Profile

A small mixed farm in northern BC that works towards harmonious genetic diversity through rare breed preservation and small-scale breeding. Here's a little bit about my pilosophy:

You can't make something from nothing. The right plants and animals, combined with careful observation and thought, can lead to magic: minimal physical work going in and bounty emerging.

Whether it's from a pot on a patio or a multi-acre homestead, a food system is composed of elements specific to your context: it's soil, it's water, it's sunlight, it's heat, it's energy. It's living things large and small, plant and animal and fungi, all interacting in ongoing processes. I'm working in the north with observation, thought, and experimentation to create magic systems.

My focus is in using the right plants and the right animals in the right relationship. Some plants, and some varieties of plants, are better in warm weather or cold weather or at resisting diseases or growing with too much or too little water: maybe your context needs a fruit that can grow without much water like saskatoon berries, or a carbohydrate that stores easily like wheat or amaranth, or needs little labour in the spring to plant like potatoes.

A goose can eat grass all summer where a chicken needs grain and a cow needs a lot of storage for the meat and a long timescale: if your yard grows grass easily a goose might be a better fit. And maybe, if the goose is a good fit, you can plant potatoes in the spring and let the goose dig them up over winter when there's not grass, and it can feed itself without you doing much work at all. If you have the right goose it will lay eggs in the spring, sit on them before the grass starts growing, and hatch out a batch of goslings that grow fat on spring grass and feed you before the grass stops growing in fall. In that system you haven't bought feed or threshed grain or dried and hauled hay in from the field so you have an easy, sustainable meat. Dig up a few potatoes for yourself and you have some very nice dinners over the winter. That's a piece of a good system-- if you live somewhere grass grows well, and where there's plenty of water for geese.

Good systems make plants easier too: the classic example is the three (or four)) sisters used by Indigenous North Americans composed of corn, beans, squash (and cleome, the bee plant). Climbing beans use cornstalks as support, eliminating the need for a trellis or sticks while adding nitrogen fertilizer to the soil for corn an squash. Squash with its big leaves shades the soil, retaining moisture and out-competing weeds. Cleome attracts and pollinators to help a fruitful harvest. For this to work you need the right corn -- tall and quick in spring to make a good scaffold for beans. You need the right bean -- not too short and not tall enough to overtop the corn, but instead selected together with the corn into a harmonious height. And you need the right squash -- sprawling, vining, able to cover the ground quickly before weeks spring up.

I put together good systems. I grow many plants and many animals: I seek out rare and unusual varieties for the biggest range of possibilities in a system. I observe them carefully. I experiment with putting them together. I selectively breed them to work together better.

Putting together good systems takes time-- years, and then decades to refine with selective breeding and adding extra elements for resilience in years with unanticipated challenges. Many people can't put together systems right now -- no land, no time, the work is just not what brings joy -- but may want the components of a system in the future. Maybe the need will come suddenly, without years to gather myriad organisms from all over the world and observe and test them. This is the place to watch me think my way through putting together systems.