community
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Why Are New Generations Leaving Farming?
This morning I was asked to be on local CBC Radio One to speak about the higher than average rainfall and how it affects vegetable growers. At the end of the brief interview, I was asked by the broadcaster why I wanted to farm, despite the broad trend of young people leaving the farm behind. Continue reading
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Garden Planning
We spend all winter here at the farm planning our season, thinking about what worked well last year, what we should change, and new things to explore that might benefit us. We also think a lot about things we can plant or grow that are not crops, but have ecological benefits, be it providing a Continue reading
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Why don’t we want to be close to where our food is grown?
Agriculture and innovation have always gone hand in hand. Indigenous American Three Sisters methods with corn, squash and beans. Incan terraces and potato cultivation. Anishinaabe food forests. Many people not only don’t grow their own food, but food comes exclusively from the store. Land is a prospective real estate development, not for farming. And farms Continue reading
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Intact Forests Within Cities
Sometimes when one expects to find a manicured park, one finds themselves in a dynamic forest. I stepped down from apartments and condos into a beautiful place and was amazed to find dead trees and tree trunks along with uneven ground, pooling water as the snow melts. On an island of just 3.8 square kilometres Continue reading
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Garden Futures: Designing With Nature
When I wrote last week’s post Art Can Show Us the Diversity We’ve Lost, I didn’t know that a couple days later I would be stumbling into the Garden Futures: Designing With Nature exhibit in Helsinki’s Designmuseo. The stated goals of the exhibition seemed to jar with my perspective as a farmer. It is not Continue reading
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Change Is Coming….Fast
Not talking about it, or pretending it isn’t real, will not help us prepare for significant changes the world will face in the coming decades. Not talking about it leaves our communities and societies weak, our businesses brittle, and unable to adapt in time. Not talking about it means we double down, triple down, quadruple Continue reading
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Shifting the Culture of Food Systems
We live in a world with more choice than ever. We also live in a world with an enormous amount of near-monopolistic corporate power and over decades, have conditioned consumers into certain purchasing habits. Many of these purchasing habits are sold with the language of convenience. The same world allows for a movement of counter-culture. Continue reading
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Integrating Agriculture Back Into Communities
What does integrating agriculture with communities look like? For many, agriculture is something that happens “over there,” on a big scale, incompatible with suburban living. Perhaps there are illusions of what agriculture means: an industrial scale, huge machines, chemicals and processing facilities, waste that has to be managed, odours that have to be contained and Continue reading
About Graham
Graham is an ecologist-farmer from Canada working on educating about the wonders and beauty of the natural world, and how we can design biodiverse food production systems.
Complimentary Blueberry Juice 