Food for Thought

Agritourism is still a small but growing activity on organic farms in our region. You have a spare bedroom in the farmhouse, you enjoy talking to strangers, your partner is a great cook and you could use the extra cash to pay bills. But wait. What will attract city folk to your place? Who has time to attend to inquisitive tourists when you are both working flat out on the farm? And strangers in your bathtub? Before making a rash decision, talk to someone who has been there, done that. The folks at Springfield Farm near Apple Hill have developed a unique form of agritourism. Eleanor McGrath tells us about their experience.

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.

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.