Eco Farm Day 2010

I spent this past Saturday in Cornwall attending Eco Farm Day, Eastern Ontario’s organic / ecological farming conference. This is the second year I’ve attended, and I enjoyed this year’s conference just as much as last year’s.

This year’s keynote speaker was Wayne Roberts, a Toronto-based food activist. He spends his time convincing Toronto to let him build community gardens and baking ovens in vacant lots, amend municipal bylaws to make green roofs and balcony gardening legal, and convincing the University of Toronto to require its food services providers to include a percentage of local, sustainable food in their menus.

I’ll be looking to read two of his books: Get a Life, and The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food.

Besides the plenary and a Q&A session with Wayne Roberts, I went to two other presentations, one by Ken Taylor of Windmill Point Farm / The Green Barn Nursery, and one by Daniel Brisebois of Ferme coopérative Tourne-Sol.

Ken Taylor is an expert in permaculture for the Montreal-area climate. He’s spent the past 30 years using traditional plant breeding and tree grafting methods to produce hardy, tasty, disease and pest-resistant fruits and vegetables that thrive in this area. He has crossed cherries with plums, and pears with apples. He has developed grape varieties that survive -40°C winters and make great wine. He grows asian pear varieties that need no weeding, spraying, pruning, or other care, leaving the landscape around his fruit trees to be as “wild” as possible for the benefit of animals and insects.

I attend his talks every chance I get, because he has such a wealth of knowledge and experience to pass on, and he has pretty much convinced me to concentrate on tree- and bush-fruit on our little 6-acre patch of North Stormont. Maybe a mulberry or two, certainly a few black raspberry bushes, perhaps a couple of asian pears…

Ferme coopérative Tourne-Sol is a magnificent success story – 5 young people met in university, all sharing a dream of running an organic farm, and 8 years later not only have they built a solid business that supports all five of them year ’round, but they are passing on what they have learned. Last year they opened their books and took us through the economics of running a small organic market garden farm, and this year they gave an in-depth workshop on seed saving for the market gardener.

All in all it was a great day. I joined the Ottawa chapter of Canadian Organic Growers, bought some heartnut seeds and grape scions from the Green Barn Nursery, and am looking forward to potentially getting involved in the local sustainable food initiative that Tom Manley will be starting this year.