Farming makes me feel alive...

OTTAWA — There’s a glint in Robin Turner’s bright green eyes as he shows off his 1979 Farmall 140 tractor — a hulking machine with an offset engine that makes it easy to see plants when you’re weeding fields.

It’s 10 a.m. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping and Turner is already dirty.

“Farming,” he says, “makes me feel alive. I’ve worked office jobs before and they don’t make me feel that way.”

The 35-year-old is one of many local farmers watching closely as the National Capital Commission reviews the master plan for the Greenbelt, a 20,000-hectare crescent of farms, forests and wetlands surrounding the city.

The NCC will soon release its vision for the Greenbelt for the next half century. Farming is a key part of the plan, and there is a growing number of people — including Turner — who hope the NCC will harness the Greenbelt’s potential to feed local markets and cultivate a new generation of farmers.

“The Greenbelt is a stunning exception to cities all over the world. I don’t think there’s another example anywhere in the world where you have 5,000 hectares of farm land within 20 minutes of the city centre,” Turner says.

“It’s important to recognize what an incredible resource it is and how much potential it has,” Turner said,

He is not a Greenbelt farmer, but he’d like to be. He dreams of operating a small-scale sustainable farm that provides food for the local market and sees himself partnering with another farmer who wants to raise animals on the same piece of land, thus producing fertilizer for Turner’s vegetable crops.

As farm land becomes available, he hopes the NCC will tap into the societal desire for local food and continue to support this new type of farming on the Greenbelt. “I hope that farmers like me can find a place on the Greenbelt. It’s important that viable farmers that can serve their community are in the Greenbelt,” he says.

The NCC appears to be listening.

Turner was invited to sit on a public advisory committee on the future of agriculture in the Greenbelt and has addressed the NCC’s board of directors about local food and what he sees as important for the Greenbelt.

“They were very supportive, they expressed a lot of interest in what I was talking about, and (NCC chief executive officer) Marie Lemay herself said she thought it was a good idea.”

Turner also plans to share his thoughts about the food system during a talk at Arbour Environmental Shoppe (800 Bank St.) May 26, starting at 7 p.m.

Last year, the NCC hired an expert from the University of Guelph to identify actions that would “encourage the appropriate evolution of agriculture” in the Greenbelt.

Wayne Caldwell’s work focuses on how transitions in agriculture affect rural communities and has a deep interest in the rural/urban fringe. His report could serve as a conversation starter for the NCC as it considers how agriculture will fit into the Greenbelt master plan.

After meeting with Greenbelt farmers and working closely with NCC staff, Caldwell developed a number of recommendations.

He says the NCC should encourage farmers to live on the land to foster a stronger sense of ownership. It should enhance marketing opportunities for the Greenbelt farms through farm tours, promotional signs and a stronger web presence, and develop specific branding for Greenbelt products.

It should also recruit new farmers who may not be able to afford their own land and develop a sustainability strategy focusing on environmentally friendly farm practices.

And it should encourage farmers to tap into the demand for locally grown food.

One way to do that is through a model of farming known as community-supported agriculture (CSA).

People buy shares in the farm at the start of the season and, in return, get a weekly delivery of locally-grown vegetables from roughly the first week of July to the third week of October.

Riverglen Biodynamic Farm is currently the only CSA in the Greenbelt. The CSA’s shares are already sold out and lately, farmer David Burnford has been spending long days in the fields getting seeds into the ground.

“There’s a lot more demand than I could supply right now,” he says.

In addition to a wide range of vegetables, Burnford also grows plums, pears, apples, cherries and hazelnuts in a newly planted orchard.

Turner has also set up a CSA. He’s rented some land in Manotick Station to start Roots and Shoots Farm. He and several others who work this plot of land live downtown and commute to the farm every day. Shares in the CSA are $500 each, and Turner says some are still available for purchase.

Starting in June, Roots and Shoots will also sell produce weekly at the Ottawa Farmer’s Market at Lansdowne Park.

Turner isn’t worried about demand. “If you supply really fresh, bountiful vegetables to the local community, it’s not difficult to survive as a small-scale vegetable farmer.”

François Cyr, the NCC’s senior manager for the Greenbelt, says when it comes to agriculture, the message to go local has been heard loud and clear.

“People like it, people want to do it,” he says.

But he says it’s too soon to express what that could look like in practice because the master plan review process is on-going.

“We’re not against organic, we’re not against community-supported agriculture, but I don’t think it’s realistic to think everybody’s going to be like that in five, 10, 20 years,” he says.

He adds about one-third of Greenbelt farms grow cash crops, but notes vegetable, berries and fruit, and horse farming are also common.

Turner looks every bit the farmer as he plows his field in a plaid shirt and brown boots.

Although he grew up on a farm, he says he was never encouraged to take up farming and spent most of his 20s travelling in Asia.

He eventually ended up in British Columbia and studied environmental science.

That’s where he got his first taste of agricultural science. He says it was the lightbulb moment that put him on the path to this muddy field.

“Food is the most direct connection between human beings and the planet because it goes right in our bodies and it comes from the dirt.”

In Sunday’s Citizen: Greenbelt tenants and their troubles

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