FARM NEWS

I’m changing my legal name!

As many of you know, I attended a ten day silent meditation retreat in Merritt back in January. During the retreat I came to the realization that my life has changed dramatically since I left my home town of Edmonton back in 2018. I never could have guessed that I would grow up to be a farmer in the Kootenays. I didn’t even know small-scale farming was a thing until I met Emily.

In the mediation hall they place name tags next to your designated meditation cushion. After a few day my name started to look odd to me. I started to feel like I no longer had anything in common with the person I was back in Edmonton. My name began to remind me of the old version of myself. A version of myself that no longer exists. And so I decided I better change my name to represent my new self.

My original name was Nathan Wiebe. From here on out it will be Nathan Wild. I chose Wild because that was my grandma’s last name. Her and I were very close but she unfortunately passed away in 2015.

If you see a post on Facebook or a blog written by a Nathan Wild just remember that that’s me now!

Get excited for flowers 😀

This season we are growing a whole bunch of cut flower for the first time. We have eight 100 foot rows of garden space dedicated to flowers. We’ll be growing dahlias, zinnias, cosmos, sunflowers, sweet peas, snap dragons, stock and many more!

This means that starting in June you’ll be able to order a flower bouquet with your veggies and baked goods. Get excited!

NEW PRODUCTS

Cheesy Potato & Leek Quiche

You want a hot and savoury dinner but you don't have the energy to make something from scratch. Why not try our Bake-At-Home Cheesy Potato & Leek Quiche?

Pull out our quiche from the freeze and let it thaw for about 3 hours. Once thawed, pop it in the oven and in just 40 minutes you can have dinner for the whole family. Once cooked, cut a slice and take a bite. The quiche is warm and the texture is soft and fluffy with soft chunks of potato in every bit. The flavour is deeply cheesy with notes of leek sharp Parmesan and gooey mozzarella. Combined with its buttery and flaky whole wheat crust, this meal is sure to be a crowd pleaser!

For our Cheesy Potato & Leek Quiche we started by milling Soft White wheat berries into a light and fluffy whole wheat flour using our stoneground mill. Our freshly-milled flour is left unsifted to ensure maximum flavour and nutrition. Soft White wheat has a buttery flavour and a light texture - perfect for a quiche crust. We then incorporated butter and salt and rolled it out into a beautiful pie shell.

For the quiche filling we used local free-range eggs from the hard working folks at Kootenay Natural Meats in Creston. We then whisked the eggs with Italian Grana Padano Parmesan cheese, mozzarella, organic BC cream and locally grown leeks and sieglinde potatoes.

Chocolate Chip Sourdough Waffles are back!

These are my favorite flavour of our sourdough waffles. The pockets of warm gooey semi-sweet chocolate chips are highly satisfying. We’re usually too busy too make this flavour so they’re not normally available. Be sure to try them out while they’re around!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT 🍎

Sound The Alarm

Have you been following the story about the catastrophic flooding in California? You should be. Next time you’re at the grocery store take a look at where the vegetables, fruits and nuts come from. The vast majority of it is sourced from California. California is in fact Canada’s #1 agriculture and agri-food exporter with an astonishing 18% of our food coming from them. This means that the flooding in California isn’t just a California problem - it’s our problem too.



The Great Flood

Mother Jones published a story adapted from the 2020 book Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It, by Tom Philpott. In the book, Tom published private letters written by a young scientist by the name of William Brewer who lived in the 19 century. William was hired by the newly anointed state of California to create a “full and scientific description of the state’s rocks, fossils, soils, and minerals, and its botanical and zoological productions, together with specimens of the same.”

During his four year investigation William chronicles what was known as the Great Flood of 1861–1862. This flood submerged Sacramento, the capital of California, and drowned the Central Valley in water as high as 15 feet. Today, that same Central Valley which occupies less than 1 percent of US farmland, produces a quarter of the nation’s food supply.

