getaway farm

We had the privilege of attending the Incredible Picnic at Alderney Landing in Dartmouth this past Sunday, and we had a great time. It isn't often we get to experience first hand people eating our beef, so getting immediate reactions was a real blast. If you ever get the chance to attend an event like this, do yourself a favour and check it out. It is a great opportunity to meet a lot of local food figures that you may not otherwise meet, plus you get to eat... a lot. 

Special thanks to Local Source Market for pushing us to attend. We most likely would have spent the day hiding on the farm if not for their insistence that we attend with them. 

I am not even going to attempt to apologize for my extended absence from our little farm blog. Since spring, I have worked more hours, worked harder, gotten far dirtier, and slept better than I ever have in all my brief 31 years. So I worked... and worked... and worked. The blog got lost in there somewhere. My bad.

Back to the matter at hand, however. Organic. The big O. A lot of folks ask us why we don't certify when we could. It's a long story, and I will come back to it. I want you to read this quote from The Omnivore's Dilema first. I just came across it and it struck me as very relative to our province.

"...the organic label itself - like every other such label in the supermarket - is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven't the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away" pg. 136 - 137

In Nova Scotia, the average that your food travels is 4,000 km. That's pretty far. In fact, you could almost drive to Austin, Texas in that. The Ecology Action Centre recently released a report based on 2008 data that pegged the average food milage at that whopping high number. Now hopefully, since 2008 we as a province have been buying more local grub and have driven that number down, but that remains to be seen.

The point is, our farm is not 4,000 km away. I promise. Driving in to "the city" every Saturday morning would be far more painful if it involved multiple thousands of kilometres. It takes ninety minutes to drive from downtown Halifax to our driveway. Trust me, I do it a lot.

It is on that note that I want to challenge you. I don't want you to just buy in to my pitch at the Market and walk away satisfied that you are doing your part. You are, don't get me wrong. You are making a huge difference to both our farm and Nova Scotia agriculture as a whole. Every dollar you give to us and deny those grocery stores is a sort of vote. But, what I really want is for you to give up one hundred and eighty minutes and come see the farm that is growing your food. Come meet the people you never see (my infamous father-in-law) and look your food in the eye. See for a fact how it is raised, what it eats, what it doesn't eat, and how we treat them. I want you to come and ask to see their feed. Ask to see their water. Walk around with the cows and calves and experience it all for your self. 

This is where that organic thing comes in to play. I promised to tell you why we don't certify, but only on the condition that I get to tell you while we sit around my dinner table and I serve you coffee. And maybe a burger or steak. Maybe. The point is, please come see your food. Don't just buy into a label and walk away satisfied. Know your food. It doesn't come from 4,000 km away, it's just down the road.

As I was preparing the draft for the next part of our story I took a break to have a cup of tea and smoke my pipe (yes, I smoke an old school tobacco pipe, I'm sorry) while I watched something from one of the TED talks and I came across this video. Have a look...

What crosses your mind when you watch that video? Do you think of your own diet? Maybe you cook for a family and you think about your kids or your partner. Perhaps it made you think of the family you ought to be cooking for but unfortunately are not. Maybe you are a foodie and you think about the people that you love to cook for. As I watched that video I was brought close to tears thinking about all the Canadians, particularly us Nova Scotians, who are suffering ill health because of our eating habits. The latest numbers I could find from Stats Canada indicate that 30% of men in Nova Scotia are considered obese as opposed to the national average of 22.9%. That's almost a third of us who are risking serious health problems and those numbers do not include those of us who are simply considered overweight. It's safe to say that things here in Nova Scotia are not as they ought to be considering our access to such a diversity of local, healthy, unprocessed foods. If we made greater use of our local resources instead of depending on the industrial food chain we could greatly reduce the obesity epidemic in our home province.

Man, I never would have thought it would have taken us over six months to update the website. Turns out that this city boy from Vancouver really didn't know what he was getting in to when he signed up to farm with his in-laws. Life since July has been the most exciting, challenging, scary, emotional, rewarding and downright fun period of my life... and I have done some pretty crazy and/or stupid things.

I suppose I should probably start with who "I" and "we" actually are. My name is Chris and I am the son-in-law-student-farmer to Godfrey and Bev, the real farming minds behind what we do. You see these guys have been farming since Noah got off the Ark or sometime thereabouts. They have been dairy farmers, grain farmers, beef farmers and everything else in between. They started out in England and emigrated to Alberta back in '94. That's where I came on to the scene.

I met their smokin hot daughter Leonie, who would soon become my smokin hot wife, at school in Calgary in '98. We got married a scant year later and it was my new in-laws who began to expose me to what farm life entailed. I have to admit that my involvement with their farm over the next 10 years was fairly minimal. I used to hate getting dirty. Or wet. Or sweaty. Or anything else that involved going outside. I was one of those guys that loved techo-gadgets, books, ideas and clean things. Don't get me wrong though, I would help out here and there when they needed it but I always tried to swing it so that I was doing cooking or driving a truck or some other activity in a controlled environment. The long and short of it is I was very much a part of the system, just another cog in the consumer culture machine.

Then things began to change. Mom and Dad (yeah I call my in-laws Mom and Dad) took a beating in '04 with the BSE fiasco. They are very much farmers of principle and they had been trying to prove to those Alberta feedlot guys that you could feed beef cattle grass and still get good gains without having to stuff them full of food that they really shouldn't eat. Of course that means they were sitting on quite the sizable herd when the floor fell out on beef prices. They managed to keep going for another few years but by the spring of '08 they had run out of steam. They sold the farm and for the first time in their lives walked away from farming with no idea what to do with themselves.

In the meantime Leonie and I had added three children to the ranks of our family and by '08 I had been working in television for a few years. Things appeared to be normal but as we watched Mom and Dad leave farming and mourned the family's loss of the farming lifestyle we began to question the values of the culture we found ourselves mired in. What were we striving for? A bigger house? More cars? A cottage? A massive tv? Who were we trying to impress? We didn't even know our neighbors to be honest. Why would we care about what people thought of us if we didn't care enough about people to be in relationship with them? Something about that seemed backwards and over the next year we came to realize that the entire system seemed broken and we wanted out. Desperately.

I'll carry on with the rest of the story next time as this post has gone on far too long but this should give you a pretty good idea as to who we are and why on earth we are trying to farm in a day and age when agriculture is almost a guaranteed loosing bet. We may be nuts but it turns out being nuts is a lot of fun so why not?