The decision to visit was somewhat spur-of-the-moment. A family friend, her two children, my wife and I piled into a Subaru station wagon one afternoon and took off toward Linden, Alberta, not knowing what exactly to expect. It’s about an hour drive from Calgary. We pass through Beiseker (past their statue of “Squirt” the skunk, the town mascot) and head north on highway 860 from Acme. Zig-zagging into a valley, we pull into a gravel road on the right. There are a few patches of trees, but the horizon is nothing but endless blue prairie skies. The directions tell us to take the second left, and pull into the driveway with several western-style buildings on the corner. The first turn would have taken us to the barn. We unload the kids from the Subaru, dab them with sunscreen and head inside.
From here, Oxyoke Farms will supply roughly forty individuals and families as part of a community supported agriculture project, providing weekly produce for the summer and fall.
Robby & Phyllis Fyn (and their daughter Barbara) care for several hundred acres just south of Linden, Alberta. The farm is remarkably mixed in landscape and use: a large garden, chicken coop, barn, hog pens, stalls for oxen, pens for herding dogs and a greenhouse packed full of ready to plant seedlings. One of the most interesting things about Oxyoke is that a good portion of the farm is rolling native prairie grassland, with the Kneehill Creek a stone’s throw from the balcony of their modest home. Robby tells us that they avoid grazing sheep and other livestock there in order to preserve the unique character and composition of the native grasses. Many native Albertans (myself included until Sunday) have no idea that much of our grassland is not indigenous, and native grasses are rare in some areas. In fact, the prairie ecosystem we know today is drastically different than when First Nations people were the exclusive human inhabitants. Grassland ecologist Don Gayton calls it the “most extensively altered biome on the planet.” Has anyone ever seen a prairie chicken before?
Oxyoke Farms and Community Supported Agriculture
Oxyoke farms is where we will be getting our food from this summer. I don’t remember where I first heard about community supported agriculture (CSA), but I do remember reading an article in the Herald last year about CSA in the Calgary area. The article mentioned a couple of projects that had been underway in the Edmonton area, as well as Thompson Small Farm, operated by Jonathan Wright and Andrea Thompson. Alas, I was too late and they were already full and as far as I knew nobody else was doing anything quite like it in the area.
I did, however, send some emails back and forth with Jon, chatting on other local issues. I’d hoped he could give a talk at my church on the state of sustainable agriculture in the Calgary area, but that never materialized. He did, however, end up sending along a series of contributions to the New Resilient, and said he’d keep his eyes out for other people interested in doing something like a CSA project. The next spring I received an email from Jon out of the blue telling me that a friend of his was having trouble finding people to buy into his community farm. What luck, I thought. I’ll finally be able to skip the middlemen and jump right to locally grown, healthy produce. At the time I had no idea that we’d actually have a hand in starting a community-supported agriculture project, nor would we be playing a much more active role as a church in getting the food from the farm to our tables.
To be continued…