In the 1980s scientists began studying the streams and banks of the Central Valley to determine its historical weather patterns over the past centuries. They discovered that “The Great Flood of 1862 was no one-off black-swan event. Summarizing the science, Ingram and USGS researcher Michael Dettinger deliver the dire news: A flood comparable to—and sometimes much more intense than—the 1861–1862 catastrophe occurred sometime between 1235–1360, 1395–1410, 1555–1615, 1750–1770, and 1810–1820; that is, one mega flood every 100 to 200 years.”

If you do the math, the last mega flood happened a century and a half ago. Scientists are predicting that the next one will likely hit by 2060 and another one by the end of the century. They also say that because of rising global temperatures these once in one or two century mega floods will happen more frequently - about every 65 years.

Sound far-fetched? It shouldn’t. Everyone thought the Abbotsford dam would never break, but just two years ago in 2021 an atmospheric river - the same extreme weather event that California is experiencing right now - broke the dam and flooded the entire Abbotsford Valley, killing hundreds of thousands of livestock and destroying homes and farms. The Abbotsford flood should be a wake up call to us all. Extreme weather events are becoming the norm. And our current globalized, centralized food system can no longer be trusted.



What Will Happen When We Lose California Agriculture?

When we lose California agriculture we will have to import our food from even farther away, such as Mexico, Argentina, Australia and South Africa. This will increase food prices due to higher transportation costs. And that’s if we can find alternatives. A quarter of the food produced in the US is grown in California's Central Valley. When it gets flooded it will create fierce competition among distributors and grocery stores.

We could source our food from across Canada but that would also be more expensive due to our high minimum wage. The other issue with transitioning to Canadian-grown food is that there won’t be enough farm workers to harvest it all. Most of our farms are large-scale operations and even now Canadian growers are struggling to find farmers to work their fields. Why? Because no Canadian in their right mind would want to work for one of these farms.

They offer back breaking, skilled and repetitive work in extremely hot weather conditions for minimum wage. And if you're on a conventional farm - which most of them are - you could be exposed to toxic pesticides and herbicides. This is why almost all large-scale farm workers are migrants. They’re the only ones desperate enough to take the work.

As grocery stores fight over food to stock their shelves there will be mass food shortages that could last for weeks and months. Food prices will skyrocket making a typical grocery bill unaffordable for many Canadians. We’ve made the mistake of putting our food security in the hands of multinational corporations. Instead of building a stable food system for all of us, they’ve created a precarious profit-making machine for themselves. The writing on the wall is clear. We need a better food system. One that isn’t tied to fossil fuel prices, with long supply chains vulnerable to natural disasters, and is controlled by us.



Our Only Hope

We only have one option to protect ourselves. We need to localize our food system. With a localized food system consisting of thousands of small-scale farmers working together, we can keep food prices stable. Local food systems have short and simple supply chains. It goes from farm to consumer or from farm to wholesaler to consumer. With less middlemen and less distance needed for transportation we can protect our food prices from price hikes. And by spreading out food production across the province in a decentralized manner we can reduce food shortages if a natural disaster were to strike a specific region.

Every small farm is also a small business. Having thousands of small farm businesses will improve local economies, making it easier to increase wages. When you work with a small crew on a small farm, growing food for your community out in nature, your job feels meaningful even though it can be challenging at times. I believe that if given the opportunity, we could fill small-scale farm positions with young people who aspire to do purposeful work pretty easily.

To have nearly a fifth of our food coming from a centralized location in a foreign country which is being plagued by wild fires, droughts and floods is idiotic and negligent. We're giving up our food security in exchange for cheap food. Is that a deal you feel comfortable making?

We have to start preparing our community for the worst-case scenario. The best way to do that is by supporting local farmers as much as you can. You could begin transitioning to a local and seasonal diet. If you’re a landowner with unused land you could consider leasing, donating or selling a small section of it to aspiring farmers who are looking for land. We were able to start our farm here in the Kootenays on half an acre of privately owned land that we leased through the Young Agrarians program. Without that opportunity we wouldn’t be where we are today.