A BOUNTIFUL HARVEST
First Nation helps out food bank
Having too much food is usually never a problem — unless you’ve run out of places to keep it.
Storage is tight at the Flying Dust First Nation’s Market Garden. That lack of space, paired with the support of corporate buyers, has resulted in two tonnes of Saskatchewan-grown potatoes making their way to the Saskatoon Food Bank.
The garden’s main buyer is Thomas Fresh, which packages and distributes produce across Canada. The company tells Flying Dust how many acres worth of potatoes it will purchase at the beginning of the growing season, but only about 65 per cent of the harvest will be up to grocery store standards. That’s where the food bank comes in.
“What people want on store shelves is ‘pretty potatoes,’ ” said Len Sawatsky, manager of the Flying Dust Market Garden. “So what we give to the food bank are still certified organic, they still taste every bit as good, but they aren’t the pretty ones.”
The garden began in 2009 on two acres of land with the idea of creating food sovereignty for the local aboriginal community, and has expanded every year since. Sawatsky said 2017 will hopefully mark the biggest expansion yet.
“It’s not so little anymore,” he laughed. “We have 172 acres cultivated right now, but not all of them are being planted because we always do crop rotation.”
The garden is staffed mainly by people from the Flying Dust First Nation, but Sawatsky said the garden will hire anyone in need of employment to grow and harvest the potatoes and a variety of veggies, fruits and herbs.
The next step forward is quadrupling the farm’s storage space, he said. “Currently we can only handle 100 tonnes and there was way more out in the field than that this past year.”
More storage will allow the organization to move toward its main goal — leaving behind external funding to become self-sufficient.
It isn’t hard to find Flying Dust produce in Saskatoon. The Sobeys grocery store in Stonebridge and Dad’s Organic Market both regularly stock the garden’s organic produce, and Thrive Juice buys beets and carrots to use in freshpressed juices.
Produce is also sold straight from the market garden, and it has community share agriculture agreements with other First Nations in the province.
“If we can get people eating healthy, we can deal with the diseases that come from nutrition and diet-related causes,” Sawatsky said. “So the priority here is the health of aboriginal people, but at the same time, also providing employment and becoming selfsufficient as an operation.”