, while these economics help the city to farm, they don’t explain why it’s involved in farming in the first place. Instead, the drivers are quality of life and the beauty of rural landscape.

“Land is a very important asset here, and there are many competing demands for it,” Bauschmidt said before adding something that many Canadian farmers would echo. “You cannot preserve the agricultural landscape without farming it.”

This article was originally published as “In a German city” in the May/June 2016 issue of Country Guide

The post Urban agriculture in Germany appeared first on Country Guide.

Are you a farmer, or a producer? Or are you a grower, or a rancher?

More to the point, what do you call yourself that paints a clear picture of who you are for non-farmers and consumers? You’re proud to farm, after all, but you’re also proud that you produce the healthiest, highest-quality food that the world has ever seen, and that you do it in a sophisticated, successful, scaled-up and amazingly productive way.

So what’s wrong with “commercial farmer” as a way of differentiating yourself from New-Agers or from hobby farmers, or from farms that seem like overgrown gardens compared with the way you farm?

Maybe nothing is wrong with it. But maybe it’s time we at least put it through the mill to find out.

So I started asking farmers about it last summer. As you might expect, they don’t all agree.

Which term do farmers embrace?

First I caught Lane Stockbrugger before he headed back into the field in east-central Saskatchewan where he farms with brother Lance.

The Stockbrugger family has been farming that same land for over 100 years. But taking over the farm wasn’t a sure bet for the Stockbruggers when they were kids. A car accident claimed their father’s life in 1983. Their mother survived the accident and raised her two daughters and two sons on the farm.

Stockbrugger started farming his first quarter over 20 years ago, while in Grade 11. He also went on to work as a marketer, and Lance became a chartered accountant, creating a savvy management team that reflects the complexity of farming today.

Stockbrugger isn’t exactly a fan of “commercial farmer.” Farming isn’t entirely about size these days, he says, because production models are so diverse. For example, what kind of farm is a grain operation with 1,000 acres?

“We’ve no idea what his gross profit is per acre because he could be doing very different things than the farmer next to him who farms 10,000 acres,” says Stockbrugger. You run the risk of insulting someone if you call him a hobby farmer, or even insulting an entire industry, he adds.

Mary Jane Duncan was next on my list. She thinks of a commercial farmer as someone who runs the farm as a business, to make a living. Like many ag insiders, she doesn’t see commercial and family farms as conflicting categories.

“We’re watching markets and keeping on top of agronomy stuff. But we’re still all family,” she tells me one morning, just before she hops in the combine.

Duncan’s farm is near Regina, Sask. She shares labour with family, but has her own land and she markets her own grain.

Terminology matters in the beef industry, too. A commercial cow-calf producer differentiates that operation from a purebred herd, rather than separating hobby and business-oriented outfits. And outsiders shouldn’t assume that every beef producer embraces the descriptor “rancher.”

“We learned quickly that people in Ontario and even to some extent Manitoba don’t see themselves as ranchers. They’re farmers,” says Annemarie Pedersen, a public relations specialist specializing in agriculture.

Canada Beef and the Beef Advocacy Centre tend to stick to beef producer to be more inclusive, she says.

Thus the conversation around which label to embrace is complex enough within the agriculture industry. But it becomes even more nuanced once you involve consumers.

Commercial or factory farm?

Even farmers who see themselves as commercial farmers may not want to identify that way all the time, says Duncan.

There’s a trend right now for consumer-directed TV commercials to portray simple family farms. They aren’t exactly wearing bib overalls and holding pitch forks, but neither are they acting like the chief executive officers of multi-million dollar businesses, and there’s a reason for that discrepancy between image and reality, Duncan says. Friendly farmers sell better than those who are interested in profit.

There’s a perception that big is bad, she adds, “and that profit is bad. But really, to stay viable in an industry you have to be making some profit.”

Like other farmers, Stockbrugger often finds himself waving the flag as a sort of spokesperson for farmers, and he definitely sees a perception problem with the term “commercial farmer” when he’s talking to consumers.

