Before the end (of the season)

Is the season over? Heck no!

As we come up to the Labour Day weekend, we’re busy putting food by. Canning, freezing and drying have begun around the farm in earnest, with our garlic harvested and cleaned, onions coming out to cure, and batch after batch of canned tomatoes. 

We thought we’d spend this space talking a bit about local food systems. We all know summer is highway building season, we’ve spent so much time in one construction zone or another. While we’re there, we look around a bit. What’s being sacrificed in the name of faster, bigger roads? 

One might think that we worship highways and vehicles, given that we sacrifice our food and precious wetland to them. 

Local food systems are based on viable farmland. Good farmland depends on wetlands to soak up seasonal floods, and forests to release water slowly from the hillsides. It also needs, well, land. Valley bottoms are the most fertile, but higher lands can grow lots of food as well, both hooved and vegetable. This seems blindingly obvious, but paving the nice flat valleys immediately reduces our ability to feed ourselves. Paving wetlands is not only difficult but leaves those same roads prone to subsidence, washout and flooding – and it creates many more issues upstream, not to mention the loss of vital habitat. 

Local food systems also require local storage and processing and local sales. Farmers markets are thriving in our region, with many of them going for longer seasons or year-round. This means a huge increase in customer convenience, as farmers find more ways to store this season’s harvest for you. It also means more stress and work for farmers, or an increase in middlemen, to freeze, can, dry or create cold and atmosphere controlled storage.

So what’s the problem? Well, it’s not a problem entirely, but it is a moment to act. Harvest is at its peak now. Right now. There are amazingly delicious melons, beans, broccoli, all the hot weather crops like tomatoes and eggplant and corn… so much bounty at the markets. Our question is: what are you doing? Are you seizing this moment to preserve some of this for your family? Are you eschewing the veg section of the grocery store and heading to the farmers market? Have you got a freezer for yourself, or one shared with friends? Have you found a dry cool spot in your house for keeping garlic, squash, onions and potatoes? What about a plastic bin with damp sand for storing carrots and beets? It doesn’t actually take a lot of space to store a LOT of food - and we’re not even starting on canning tomatoes!

But also keep coming to the farmers markets all year. We need you to support the local food system. We need you buying produce, canning, and our food makers from pies to bakeries to popsicles. When you do that, we keep feeding you and feeding our own families. We also feed the food banks, create jobs with purpose, support wetlands and riparian zones, and make a small rural community alive. 

Without farmers markets, we lose our small farms and the diversity they bring. We lose a lot of our food security, as giant operations are scaled and structured to export food away from our community. We lose people too, as small farms employ more people per capita, and without jobs they’ll have to leave. We lose the environmental protection diversified small farms provide. 

So head down to the market, buy a shared freezer with friends, and stock up while this bounty is available. While you’re there, stop by the brewery booth and lets talk about how to make our food system stronger.