The biggest little farm is the future of farming

Biodynamics is an ecologically sound way for the world to feed itself free of petrochemical-based pesticides, fertilizers and genetically modified plants. Healthy soil is the basic ingredient.

“Food has a soul. If you try to manufacture it you kill its soul,”  Ziggy Kleinau, owner of Ziggy’s Little Meadow Farm on the Bruce Peninsula.

While putting myself through the culinary program at George Brown College, I worked as a personal cook for a family that lived on Palmerston Avenue in downtown Toronto.

Every day after classes, I walked to the semi-detached, two-story home, let myself in, made a cup of tea in a massive café au lait cup and looked at the day’s menu.

The family I cooked for was made up of a mother, Leslie, who worked at the Royal Ontario Museum, her six-year-old son, six-month old son and her partner who worked at a museum in Montreal during the week returning home late Friday night.

Leslie grew up in an affluent family in British Columbia. She travelled extensively during, and after, her university years. And, all of that culminated in a real appreciation for good, locally sourced food made with the best quality ingredients.

It also helped that she frequented the Cookbook Store at the corner of Yonge Street and Yorkville Avenue where Leslie acquired her vast collection of international cookbooks from Vietnamese to authentic Portuguese and classical Indian cookery as well as all the best Italian and French classics.

Each weekend, Leslie planned the week’s menus including any special breakfasts – a favourite was cream of wheat with onion, potato, cabbage and Vietnamese spicing – and the occasional dessert.

Then, she would place her grocery order with the local Portuguese grocer who would deliver everything right to the door. All I had to do was show up and cook. The only exception was when fish was on the menu, then I would pick up fresh fish from a local fishmonger on my way to work.

I loved that job, not only because it paid more than any restaurant I was also working at – I’ve always had two jobs since I was 16 to put myself through seven years of post secondary – but because I learned so much in the three years I worked for this family. Perhaps, most importantly, I knew my labour was really acknowledged and appreciated.

I had good knives, copper bottomed pots, wooden cutting boards, a blender and plenty of wooden spoons to work with. And, that was it!

Part of my job was making baby food from scratch. That included making infant oatmeal. You start by grinding whole oats in a blender. The meal is mixed with water, cooked and then forced with a wooden spoon through a fine sieve before being placed into ice cube trays and frozen into individual servings.

Rinse and repeat with whatever grain or vegetable that you can think of.

My upper arms never look so muscular and taught as when I was making baby food from scratch. Oh, and yes, making polenta and risotto also helped!

I left this job after completing my apprenticeship at local Toronto restaurants and writing my provincial exam for journeyperson cook only because I then went on to Western University to earn a Bachelor of Education and the distance was, well, prohibitive.

I had an appreciation for local food and a background in organics thanks to discovering two brilliant books while in high school. The Deadly Feast of Life by Donald E. Carr (1971) introduced me to the concept of organic food while Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe (1971) explored the economic viability of feeding the world’s hungry if only North Americans could be convinced to become vegetarians.

Unfortunately, Lappe did not account for the fact that capitalism is profit driven and the ability to pay – whether for grains, vegetables or animal protein -- overrides every good action including a more equitable distribution of grain and plant-based foods.

When I had my own kids, I bought pretty much all of my food including free-range chicken and eggs, ethically raised beef, cheese, vegetables and fruits from Foxcroft Farms, an organic community supported agriculture (CSA) farm family in Scotland, Ontario. Bernie Fox delivered fresh in-season foods to my door in Etobicoke and then Burlington once a week. My family ate according to the rhythm of the seasons.

It was after the birth of my first child (1992) that I heard about bovine somatotropin (BST), or bovine growth hormone (BGH), being injected into Jamaican and American cows to increase milk production. BST was poised to come to Canada and people were so divided over it that the Canadian government would not give me an official statement when asked about the controversial drug. That’s when my spidey sense, aka danger sense, went into overdrive.

Eventually, I found a farmer who told me the down sides of BST that included udder infections that lead to very painful mastitis, puss in the milk, the use of antibiotics and the residues of the growth hormone and antibiotics found in the milk that could potentially affect children consuming this milk. The fact that Canada had, and continues to have, milk quotas that were routinely surpassed effectively made BST use redundant.

The farmer also told me about to the annual Guelph Organic Conference held the last weekend of January. Luckily, it was one week until that year’s conference and so I registered.

