Farmers growing vegetables and community
Consuming Passions is a multipart series of Eating Niagara about passion projects of the people in Niagara’s food and beverage industries. This is part four in the series.
Ryan Thiessen will never forget the pineapple he saw during a tour of a local food bank nine years ago.
It was “janky-looking” and going mouldy, the St. Catharines farmer recalled. And yet it was one of the few fresh food options for someone hungry and desperate enough to eat it.
For Thiessen’s wife, Amanda, the image of the lettuce she saw on that same tour is forever etched in her mind’s eye.
“It was stuff you’d throw in compost,” she said.
“It was like thirds,” Ryan interjected, putting them one rung below imperfect — but still edible — seconds in the ranking of produce based on appearance and freshness.
“It was worse than our thirds,” Amanda countered.
But it was the best inspiration. The Thiessens were embarking on their career as farmers at the time. They spent years as church youth leaders growing vegetables with their youth groups to donate to Community Care of St. Catharines and Thorold.
Seeing that pineapple and that lettuce compelled them to continue those efforts, this time on their own plot of land, and as part of their business plan as Creek Shore Farms. They were further convinced by the point system the food bank uses when allotting food and toiletries to clients each month.
Choosing processed, canned or
dried goods used up points. Ditto for selecting necessities like toothpaste and toilet paper. Selecting fresh fruits and vegetables didn’t eat up any of the precious, limited credit.
“You can choose to feed your family or you can choose to wipe your bum,” Ryan said. “(Fresh vegetables) didn’t compete with people’s needs and that was big for us.”
With that, the couple made it their mission to share 10 to 15 per cent of their harvests each year with Community Care. Good food, they said, is a right not a privilege.
They’ve never been perfect at it, they admitted. There have been years they were flooded with potatoes. Others, it’s been a challenge getting any volume at
all, especially early in their careers.
The Thiessens were just learning to farm and struggled at times to maintain their CSA (community supported agriculture) program with weekly deliveries of vegetables to paying customers.
Still, they donated what they could even when their landlord at the time, also a farmer, criticized the young couple for inking a plan to share their profits with the food bank.
“I specifically remember him saying, ‘What would the bank say if they knew you were giving away your vegetables?’” Ryan remembered.
Turns out, the bank would reward the Thiessens.
In 2011, Creek Shore Farms
won the Scotiabank and Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) Small Business Big Impact Challenge. Creek Shore was chosen from more than 1,200 businesses because of the Thiessens’ commitment to sustainable, organic agriculture and making their community a better place to live.
The award was plum recognition for a couple who also quietly waive their CSA fees or come up with flexible payment plans for customers who need the financial assistance.
“We don’t have time to give but we have vegetables to give,” Amanda said.
They aren’t dumping substandard produce that they grow on four acres in west St. Catharines, either. They ask Community
Care what it needs and do their best to deliver.
“It’s not seconds,” Ryan said. “We donate that stuff, too, but we do the same quality we give our customers.”
This year they hope to be better meeting their targets. Their lettuce patch is already planted with 1,400 heads. The Thiessens figure there could be a minivan full of salad bound for Community Care in the weeks ahead, provided Mother Nature co-operates and they can keep the weeds in check.
To help, they sometimes recruit volunteers to yank competing shoots. They invite people to help with big harvests, too.
“We like having people come to see the farm,” Amanda said.
Since that first visit to the food bank, they’ve also refined Creek Shore Farms’ modus operandi, though it’s no more likely to get their former landlord’s approval. Community Supported Agriculture has been tweaked to be Agriculture Supporting Community.
“It’s a way to give back to the community, to support the community and to get involved with the community,” Ryan said. “That’s the way I looked at it. We were asking the community to support us, so we should support the community. From a business and a personal standpoint, that was our belief.”