Sarah Smith and Jett Beliveau struggled with selling their vegetables online this spring and summer.
Sweet Soil Organic Farm is usually present at the Sackville and Dieppe farmers’ markets, both of which shut down for extended periods of time when COVID-19 came to Canada.
SS: The CSA program is sort of an online program because people register online and we process payments that way, but we didn’t really want to start an online ordering platform. And we weren’t going to be part of the Dieppe virtual market, because it would have been too logistically complicated for our whole cooperative to be part of that.
They initially had produce available for sale on other farms’ online stores and Fridgee, but those methods could not replace the local farmers markets.
Beliveau expresses gratitude to have neighbouring farms, who they have a cooperative relationship with.
JB: It’s a very tight knit community around here, and we kind of have to be as Maritimers because elements of Mother Nature are throwing curveballs as well. This has been the driest season I’ve ever seen, one of the highest droughts, and so many people have crop failures. So without this tight knit community, we wouldn’t have been able to trade off certain crops. We didn’t do so well with this one year and then another farm kind of picked that up, and I like that everyone works together to keep us all going.
Beliveau says that when international and provincial borders began to shut down, he was uncertain about the future of food in New Brunswick.
JB: We didn’t really know where food would be within a few months of time. Just thinking about those types of things has changed for us. Thinking “oh, well, food can be shipped from Mexico, California, anywhere else from another border that was closed. How are we going to get local food to people?” So I think we grew as much as we could with that in mind.
Smith echoes this concern for food security, and says that these issues preexist the arrival of COVID-19.
SS: If all the borders were actually closed tomorrow, and we couldn’t get any food delivered from other provinces or other countries. There’s no way that we’d be able to support ourselves, because farmers here don’t grow enough to support maybe a percent of the population or something like that. We would all love to grow more, and we would all love to be able to distribute our food to people who actually need it. But the way that the system is right now, it’s really only those that can afford to spend a large percent of their income on food. Those are the people who are buying from small scale local producers.
Smith says that provincial policies surrounding local farms and food need to be changed in order for food security to be improved in New Brunswick.
SS: There were a lot of call outs at the beginning of the spring in March on Facebook and social media. It was like “Farmers, we really need you, we need you to plant more, we need more local food,” and then they shut the farmers markets down. So we didn’t have any way to sell our food. But the grocery stores were not shut down. So I think the provincial government level of policy…the support is just kind of like a trendy support. It’s not a real deep support that shows up in food policy and procurement policy. Otherwise, the farmers markets wouldn’t have been closed. I recognize that maybe the farmers markets, because they’re smaller, wouldn’t have been safe necessarily, because of the concerns of social distancing and the virus and everything like that. But I mean, people were still allowed to go to the grocery stores, there were just extra rules in place to keep them safe.
The future of local farmers’ markets is a great concern for the farm, and they are anxious to see how markets will adapt once it is too cold to gather outside.
Sweet Soil Organic Farm will spend the winter distributing their produce via their CSA program and making improvements to buildings on their property.
By M. Cunningham