That was 1994 and one of the workshops I signed up for an introduction to biodynamics. I picked it just because it sounded really interesting, ‘out there,’ and like me, hippy dippy, – and it did not disappoint.

The presenter, a gentleman in his 70s emigrated from Germany as a young man to Orangeville, Ontario the epicentre of biodynamics in Ontario at that time. He definitely qualified as an expert in biodynamics simply based on the fact that he was from far away and also the number of years he had been growing food this way. Perhaps just as important was the lived experience that backed up his claims because this way of farming, developed by philosopher Rudolph Steiner in 1924, had literally saved this man’s life post-WWII.

After serving as a child solder in the German army, the presenter returned home to his family farm. As the only surviving male, he took over the running the farm and bringing back production.

The Americans, at the time, had an overabundance of chemical weapons left over after the war. They began promoting ‘pesticides,’ or more aptly named, chemical weapons of war, as part of the solution to Europe’s inability to feed itself.

This young man bought into the American propaganda and began using pesticides on his previously organic fields. The Americans guaranteed increased yields due to fewer pests. The costs to those who bought into the American propaganda was not only financial, but human.

After a couple of years, the young farmer’s health declined so drastically that he went to his doctor. He was told that if he did not stop using these chemical weapons, he would be dead by the time he was twenty.

Heeding his doctor’s recommendations, the young farmer found and embraced biodynamics.

He eventually moved to Canada and settled in Orangeville where he was still biodynamically farming.

He told the story of his wife wanting him to grow asparagus for her the previous year. He had never grown asparagus mainly because it thrives in sandy soil and their farm was predominantly clay soil.

So, the farmer did what any good biodynamic farmer would do and trucked in sandy loam recreating the best possible growing conditions and got a bumper harvest.

During his talk, an Agricultural and Agri-Food Canada representative abruptly got up and noisily left the workshop making everyone aware of his disdain for what the presenter had to say. That was the ag rep’s loss because what I learned that day proved invaluable even as a home gardener.

Always plant in the sign of Capricorn because that will guarantee rain within two or three days of seeding. Only plant when the evening temperatures are warm enough for you to do so shirtless – something my own children adamantly insisted I not do, although I never understood why.

Use native, heritage seeds when possible and use natural remedies for all infections and infestations. Rams, or cows, horns filled with manure and buried in the ground are an integral part of soil preparation as was manure tea – and, soil preparation is everything!

Needless to say, I was so excited when I watched the 2018 documentary, The biggest Little Farm chronicling Molly and John Chester’s dream of owning their own farm.

It starts with the very simple idea of growing a wide variety of crops for Molly, a personal chef, to prepare and cook. Then, the film progresses to a detailed business plan to attract investors to finance the purchase of the 200 hundred acres of land needed to accommodate that plan.

But the journey really begins to take shape after this couple realizes that organic farming is a much bigger, and more difficult, undertaking than they ever thought possible. And, those challenges increase exponentially when the soil has been overused and abused by ‘modern’ industrial farming practices.

And, that’s when mentor, Allan York, makes his entrance.

York, unquestionably a biodynamic guru, leads the Chester’s on their seven-year adventure of successes and failures that ultimately results in the creation of an interdependent, interconnected, self-sustaining ecosystem in arid California. In other words, the Chester’s and their team of biodynamic farmers eventually create a living, breathing, thoroughly thriving paradise that feeds many with very little input while generating a low carbon footprint.

This is the type of truly sustainable agriculture the world needs to embrace.

Biodynamics is all about the health of the soil and saving non-genetically modified (non-GMO) seed. That needs to become mainstream if we are going to be able to feed ourselves in the midst of an ongoing climate crisis that is only getting worse as we ignore the impact fossil fuels, petrochemical-based fertilizers and pesticides are having on the cycle of life, the Earth and our atmosphere.

Watch The Biggest Little Farm with someone you love and then share it with all the family, friends, environmentalists and actionists in your life.

And, the next time a developer tells you that a farm’s soil is no good so we should just build houses on it or pave over it, send him my way and I’ll teach him about biodynamics, manure tea, micro-organisms and the interconnectedness of humans and Mother Nature.

The Biggest Little Farm (2 hours 17 minutes) available free on CBC Gem.

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Home schoolers, elementary and high school teachers find out more about biodynamics, food lessons, unit plans, summatives and related material here.

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