I am a young farmer who shares the ALM farm business with Mary Alice Johnson. 

I came to the farm over five years ago as an apprentice and only planned to stay on from August to April, but the farm turned out to be a place for a major life transformation where I began to realize my values and started to see the world with new light. 

April came much too quickly and I made the difficult decision to trade in my life of chasing money to a life where I do work I enjoy and feel is worth doing, my commute is walking down the porch steps. I grow fruit and vegetables and animals that I love and respect and I share them with a community that appreciates fresh, nutritious food. We have so many great customers. It’s those interactions with the folks that are so grateful and excited and appreciative and receptive to our food that feed my soul and remind me why I do this.  

Lately there has been a lot of attention paid to the local food movement, and there is certainly rising awareness about food security. 

I feel there is a real need for people to understand the lives of our local farmers, especially the challenges we face. There has been a lot of attention paid to local food these days, and communities are starting to ask about food security.  If we had to feed ourselves tomorrow could we do it? 

One problem I see is the difficulty of trying to make a living wage farming.  I get really frusterated when all the solutions for making farming viable focus on value-added, agri-tourism, teaching, etc.  To me there is a fundamental flaw with this. I think people need access to fresh, good quality produce and we need to support the people who grow it. As it is, we are trying to exist within a system that doesn’t make sense, doesn’t take care of the basic needs of our communities (water, food, environment), and so all the solutions again drive our focus from taking care of our needs to chasing our wants.  

I could make our carrots into carrot pickle sticks, but that takes a lot of energy and time, as well, I truly believe the customer is better off just eating the carrot as it comes from the ground, as this is when it has the most nutrients. 

The world, driven by profit, has caused us to mess up a lot of ecosystems and we really have to stop looking at everything as resources for human comsumption, and incorporate protecting our needs (air, water, food) and the well-being of our society. 

As well, it sure would be nice if we could learn to live with and learn from nature. The farm is a small model of the world, in my eyes. 

Lately, BC Assessment has reassessed ALM farm and we now have a split tax on the property.  Anything that is not farmed is taxed as residential.  For an organic farm, buffer trees that protect us from pollution from the road are a really important for the health of the farm, although they don’t produce anything tangible.  Wildlife areas for birds and bugs and frogs are also very important, but are now taxed as residential.Perhaps we should get the wildlife to start paying rent?  

Such a lack of understanding of an ecosystem is very disturbing to me, as well it makes farming at ALM that much more financially stressful.  

To get farm tax on the wild/buffer zones we would have to clear them and farm right up the road which in my heart I know is not right or a good idea.  I see the farm as a living being, and the humans, wildlife, worms, water are all integral parts of the system, though BC assessment sure doesn’t look at the farm in a holistic way.  But that’s the same way we humans seem to see the world, too.   

  I still have hope. I see people getting excited about gardening and good food and sharing information and building community, here and in other communities. I know we should all grow more food, we need more space for people to have gardens and we need to protect farm land. 

I don’t know exactly how to incorporate these ideas into our society, but I know we really have to stop being afraid to change, and stop clinging to this old, worn out system.  Let’s look after each other, and start with our basic needs. 

 Marika Nagasaka