June 21,2017

The food from this farm is rare and valuable, but it should be foreveryone

Fred Lum / The Globe andMail

I love this time of year. After the stress and uncertainty of a cold and miserable spring, the farm is finally starting to fire on all cylinders. Weve been harvesting for a couple of weeks now and as the June sun warms up our fertile soil, the garden is suddenly a riot of growth. For the past few days, weve been cutting hundreds of pounds of baby greens arugula, lettuce, kale and the most perfect, dark green, succulent spinach youve ever seen. Its all beautiful and delicious, and our chef clients are clamouring to get it into theirrestaurants.

Like any good businessperson, I want to charge as much as I can for what Im selling, especially since what Im selling is both rare and valuable. You cant find the kind of organic greens we produce on our farm just anywhere. But one of the most common criticisms of organic food is that its too expensive that its elitist andunaffordable.

I think this argument is bogus. Canadians spend less of their income on food than anyone else on the planet and a big portion of their food budget goes to things such as brewed coffee and soft drinks that they could easily do without. And why should I charge less for my products than the market will bear? Everyone on our farm works very hard and we deserve to be rewarded for our skill andeffort.

Fred Lum / The Globe andMail

While the vast majority of Canadians could afford to switch to organic, there are many who are too mired in poverty to eat well. When Gillian and I started farming more than 10 years ago, we quickly realized there was a disconnect between our need to make money and our desire to make our food more accessible. So we decided to throw aparty.

We asked one of our chef clients to help us cook a big meal, we hired a band to play in the barn and we sold some tickets. We raised a few thousand dollars, all of which went to purchase local, organic food from our farm and others like it for a progressive outfit in Toronto called the Stop Community Food Centre. The idea was to support sustainable farmers and to get really good food into low-incomeneighbourhoods.

Brent Preston

Over the years, our little fundraiser grew. We started inviting more chefs to cook and the bands we booked got bigger and better known. We had Stars, Sam Roberts and Sloan: Two years ago, the Tragically Hip showed up. We brought on sponsors and the amount of money we raised alsogrew.

This years event happened on June 17 and involved chefs from 15 incredible restaurants cooking on the front lawn. Almost 1,000 guests ate and mingled and enjoyed the late afternoon sun. At dusk, Joel Plaskett and the Emergency took the stage and almost rocked the barn down. Theres nothing like good food and good music to unlock goodwill and generosity. We raised more than $110,000 in onenight.

As I wandered through the crowds that Saturday, I couldnt help wondering how it had all come to be: How did so many chefs and foodies and musicians end up all together on our farm? The answer, of course, is that food brings us together, and that making good food available to those who cant afford it is an easy cause to get behind. What organic farmers and chefs and musicians have in common is that they all produce something rare and valuable, something worth paying for and worthsharing.

June 7,2017

The winter was long and lean and the spring cold and wet, but finally our first greens are ready - six months after we last gotpaid

This past winter was long and lean, as it always is on our farm. My wife, Gillian, and I spent our days catching up on bookkeeping, ordering seeds, and taking some time off, while our fields were covered in snow. As the weather began to warm, we started to get excited about the upcoming season. We planted salad greens as soon as the snow melted in early April, and our anticipation grew with ourseedlings.

This spring has been colder and wetter than any we have experienced in our years on the farm, but this week, finally, our first greens are ready. We sent out word to our clients a few days ago, and today we harvested. And not a moment too soon its been almost six months to the day since the last time we gotpaid.

We gave up trying to grow vegetables in the winter a long time ago. Our farm is on top of the Niagara Escarpment, in one of the coldest, windiest spots in Southern Ontario. Our greenhouses get so buried in snow that we often cant even get into them, let alone grow anything in there. So we have to grow all our food, and make all our money, in only half theyear.

Luckily, most of our food gets sold to restaurants, and most of our chef clients are committed to seasonaleating.

Farming was traditionally a seasonal business in Canada, but the big corporations that now dominate our food system have worked hard to convince consumers that they should be able to eat whatever produce they want at any time of the year.

Veggies are grown in massive, climate-controlled greenhouses in the middle of winter, and all manner of fresh fruits are flown from the far corners of the globe. If local asparagus is only available for a few weeks in the spring, why not bring it in from Argentina the rest of thetime?

The answer, for our chefs at least, is flavour. Eating Argentinian asparagus in February is a sad, limp, insipid experience. The chefs who buy from us want local and seasonal produce because it tastes best. They are also fiercely loyal to their local suppliers, looking on their farmers as partners, friends, and fellow artisans. Most of our restaurant clients dont have leafy greens on their winter menu: Instead they use locally grown storage vegetables like cabbage, Brussels sprouts and beets. But even the most committed chefs get tired of cooking out of the root cellar after a while. By this time of year, theyre just as excited as we are to see the first saladgreens.

Now that the first harvest is behind us, the madness truly begins. Tomorrow there will be a second harvest, followed by a third the next day, and so on, five or six harvest days a week until the snow flies in October. Well cut and wash and ship off thousands of pounds of beautiful, fresh, delicious vegetables to dozens of talented and appreciative chefs. Well work 12 hours a day, six days a week, racing against the looming winter, to sell as much as we can, so we can refill our family coffers. Its fun and exhausting and immensely satisfying work. And the vegetables taste especially sweet since I know that in a few months, theyll begone.