To that audience, he says, commercial farm can sound “kind of factory-farmish, where accountability is out the window.” Yet the majority of farms are still family-run, he says, and they are highly productive without the negative connotations of factory farms.

The term “commercial farm” risks raising those issues without resolving them, Stockbrugger thinks.

It turns out Duncan and Stockbrugger may be right on the mark when it comes to consumer images of farms.

Based in Kansas City, the Centre for Food Integrity is an industry group that studies consumer trust in food, with a special focus on communication techniques, and it has found that consumers suspect large farms put profit ahead of principles.

This means that large family farms must spend more time talking about their values, the group says.

Canadian communications experts agree. “It’s mind-boggling these days how often food and food issues are in the press,” says Chris Forrest, public relations director with AdFarm.

Forrest doesn’t have a specific recommendation on whether producers should use the term “commercial farmer.” But he doesn’t want to lose sight of the fact that a commercial farm can be a family farm, too. The term commercial farmer “probably comes with an expected level of professionalism that you’re bringing to your career.”

Pederson agrees, yet points to a differentiation that could prove critical. Farmers are at the top of the list of the most trusted professions, she says. Yet when you talk about most trusted industries, agriculture becomes more of a grey area. In many consumers’ minds, the word agriculture triggers images of factory farms, multi-billion dollar companies, pollution, pesticides, and antibiotics.

It’s safe to conclude that the agriculture industry has a perception problem. But it’s not clear that farmers should embrace the “commercial farmer” label with consumers while having to explain at the same time that this doesn’t mean they’re factory farms.

Pedersen asks why it’s up to commercial farmers to differentiate themselves from hobby farmers in the first place. Commercial farmers produce most food.

It turns out, in fact, that none of these questions are easy. For instance, how do consumers perceive the term “rancher?” It should be simple, right?

After her work with organizations such as Canada Beef and her own experience talking with consumers, Pederson sees “rancher” a little like a Rorschach test — it reveals more about the person looking at the inkblot than the inkblot itself.

For some people, the idea of a rancher conveys a certain romanticism, Pedersen says. Yet other consumers see ranchers as lawless, and maybe even abusive towards their animals.

Whatever term producers use, part of the challenge will be pulling consumers past those stereotypes. And one model to look at is the Behind the Beef program, which was delivered by the B.C. Cattlemen’s Association.

Convincing consumers in cities such as Vancouver that the beef industry can be trusted with animal welfare and environmental issues is an uphill battle, says Pedersen. Behind the Beef hired and trained people to hand out recipes in grocery stores with information on beef production. Pedersen, who helped with the program, said they often chose ranchers. Consumers were more interested when they could get information on raising cattle straight from the source, Pedersen says.

Producers have to own their stories, she says. And although social media is great for interacting with some people, farmers need to expand their reach beyond Twitter, she adds. “I think the personal conversations are the hardest. But we have to win people over one person at a time.”

Forrest agrees that everyone in agriculture has a role to play in facilitating those conversations. At interview time, AdFarm was preparing to launch License to Farm. The film, funded by SaskCanola, along with the Saskatchewan and federal governments, looks at misperceptions around agriculture. Forrest hopes the film encourages individual farmers to join the conversation, but those conversations do need to be respectful and fact-based, he says. “Ignoring people or arguing with them isn’t going to accomplish much. It’s about sitting together at the table and sharing information.”

Duncan says she’d probably reserve “commercial farmer” for an ag audience, even though she identifies as one. With her friends, she doesn’t focus on explaining what a commercial farm is, as they don’t have a good grasp of the business side of farming.

As for Stockbrugger, he’s not going to be labeling himself a commercial farmer anytime soon for any audience. He doesn’t mind the term producer, he says, but there’s more to farming than producing.

The other day, though, he overheard his four-year-old son tell his sister “I’m going to be a farmer when I grow up.” That seemed to sum it up.

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