Blog

It has been a very long time since I got in contact with you. It has been a busy and eventful time since our last contact. June 2006 was almost completely taken up by the organic producers class action trial against the BC Egg Board.

Greetings to all you eaters out there, and I assume “eaters” is a fairly safe assessment of my readership! I hope you’ve had a good summer. I am finally back on track writing again after a long season of long hours. The days are shorter and the weather cooler now, as you’ve probably noticed, and this means things just aren’t growing at the rate they were four months ago. My final plantings of salad greens went in the ground mid August and the barley cover crop was planted towards the end of September. I am still picking salad greens for farmer’s markets and restaurants, and finding that I’m having one of the best late seasons I’ve had since I started this business.

The Farm Industry Review Board (FIRB) has just announced once again that they are delaying of the implementation of any changes in the marketing board system that would accommodate certified organic producers or any other niche marketers of a supply managed commodity. The date for their decision is now not before mid August. This is the second one-month delay of implementation of the Lereux Report. I was going to write a June report announcing that the proposed June implementation was delayed to July 17th but fortunately I did not waste the effort in June.

Greetings once again. Okay, so I missed my May deadline completely! Things just got really busy – you know how it is – and time slipped away. Today, however, is a rainy day and over the last few rainy days I’ve used up all my rainy day jobs, or at least the ones I feel like doing today! So here I am, ensconced in front of the computer, digging deep into my creative inner self to somehow try and express the wonders and joys of a farming life to you good people. Here goes…

As an organic farm we grow a very diverse range of crops and manage them in a way that each crop or animal enhances the attributes of the other crops. We use the chicken manure to fertilize the raspberries, we feed the waste portion of a crop to the pigs, the chickens keep the insect population under control etc. I have always resented being called Fred Reid the chicken farmer when I am Fred Reid the organic farmer who happened to be involved in the politics of chicken farming over the last while. I have decided to divide my report this month into the sections of farming that I am engaged in. Each section brings with it its own unique problems of growing and of politics.