2024 Project Update:

Sowing the Future: Women Farmers + EcoAgriculture is an arts-based project in its third year, with a focus on diversity and inclusivity. This season features a selection of women farmers in the Ottawa area, including racialized, gender-divergent and landless or farm workers, which also includes temporary foreign agricultural workers. The 2024 season began slowly, as it took time to network, make connections and build relationships, which led to many interviews, farm visits and photo opportunities.

Kumiko of Jambican Studio Gardens

Kumiko grew up surrounded by her family’s rice fields in Japan. Wanderlust and the travel bug took her to New Zealand, where she worked on a variety of farms. Eventually, her travels brought her to Canada, where she settled down and married a farmer. Though she never actually wanted to be a farmer, she has embraced the life and work of a mixed vegetable farm and works alongside her husband.

Jambican Studio Gardens is located half an hour outside Ottawa, on the edge of a small town. Kumiko’s husband and his family have owned the farm for two generations. Their focus is a blend of Jamaican and Asian vegetables, which includes trials with rice, sorghum, burdock, and many types of soybeans and Asian greens. This year, Kumiko is experimenting with indigo and using its fresh leaves for dyeing natural fibres. Kumiko is drawn to traditional food-ways and is learning (or re-learning) to make fermented products like Miso Tempeh, and Natto. Guided by an energetic connection with the plants she grows, she works exclusively by hand using hand tools, leaving the tractor work to her husband. Together, they tend a large area of approximately 7 or 8 acres with little outside help.

Li Xu of Seven Hues Eco Farm

During the pandemic, Li Xu started Seven Hues Eco Farm as an incubator project on a half-acre plot at Just Food Farm on the east side of Ottawa. As a young person in China, Li wanted to be a horticulturist but opted instead for an academic path. However, life in Beijing as an academic, and dealing with the ghosts of the Cultural Revolution and the heavy pollution of urban density did not sit well with her and Li came to Canada to complete her PhD in sociology. Once established in her work with the government, she once again turned her attention to nature and plants.

Learning and re-learning as she goes, Li grows a large variety of Asian vegetables, including bok choy, luffa, bitter melon, yard-long beans, sesame, peanuts and even Asian pears. Traditional Asian vegetables bring her comfort, along with memories of the food of her childhood in China. It’s important to her to have ready access to the vegetables she grew up with, as well as the 20 varieties of tomatoes she grows. Her farming also brings her in close contact with nature, which was soothing during the pandemic and beyond.

Farming for Li Xu is a way to both connect to nature and enjoy a sense of community belonging.

Heather and Stephanie of Fiddlehead Farm

Married with a new baby, Stephanie and Heather offer a community supported agriculture (CSA) program which allows clients to order fresh veggies harvested to their specific requests. They have been farming together for 12 years on 8 acres at the northern edge of Prince Edward County, with a deep commitment to small scale organic agriculture’s capacity to feed the world. They produce a staggering amount of food, focusing on organic methods, biodiversity and rebuilding soil through cover cropping, all to produce tasty vegetables for the local community.

Fiddlehead Farm hosts three temporary foreign agricultural workers from Mexico, Rosalba, Norma, and Marina who live together in the old farmhouse on the property. They live in Canada for approximately 8 months of the year, returning home between contracts. Coming from an agrarian background, they are no strangers to hard work. They work as a team on tasks together and maintain a steady flow of conversation throughout the day.

Camille, Tess, and Willow of BeetBox Co-op Farm

Attracted to the idea of a worker-run co-op, these three young people form part of the farm team at BeetBox Co-op Farm, also a CSA model where members pay in advance for their vegetables. Just on the fringe of the City of Ottawa in the Greenbelt, the farm is owned by the National Capital Commission and leased to the co-op. Part of the legacy of small mixed farms in this area, it provides land for several small agro-businesses, including a garlic grower, a dry land Jamaican farmer, a community garden and a forest school.

These three young farm workers are the heart of the farm, providing leadership, labour, organizational skills, and innovation. They find joy in working collectively, allowing each person to be both challenged in new areas and take a leadership role in areas of their expertise. Camille shines in her role as manager, working from a cooperative perspective. Willow tried her hand at commercially growing flowers as well as directing the weekly vegetable harvest. Tess learned new skills in running and maintaining the farm’s tractor and used their writing skills on social media to produce the farm’s weekly newsletter. Working collectively, they find they can support each other in noticing the profound beauty in their work alongside the backbreaking effort required in all weather conditions.

Community Farm: A Project of BeetBox Co-op Farm

While photographing and interviewing the farm workers at BeetBox Co-op Farm, I noticed groups of people working together, gathering surplus vegetables from the commercial operation and tending to their own half-acre plot of vegetables. I came to learn that 50 to 70 people a week collectively grow their own vegetables with the support and cooperation of the commercial side of the farm. Working evenings and Saturday mornings in small groups, they mirror what is grown commercially, all the while fostering community connections and making friends. A pandemic project now in its fourth year, they are able to produce so much food on half an acre that they feed 50 to 70 families a week and donate the surplus to a local food bank.