Canadian Organic Growers
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.
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?
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.
Drive down a country road in the summer and every other field will be planted in soybeans. The farmer’s ‘beans’ will almost certainly be transgenic, genetically modified to withstand multiple doses of a herbicide soup designed to try to kill the pesticide-resistant weeds that Nature continually creates. So why aren’t these soybeans grown organically? The short answer is that it is much more demanding – it is not a ‘plant, spray and walk away’ type of crop. But why don’t we let the author of this month’s article explain right here how he does it.
We don’t usually think of bison when deciding how to manage pastures, but it turns out that they have something to teach us and Paul Slomp, the author of this month’s article, has been putting their wisdom into practice. Paul has adopted an active role in deciding where his cattle graze, how much they graze and when it is time to move to greener pastures.
They were laughed at when they said they were going to grow organic apples. Much too difficult, they were told. Being young and determined they went ahead anyway. Now, 13 years after buying their 48-acre farm near Hudson, QC, Eric and Anick are growing 20 different varieties of certified organic apples, along with other tree fruits.
Want something different to offer to your CSA or farmers’ market customers? If you like a challenge, try growing ginger. A few farmers in our region are experimenting with this tropical crop and at Long Road Ecological Farm, Xiaobing Shen has been growing it successfully since 2020. But it does take some planning. Because of its long growing season, planting starts in early January and harvest continues into November. In this month’s article, Xiaobing tells us about all the steps in between.
Hot August days often make us wish for a juicy slice of watermelon. If you are a farmer, you have probably decided that melons are not worth growing for market, given more profitable crops and unpredictable summer weather in our region. If you are a consumer, you are likely faced with buying one from our erstwhile friendly southern neighbour. In this month’s article, François Biron tells us why he grows tons of melons every year on his farm in the Outaouais. He also shares the secret of growing seedless watermelons.