Do you have food on your table today? If the answer is yes, thank a farmer.
While city dwellers may have less connection with the source of their daily food, residents of rural Manitoba can’t help but be exposed to the sights and sounds of our province’s many farm operations.
Harvest time here is especially beautiful as the crops mature and change colour. It’s also a time of year when farmers get no rest, their fields abuzz with harvesting equipment from the early hours of the morning until well after the sun goes down.
Ken Krahn is a third-generation farmer and has been growing crops in the area for 35 years. He farms close to 3,000 acres in the municipalities of Ritchot and Tache. This spring, Krahn grew four types of crops throughout his acreages: Hard Red spring wheat, canola, soybeans, and corn.
He says the hot dry summer definitely impacted this year’s crops.
“In 2017 we had excellent soil moisture coming into the year, with timely rains during the season which made for excellent yields,” says Krahn. “This year was very similar except we did not have any late season rains to finish out the late crops like beans and corn.”
The lack of rain, he says, meant less fighting against fungal disease, but it also lowered his overall yields in beans and corn. His wheat yield turned out similar to last year while canola pulled ahead a bit from 2017.
Krahn and his wife Emily believe that sharing their abundance means more than contributing to the local agrifood market.
“We are supporters of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. However, we have not had a joint community effort for a few years like we’ve had in the past,” says Krahn. “We have also contributed some of our proceeds from the crops to organizations like Harvest for Kids.”
Harvest for Kids is a program developed by Children’s Camps International (CCI), an organization whose goal is to send children to CCI camps established in developing countries around the world.
While most of us don’t have direct farm-to-table access to our grain products, vegetables and meats can be a different story. CSA stands for community-supported agriculture, and these businesses are popping up all over the region, many of them providing spray-free and grass-fed options during the summer months.
Nick Rempel has been co-owner of Natural Collective CSA for the past three years. His partners, Connor Screpnek, Adam Pauls, Derek Denolf, and Katie Daman, grow a variety of vegetables on their four-acre garden near New Bothwell. With more than a half-acre of additional pasture space, they were also able to raise free-run chickens fed with a non-GMO diet.
“The hot, dry summer was great for us this year,” says Rempel. “We’re lucky that most of our garden is irrigated, so we didn’t have any issues keeping the crops well-watered. We’ve never had carrots and beets ready to harvest as early as we did this year, and we were swimming in tomatoes from late July until [late September].”
Pests can be a gardener’s nightmare. For Natural Collective, flea beetles proved to be the toughest foe this year.
“Flea beetles are always an issue for us, but they were particularly bad late summer after the farmers harvested the canola,” Rempel says. “Luckily, most of the plants were robust enough to withstand the damage, but our availability of crops like arugula and kale, which need to be aesthetically appealing, suffered for a month or so.”
Rempel says that he and his partners use gardening techniques that allow them to grow without the use of any chemical pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides. To keep weeds at a minimum, many crop rows are planted over a layer of landscape fabric. Another relatively easy intervention that they employ is the use of row covers which means placing a light layer of fabric on top of the fledgling plants that is sunlight- and water-permeable but helps keep the pests at bay.
As the demand for locally sourced fresh food products grows, so do the number of farmers’ markets in the area. Rempel says, over and above their CSA share sales, the team found themselves regularly at Farm Fresh Food Hub’s market on south Osborne, the River Heights market, and the St. Malo farmers’ market throughout the summer.
Rempel says that Natural Collective sprung from a collaboration of friends who shared similar values.
“Market gardening seemed like the easiest way to do something that fit our ecological values while also fulfilling our desire to work for ourselves and gain a bit more self-sufficiency.”
He adds that the team will be back at it again next spring. In the meantime, fresh-farmed chickens can still be purchased by visiting their website or Facebook page.
