Former city couple shifted to different fields
Professionals trade city life to grow organic
Chris Bodnar and Paige Dampier weren’t really supposed to be farmers.
But on this morning, Bodnar is using his PhD in communications to chat up a video crew while harvesting certified organic beets for the Langley Community Farmers Market. Dampier — with a Master’s degree in planning — is loading the van with wooden crates of lettuce with the help of their three grade school-aged girls. It’s a funny old world. A decade ago, faced with the likelihood that working in his field professionally would mean regularly uprooting to chase work all over the world, Bodnar and Dampier reassessed their goals.
“In the old days when everyone picked up and followed the male breadwinner, that might have worked, but Paige is a trained community planner and she had a job in Vancouver,” Bodnar said. “We made a decision to live where we wanted to live and then it became a matter of what to do.”
They were active as volunteers with FarmFolk CityFolk and the Richmond sharing farm at Terra Nova and were alerted to an opportunity to take over an existing business on the Glen Valley Farm Co-operative from John Switzer, a retiring farmer who was willing to mentor them. Close to Home Organics is now a thriving business.
“Ten years later, we really haven’t looked back,” he said.
“Now I’m teaching a course in sustainable agriculture at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. So teaching, but in a totally different field.
“The plan has really come together; we just didn’t know what the plan was at the time.”
The girls are home-schooled through a local distance education program, which allows the family to work education around the rhythms of the farm. This morning the girls are loading cartons of salmon berries they have picked themselves, labour that will profit them alone.
“There are no input costs, so they keep that money,” said Bodnar.
Dampier imaged a more idyllic life in farming, something with red barns and pastures. There are a variety of old tractors and clucking hens scattered about the property, but things like rest, travel, visiting family and lazy mornings are strictly wintertime activities.
“I knew it would be hard work, but I didn’t understand how seasonal farming is and how what you do each day is so dependent on the weather,” she said. “It really connects you to more natural cycles.”
Being so busy planting, harvesting and selling their produce through the summer has put them on a cycle that is essentially opposite to that of friends they made in their former lives as city-dwelling academics and professionals.
But organic farming aligns perfectly with their ideals as entrepreneurs and parents.
Glen Valley Farm has been certified organic for 20 years and made the switch at a time when being organic was something of a higher calling, a way of farming that placed the health of the soil and the community first.
“The origins of the organic movement was really about farmers getting together to find some agreement about what they didn’t like about conventional agriculture and how to differentiate themselves,” said Bodnar. “So they came up with their own standards.”
While Bodnar and Dampier inherited a certifying body when they took over the farm — certification remains a condition of their lease — they still certify with the venerable B.C. Association for Regenerative Agriculture.
As a former academic, Bodnar likens the audit process that organic growers go through each year to a peer-review process, one that sets new goals for sustainability with every iteration.
“We continue to certify through this small regional non-profit society because it’s a contact point with other farmers and we also see that it remains true to the spirit of certification,” he said.
Can industrial-scale agriculture really be organic? Bodnar doesn’t think so.
“If you have a 2,000-acre farm in California producing vegetables, the exercise becomes finding organic replacements for a conventional input,” he said. “The spirit of organic as it was envisioned by farmers 20 or 30 years ago is lost in that process.”
The persistent and spectacular growth of the organic food market caught the attention of the commercial food industry a little over a decade ago and since then “organic” has been among the most popular label claims on new food products. Nearly 14 per cent of all new products claim to be organic, according to Mintel research.
Organic has grown up and become a big business, closing in on $4 billion in Canada alone.
But that’s not necessarily a good thing. National organic standards in Canada and the United States set a low bar for farmers, which critics say has diluted the standard and reduced the organic label to little more than a marketing gimmick.
“Now that organic is big business, there is an element of skepticism,” Bodnar said. “So now people want to know more. ‘It’s organic, but what else?’”
The certification logos that Close to Home Organics kiosks display at farmers’ markets are less a marketing ploy than they are a conversation starter.
“One of our markets is Lonsdale Quay, where you have people coming off the SeaBus to get where they are going to go,” he said.
“But if they see we are certified organic, for them that’s a baseline that they are willing to trust. Sometimes they have additional questions, but that label is what brings them in.”
At its heart, organic farming excludes chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, which are found in much lower amounts in organic produce than conventionally grown produce, which many of their customers value.
Newer devotees are interested in purity and buy organic for the perceived health benefits or, more often, the health of their children. But there is another distinct demographic: people who shop for the health of the entire community and the planet.
“Among the boomers and the millennials there are people who have that holistic value set,” he said. “They want to know, ‘If I buy your product, what are you doing to make the world a better place?’ That’s a high standard and you have to be able to demonstrate that you are meeting it.”
Meeting that standard remains good business for Close to Home, which boasts a near fanatical customer base.
Langley resident Leslie Summers filled two bags with organic greens within minutes of the market’s opening at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
“I buy it because it’s fresh, it tastes good and it supports local people,” she said. “I buy all my green stuff at Close to Home.”
Close to Home’s Community Supported Agriculture program provides a prepaid basket of organic vegetables weekly to its subscribers throughout the growing season. It fills up every year in January, well before they even have a chance to advertise it.
“We have people who are extremely dedicated, who show up early at the market every Saturday to get their vegetables from us first,” he said. “And if they can’t get what they need for their meal plan from us then they go (grocery) shopping.
“That’s a really intense and developed long-standing relationship that we have with our customers.”
Glen Valley Organic Farm is a co-operative of three separate farming businesses that own the land: Close to Home, Earth Apple Farm and Pitchfork Organic Farm, which has recently evolved into a seed-saving business. The 50-acre farm supports full-time work for 14 people through the summer.