Jim Davidson is named COG OSO Chairperson
Jim Davidson stepped into the role at the April 23 Steering Committee meeting.
Balancing Life and Logistics on the Organic Farm
There can be much joy in organic farming: seeing garlic break through the mulch in early Spring, watching pollinator insects happily gathering nectar from the squash plants and hearing the ‘best ever meat’ compliments from your happy customers. But things can also go south. Your farm worker quits in mid-season, your tractor just died, you are spending too little time with the kids and you don’t have a retirement fund. Jess Weatherhead walks us through their journey to find balance on the Roots and Shoots organic farm in this month’s Food for Thought article.
Senior Organic Gardeners update
Senior Organic Gardeners activities over the past winter.
Marketing Organic Grain
It’s hard to grow a good crop of organic grain. If you don’t have saved seed, you will have to search for an organic supplier. Has the cover crop trapped enough fertility in the soil? How bad will the weed pressure be this year? And what about the cost of tractor fuel with war in the Middle East? When the crop is sold, will it cover costs and still leave enough to live on? In this month’s article, Rob Wallbridge takes us through the challenges and the rewards when selling your organic grain crop. You can take advantage of Rob’s years of experience as a grain trader right here.
Tea the way nature intended it to be
Nearly half of adult Canadians drink tea regularly – 12 billion cups a year. To make all that tea, we import roughly 50,000 tons of it annually – mostly black, some green – coming all the way from Asia or Africa. But what if we could buy tea grown and processed in the Ottawa Valley? That is the question that the founders of the Algonquin Tea Company asked themselves, and the rest is history.
Elwood Quinn
Elwood Quinn has passed away at the age of 78.
Gillian Boyd
For those who knew and remember Gillian Boyd, I am saddened to share news of her passing on January 2, 2026.
Cabbages the size of baseballs
If you are a vegetable farmer planning the coming growing season, cabbages will probably not be anywhere near the top of your list. These large plants occupy high value space in your field for most or all of the growing season. But what if farmers could grow a cabbage the size of a baseball, occupying little space in the field and maturing in only 55 days?
Why do I always choose organic food?
Why would I want to eat something that could kill an insect that tries to eat it?
Our Family’s Journey to Organic Dairy Farming
Drive down any rural road in our region and you are likely to see a farm with a large, new looking barn on it. It could be a pig farm or a chicken farm, as no animals are visible. It will mostly likely be a zero-grazing dairy farm where cows are kept penned in year-round and fodder is carried to them. Organic dairy farming, however, requires that cows graze and exercise outside whenever weather permits. The author of this month’s article, Sam Gerstgrasser, tells us how he ended up dairy farming and why organic was a natural choice for his family.