May 24, 2017

Youve probably never heard of a Jang, or a push seeder and neither have the vast majority of conventional farmers

Brent Preston

Last Monday morning was a little like Christmas on the farm. Last Monday, our new Jang got delivered.

Whats a Jang, you may be wondering? Ask any small-scale organic farmer that question and shell probably get a wistful look in her eye, as if remembering a passionate love affair from long ago. A Jang is the most elegant of machines, a precision-crafted tool that is both high-tech and radically retro, built from cutting-edge materials but powered entirely by human muscle. Its the kind of implement that organic farmers can talk about for hours on end when they get together the equivalent of the latest iPhone for small-farm geeks. A Jang, you see, is a pushseeder.

Let me guess, you dont know what a push seeder is either thats okay, neither do the vast majority of conventional farmers. They probably assume that the use of hand tools in commercial agriculture died out a century ago. But some of us are bucking the bigger is better trend that has pushed farmers to adopt massive, wildly expensive, diesel-guzzling machinery. Some of us are going oldschool.

On our farm, weve always aimed to be human-powered. Relying on people power rather than machines helps reduce our impact on the environment, preserve our soil, provide more employment and produce higher-quality vegetables. Its also healthier for us our bodies are a lot better off when we work with our hands in the fields, rather than riding a tractor allday.

What our preindustrial farming ancestors understood, and what some of us are rediscovering, is that well-designed hand tools can make human-powered agriculture exponentially more efficient, to the point where we can compete with our petro-powered neighbours. We weed with Swiss-made wheel hoes. We plant our seedlings in soil blocks made in a spring-loaded press imported from Holland. Most of our tools were originally introduced in the 1800s or even earlier, but theyre now made with modern materials and incorporate innovative designtweaks.

The Mac Daddy of our hand tool arsenal is the push seeder. For years, weve used a one-row seeder that looks like a little bicycle with a handle it picks up seeds from the on-board hopper, drops them down a chute into the soil and covers them up, all powered by a drive belt attached to the front wheel. Its a simple and elegant machine, but we now plant almost 15 kilometres of row every week, and pushing that little seeder back and forth all day can gettiresome.

Brent Preston and his wife Gillian Flies on their farm inOntario

Brent Preston

So Gillian and I decided to upgrade to the Jang. Its made in Korea and works on the same principal as our one-row seeder, but it plants six rows at a time. It has interchangeable sprockets in the drive chain so we can fine-tune the seeding rate, and larger, detachable hoppers so we can carry more seed and change seed varieties quickly. Thats why we got so excited when it arrived last Monday we knew we were about to increase our planting efficiency by a factor ofsix.

My tractor-driving neighbours probably think I look ridiculous pushing this little yellow contraption around in my fields, but I dont care. Im getting a good workout, Im not breathing any diesel fumes and the Jang cost me a tiny fraction of what their tractors are worth. The chains and gears on the seeder make a pleasant whirring sound as I push it down the row. Thats the sound ofmoney.

May 8, 2017

This year, our usual stress has been compounded by the weather; weve had one of the wettest Aprils on record

Thanks to a particularly wet April, the barnyard at the Prestons farm is a sea ofmud.

Brent Preston

Ah, spring! The season of possibility, when gentle rains bring forth new life and the bucolic countryside awakens in a burst of verdant green. What ajoke.

Spring is the ugliest season. On our farm outside Creemore, Ont., spring is the season of stress. The seeds we planted more than two weeks ago have barely started to grow. Its been almost six months since we last got paid, but money is flying out of our bank account: a thousand bucks for a new sheet of plastic to replace the one that blew off our greenhouse in a winter storm, more than $10,000 for seeds. Our seasonal employees started working last week, so were burning through almost $1,000 a day in payroll and were still weeks away from our firstharvest.

My wife, Gillian, and I abandoned downtown Toronto more than a decade ago to follow our dream of owning a small, diversified organic farm. That dream often turned into a nightmare in the early years, as we buckled under the pressure of trying to run a farm with no experience, no machinery and not much of a clue. Now, the emotional arc of each growing season seems to mirror the 10-year arc of our career asfarmers.

Spring is the time for anxiety and self-doubt. Will our customers come back after the long winter? Will some unforeseen plague descend on our gardens? Will it ever warmup?

This year, our usual stress has been compounded by the weather; weve had one of the wettest Aprils on record. It has rained almost every day, and last week we had three consecutive days of torrential downpours. The barnyard is a sea of mud, which makes the farm look even worse than it usually does at this time of year. An early snowfall last November covered up all the junk that we had been too exhausted to put away at the end of the season, but its all back in plain view now that the snow isgone.

The nice thing about having a decade of farming experience under our belts is that we know things will get better. The weather will improve. Our veggies will start to grow. The chefs and retailers who buy our produce will all get excited when we send them the first salad greens of the season. The puddles will dry, well tidy the place up, and the farm will once again be green and beautiful: bustling, profitable, and the setting for a happy and meaningful life for ourfamily.

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