As the sun begins to return for the New Year, I sort through our seed collected from the last growing season and I often think of food security.
My reasons for becoming a certified organic farmer are many, but if I were to choose two reasons as the most important ones, they would be food security and environmental protection.
While living in Alaska and now in Prince George, the apparent lack of food security is obvious in more ways than just the current sticker shock we are all seeing at the grocery stores these days driven by our lack of local producers and weak loonie.
We have all heard the news of rising food prices and the sinking dollar, yet many are still consuming the strawberries of California in January at great expense to the environment and the wallet.
Season extension is often a topic in the world of agriculture in the north. Many speak of heating greenhouses, poly tunnels etc. in efforts to lengthen the season of food production and security in the north. There are even those entrepreneurial enough to grow tropical fish and veggies in heated greenhouses in the cold dark months of winter to extend the season and capitalize on the lack of local production.
The old adage of "those who do not know history are doomed to repeat" in the instance of modern agriculture should be disregarded.
The root cellar has been in use since the early days of agriculture as a means to preserve vegetables, nuts and seeds for the year, and this was before the advent of a fossil fuel driven food system. Root cellars do not require the use of electricity for preservation such as the refrigerator, and instead rely on the temperatures of the soil beneath the frost line. Free energy!
The simple root cellar allows one to extend their season by means of cool storage like that of the fruit packing houses of the Okanagan that keep B.C. in apples for long into the winter. Unlike the packing houses, the root cellar requires no energy. Yes, it's true you are not going to store fresh strawberries in the root cellar all winter, but the staple foods will store just fine, as will canned and dried foods, and besides we should be sticking to our northern roots (pun intended) for our winter cuisine, and consume all the great dishes of the years of past that don't rely on imports from the southern hemisphere.
After taking a visit to the largest producer of carrots in the region (who is now retired) and seeing their cold storage virtually empty, the reality of the lack of a local supply really took hold of my wife and I and a sense of urgency was present. We now are in the process of designing and searching for funding to build our own root storage on our farm to aid in our efforts to increase production on the farm.
For the avid foodies and backyard gardeners you can increase your root storage via burying 55 gallon drums in the soil with an insulated top. This is a simple, effective, cheap, reliable and a great way to mitigate any blips in the supply chain of the grocery stores, which only have three days of food and one if there is a panic. Plus we all know homegrown veggies are the best you can get, so the less you have to buy at the store, the better.
Now get to digging the roots that are local and northern and enjoy the meals of yesteryear, which don't include complex chemicals that are not easy to pronounce.
