Christopher Brown — aka “Farmer Brown” — participates in a locally owned and operated growers co-operative that delivers food to Nanaimo’s Farmer’s Markets
A little over a year ago a group of local farmers just south of Nanaimo formed a partnership called the Farmship Growers Co-operative. As reported in the Nanaimo Daily News, “the group worked out a deal in which they would lease nine acres of the Wyndlow Farm…along with Chris Brown, a new farmer who just wrapped up his first year growing food in the Cowichan Valley.” Chris is one of a burgeoning new generation of urban farmers reimagining and reinventing farming for a new century.
Urban agriculture
Urban agriculture is the practice of cultivating, processing, and distributing food in or around a village, town, or city [Wikipedia] — and it can include edible landscaping, community gardening, and urban farming. Urban farming takes things a step further as it includes growing food for wholesale and retail sales to urban consumers [EdoDesign Resource Society]. Local and urban agriculture is finding new life around the world — and Vancouver Island is a prime location for growing.
An British Columbia-based organization called the EcoDesign Resource Society has published an Urban Farming Guidelines handbook — and they list some of the reasons for increased interest in local food production:
Several converging, relatively contemporaneous events and movements have brought us back to recognize and re-embrace food production as an integral and vital part of the urban complex. These include the Bruntland Commission, Local Agenda 21, energy shortages and pricing increases, social movements which demand healthier local and organic foods and associated social justice concerns around food security, climate change and initiatives to mitigate its projected impacts, and evidence of the significance of recent food supply shocks. In addition, there is considerable concern about the environmental, social and economic impacts resulting from our industrialized, global food production system and this has driven many alternative food production initiatives which are characteristically local. — The Urban Farming Guidebook: Planning for the Business of Growing Food in BC’s Towns & Cities [opens to PDF]
Food security a ‘real concern’ on Vancouver Island
Food security (also called food sovereignty) plays a particularly important role in driving the development of new food sources on Vancouver Island. Fifty years ago, Vancouver Island farmers produced 85% of the Island’s food; today, Island producers provide only about 10% of the food consumed [Watershed Sentinel].
A 2011 report by the Vancouver Island Community Research Alliance’s Local Food Project, called Strategies for Increasing Food Security on Vancouver Island, observes that sourcing good quality food closer to home is a key theme on Vancouver Island:
Geographically, Vancouver Island is blessed with a temperate climate and fertile soils, which make it a prime location for food production. However, high land values, increasing labour and input costs, and loss of processing and distribution infrastructure, coupled with a shrinking farming population has threatened the viability of the local food system on the island and consequently threatens food security of the local people (Scott, 2004). The Island’s many communities are also vulnerable to transportation interruptions as a result of conflict(s), natural disaster(s), or fuel shortages. Food sustainability and security are very real concerns for many residents of Vancouver Island. — Strategies for Increasing Food Security on Vancouver Island [opens to PDF].
Julie Chadwick writes in her Nanaimo Daily News article that “what [Nanaimo’s] Farmship Co-op say they are striving to illustrate is the new and innovative face of farming, in which a framework is provided that allows resources such as skills, land, equipment and physical labour can be shared in new ways.”
Chadwick reports that co-op members say they offer a “new model of farm sustainability, by uniting the ability for farmers to work collectively as a money-making venture, while encouraging newcomers to learn how to farm in the non-profit educational component of the co-operative.”
But will communities support local agriculture?
An October 6, 2014 article in the Times Colonist reports that though Greater Victoria residents are showing a strong commitment to the environment, they’re less likely to buy local food than to go green in other ways:
According to the annual Vital Signs survey, 98 per cent of residents say they recycle, 95 per cent make an effort to conserve energy and 92.5 per cent try to reduce waste. But when it comes to buying food produced locally, only 23 per cent reported doing so regularly or all the time. And 54 per cent said they never do. Access to local foods seemed to be the biggest problem. — Times Colonist
“We need much more support for locally grown food, more food grown on public land, [and] support, including funding for neighbourhood-generated projects,” one respondent to the Vital Signs survey [opens to PDF] said.
Local agriculture food panel on People First Radio
We speak with Christopher Brown, a Farmship Growers Co-Op farmer and board member at Bowen Road Farmer’s Market, with Marjorie Stewart, board chair at Nanaimo Foodshare, and with Kelsey Wolff, a co-founder of Start-Up Nanaimo and community manager at Nanaimo’s Square One tech incubator.
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