Strengthening Wholesome Natural Food Security in Niagara and beyond

On November 5, the first sunny and beautiful Saturday of the month, I volunteered at the Niagara Farm Project with an environmental club from Brock University. As a local non-profit organization specifically located in Grimsby, Ontario, its overarching goal is to enhance food security throughout the Niagara area. This is being striven towards by implementing environmentally sustainable farming practices through the lens of micro farming, which utilizes smaller acres of land. According to the Executive Director, who is also a participating farmer, the organization emphasizes permaculture, or growing vegetables naturally, in their mission. From this farmer’s perspective, affordability and accessibility in food prices should be able to go hand in hand with nutritious healthy food for low-income earners.

In that sense, it is not ideally accomplished with synthetic fertilizers and other artificial materials, because they contribute to the use and growth of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) or foods in farming and gardening. Despite its inevitability for conventional mass farming practices to feed numerous people, this essentially contradicts the goal of maintaining a healthy and nourished lifestyle.

Interestingly, the multiple small garden beds we came across were shaped in spirals like a hypnotist’s spin wheel. This increases the flow of water through the planted areas along with food decomposition activity, to help ensure for high quality well-moisturized soil to grow new crops. Our primary duties were to harvest the newly grown vegetables and fruits for the project’s programs in the upcoming spring season.

There was strong biodiversity among these unique gardens, with crops such as purple kale, red and green tomatoes, eggplants, green bell peppers, rosemary, cilantro, and onions. Also a feature of these gardens was that one contained a group of these vegetables together, as a ground for polyculture, whereas another was devoted to monoculture, which is planting one crop. With a partner, I sorted the good and spoiled bell peppers and physically cleared out weeds scattered in the dirt, removing any excess dirt from the roots of detached weeds by shaking it like a shelf duster for future planting. This was similarly done with both the tomatoes and eggplants. All of the pulled weeds and straw gathered from the director’s farm would be composted together to make a natural fertilizer for gardening next time around. The juicy fresh taste of a few of the actual tomatoes that I experienced was a positive testament to these natural farming methods.

While it may be open to interpretation, this endeavour was a seemingly unique service-learning experience, as my club and I became more informed about principles of organic farming in performing the activity. Moreover, these are principles that guides the Niagara Farm Project in ensuring food security is nutritiously beneficial to the community. Regardless, it is crucial to understand that our contribution was the easier aspect of this process. The more challenging, but not impossible one occurs with the months for cultivating the crops. By continuing these types of practices throughout Grimsby and on a wider scale, however, a more wholesome sense of food security can indeed be achievable.