TRADITION WITH A TWIST OF INSPIRATION
Devon Strang is hard at work on his family's sixth-generation farm.
The Strangs have been harvesting potatoes in Malden, N.B. — in the shadow of P.E.I., the widely-recognized potato capital of Canada – since 1855.
Their success is built on premium, quality potatoes. Top tubers have helped them grow the farm from five acres to more than 700.
But there came a time when the Strangs started looking for other ways to expand.
Acquiring more land was out of the question. There was also the question of what to do with all the smaller potatoes, the spuds that weren't marketable. Some brainstorming led the idea of potato vodka. After several years of study and fine-tuning the process, the Strangs opened Blue Roof Distillers.
“(It) keeps us busy in our down time,” said Strang. The distillery — named after the Strang farm's trademark blue roofs — opened in 2017.
It's allowed them to provide work for their staff outside of regular farming season and provide the business with a second revenue stream.
"It is getting harder and harder to make a dollar. We saw a void in our province and in Canada," said Strang.
Just over 1,400 highway kilometres east, in Arnold's Cove, N.L., Alberto Wareham no longer sees his community as rural.
This town (population 949) is just a 90-minute drive from St. John's.
It sits on the doorstep of an oil refinery at Come By Chance as well as the Bull Arm industrial fabrication site. There, huge floating production platforms took shape for the Hibernia and Hebron offshore oil fields.
And every day, people in Arnold's Cove can look seaward to see oil tankers sailing past — on the way to the oil fields to pick up crude or en route to nearby Whiffen Head to offload for shipment to North American ports.
It's a visual reminder of how this small town is connected to the larger world.
With that in mind, Wareham, president of the Icewater Seafoods, doesn't see his community as being dependent on the traditional way of doing things.
That's especially true when it comes to the way his company approaches the province's oldest export — codfish.
Ware ham and Ice water have built a technological ly sound processing plant, delivering cod caught in Placentia Bay and around the province to high-end markets in Europe.
The company employs over 200 people from Arnold's Cove and the surrounding area with a highly-automated system.
It buys fresh cod from independent fishermen and produces what Wareham calls “the freshest of the frozen fish.”
Icewater doesn't bother with lobster, crab or shrimp, as other processors in the province have done. Instead, it has stayed true to cod.
It's ideas like that — or turning potatoes into vodka — that show rural Atlantic Canada can be a place of ingenuity and innovation, where a twist on traditional can provide hope for tomorrow.
“Everybody looks to cod as the future again,” said Wareham.