Agriculture committee  Sure. Thank you. As I mentioned before, I don't come from a farming background. I grew up in the city, but I was travelling the world and working in Thailand on a number of permaculture projects. Actually, Mr. Toensmeier's book, Edible Forest Gardens, was a big inspiration in my

Agriculture committee  Sure. For us I think it's consumer awareness. I just want to sell more to more local people. The more we can change consumer demand and change consumer perspectives, I think that goes a long way to the viability of small-scale farms like ours.

Agriculture committee  For us, it's our immediate community. In Durham region—if you're familiar, you know—there's Oshawa, Ajax and Pickering. For us, that's local. Depending on where we are in our municipality, we try to serve our community within our region. There are a few million people. Our small

Agriculture committee  Yes, I would say you are. Congratulations on that effort.

Agriculture committee  Thank you. It's a great question. Typically, there are not a lot of incentives in terms of funding or access to funds, especially for small-scale growers. A lot of the programs developed by government or to access capital are typically for larger-scale farms. For the small-scal

Agriculture committee  Thank you. Any kinds of incentives we can offer to farmers.... As Mr. Toensmeier said, every farm is different; every context is different. If there is a general set of practices that can be outlined in a framework from within which to operate, then, I think, farmers like me can

Agriculture committee  Sure. As I said before, we're certified by our customers. We're very transparent in how we grow. We grow organically. I don't feel there needs to be a certifying body or regulating body that tells us farmers how we can grow our best products. I think we're certified by our custo

Agriculture committee  Yes, absolutely. To throw some numbers out there, on a one-acre market garden, we should be able to produce enough food for 50 to 100 people. Economically we can generate over $100,000 of annual vegetable crops with 40% to 60% margins, depending on the skill of the grower, costs

Agriculture committee  Yes, very much so. We built a passive solar greenhouse using a standard, off-the-shelf, hard wall style greenhouse. We started growing in the dead of winter, and we were able to successfully maintain temperatures above 0°C by storing all the heat into the soil using heat pumps an

Agriculture committee  We're very much concentrated just outside of an urban centre. If you're familiar with the Durham region—Oshawa, Whitby, Ajax, Pickering.... We have a 10-acre farm with almost an acre of market garden and we're able to feed 150 to 200 families a week. We sell our products at loc

Agriculture committee  It wouldn't entirely. Currently, we're growing vegetables. We specialize in salad greens and market garden vegetables. We have eggs as well. We currently don't grow any livestock, so there's no meat, dairy or anything like that coming off our farm. We supply vegetables, farm-fr

Agriculture committee  We don't right now because we haven't put any greenhouses up, but it is in our plan to extend the growing season by having low-cost greenhouse systems that don't require a lot of heat through the winter. We're just working towards that right now.

Agriculture committee  We've taken what was essentially an acre of grass or lawn that had to be mowed or cut and we've built a bio-intensive market garden on it. We don't till up the soil. We add high-quality compost. We grow cover crops in between annual crops. These cover crops help build up the soil

Agriculture committee  Good day, and thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name's Ryan Cullen. I manage a small-scale—in our case, 10 acres—diversified farm. We predominately grow market garden vegetables intensively, but are integrating small-scale livestock systems and small fruit and nut