Getting out and getting back: some lessons I’ve learned about growing food

25 years ago my wife and I, dragging along with our five-year-old twins, decided to finally follow our dream of leaving the city and pursuing a more integrated life on a farm. Her BA in Creative Writing and my years of studying English lit might not have inspired confidence, but I’d spent some time on a farm growing up, and my family moved to our own 80 acres (32 hectares) just north of Edmonton, Alberta when I was about 13. That farm started with an outhouse, a 400 sq. ft. (37 sq. metres — man that makes it sound really small) house designed (and destined) to be converted into a garage, and once a week we hauled 20 litre (5 gallon) buckets of water from the city to the farm. The only plumbing was a buried drain for water from the kitchen sink that had to be covered with straw bales in the winter to keep it from filling with ice.

I left the farm after high school, but always harboured a desire to live in the country. Probably because my formative years were during the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s. And after sitting in an unheated outdoor privy at -40 degrees, not much about living in the country could scare me.

It turned out to be a good idea to have kids; with grandchildren to think about, my parents thought it was a great idea that we move to the province they lived in, and if we moved onto the farm, so much the better. Problem was, they assumed we would be following the same growing practices that they and my brother followed. We were much more interested in being a New Agriculture farm. We wanted to stay small,be organic, and pursue what Helen and Scott Nearing called The Good Life. We wanted to be centred in the type of farming practised by my grandparents, but informed by our experience and all the research done by groups like the Rodale Institute.

We shared a 1/4 section (160 acres, 65 hectares) with my brother, both of us growing vegetables. He invested heavily in machinery and greenhouses, while we used a Troybilt tiller and hand powered planter. He was a big business (~100K/yr in gross sales) while we were about the life (15K gross when we left). We were organic, my brother was not. We were a mixed farm, he was not. And we were outside of Edmonton, Alberta, which was not overly friendly to back-to-the-land hippies.

We had far better response from our customers – we both sold direct at farmer’s markets. My brother looked into wholesaling, but he was too small and the pay was too low. It’s one of those flaws in the supply and demand model; when you have a supply, so does everybody else (a short growing season is funny that way).

Our ROI (return on investment) was far better than my brother’s, but his operation was so much bigger (and 30+ years more established; my mother had started his operation while he was in grade school) that he had an almost reasonable after-tax income. We lived in poverty we scarcely noticed. After all, we were warm, housed, and had a freezer full of organic vegetables and cruelty-free meat. We didn’t have television (with the exception of curated shows sent to us by friends worried about our isolation), but we had a fantastic relationship with our library. Whenever possible, we attended cultural events in the city, went to museums, art shows, and plays (Edmonton has a terrific group that puts on Shakespeare in the Park each summer).

The early years were great. The last couple of years were very tough. Alberta went through a drought that we couldn’t counter. My brother had dugouts and irrigation equipment. We did not. The last summer, nothing grew. In August we discovered that without spring rains, there was still frost in the ground about 600mm (14 inches) down.

There were lessons. The new ag experiments were imperfect. We were trying to bring together old school ag, organic farming, and sustainable practice. The only thing we had was land. We were under-capitalized and under human capitalized. And while we did good things, the lesson I took was “take community with you.” Without understanding and support for what we were doing, it all became so much more difficult. And when you get a group together to farm, form a co-operative. Here in Sooke, Cast Iron Farm has formed a co-op to buy their land, and then they lease it to themselves to farm. The new farming co-op will allow people to join and farm, but not have to own the land. And it will all serve to keep their land out of the hands of developers (a huge threat).

Give up on the idea that you’ll ever have a good income, and instead concentrate on living a full life. Eric Brende has a great book called Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology that expresses how living simply can actually be very rich and complex. And learn a skill — preferably carpentry or welding. You’ll become more valuable to yourself and others.

Also, add value! Jam has a better return than berries. Spice rubs pay back better than bags of herbs. One of our market neighbours was a dairy that pasteurized their own milk, allowing them to sell cream, cheese, and the like.

Add service! I once drove two hours round trip after market to get some purple potatoes to a woman who wanted to serve them to her In-laws. Customer for life.

Don’t watch television. Really. You will feel richer. We lived below the poverty line, but didn’t notice because we didn’t have to keep comparing ourselves to an unobtainable ideal. Mid-winter, we would drag a goose out of the freezer, invite a bunch of friends out from the city, and no one could have been better off than us. My daughter followed Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in terms of living on a Hellmouth, the farm was clearly better.

Add love. It’s the only thing that lasts, and it’s the only thing that communicates. If we hadn’t loved what we were doing we would have sold a quarter as much. My brother couldn’t communicate a joy he didn’t feel, and his sales suffered as a result. His wife finally told him to stay home and prep for the next day’s market. So add love. Can’t say it enough. Add love.

We now live in a small town on Vancouver Island, in a small house with a tiny yard. We are still working towards the sustainable life; the greenhouse is up, raised beds being filled, a vermiculture composter working. We won’t be self sufficient, but we will be better off. And we are still adding love to what we do.