ASK Salt Spring: Answered - Ep. 35 Jon Cooksey

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

Ask Salt Spring Answered talks to Jon Cookey, a board member of the Farmland Trust about food security on Salt Spring Island

You're listening to episode 35 of Ask Salt Spring Answered, in which we speak with John Cooksey, who is with the Farmland Trust, about food security on Salt Spring Island. Okay, so I'm sitting here with John Cooksey, who is a member at large of the Farmland Trust, but with a specialty in food security. And we've just been in the Ask Salt Spring session where the topic was really all about food security. And John, you were telling us about the food summit you had on November the 26th and some of the fallout from that and basically you were saying

there's so much to do and perhaps tell us a little bit about what you actually are doing? Well, I started working on food security about a year ago, seeing that Salt Spring has a number of interrelated problems, food security being one of them that we, you know, 4% of the food that we eat on the island is grown on the island, certainly not more than 10%. But obviously, we have a housing problem, we have water issues, all these things are interconnected, and wanted to take a systemic approach to that. So that led to the food summit in November, to which we invited people from all sectors. We had a bunch of farmers and food producers, but we also had people from the water districts, we had our representatives.

We had indigenous participation from Ceaut and Cowichan. Everybody was invited, but those were the two that were able to make it. We had some regional folks and housing folks and sat everybody down together and started to talk about how all these things relate to one another. Because if you sit down and have coffee with any farmer, any agrologist, anybody on the island who's involved in food, first of all, they'll tell you that everything's been tried and nothing is going to work and it's all impossible. But secondarily, this is connected to that. In particular, no food security without housing security. But water is going to be an issue. The climate is going to be an issue. So we've all got to start working together. And what has really come out of the summit, I think,

as much as any individual project, although some have, and there have been a lot of ripples, is the relationships. And I really feel the convergence in people who are in activism, who are part of NGOs, of really wanting to work together, to not overlap, that this is all kind of one problem, the well-being of our community is one problem and the desire to work together, the desire to work with indigenous people, we hear it everywhere in all the conversations that we have. All right. Now, we talked a bit about the 50 Farms project, and that sounded really interesting to me. So as I understand it, the idea is that you find all the pods on Salt Spring Island, the emergency pods, I guess. Yeah. And you've worked out where the farms are in relation to those pods.

Yeah. And you're going to put them together as a food source. Yeah, the idea was, you know, could we have, could we make sure that everybody on Salt Spring has a walkable farm near them with a farmer that they actually know and have a relationship with? And, you know, through an emergency preparedness lens to a degree, we're a little island, we're at the end of a long food chain, supply chain.

And, you know, what would it take to build that? So that, you know, in the event that things go awry in whatever way they might, everybody eats and everybody knows where to go for the farms. Now, the pod system, we're really lucky to have one already set up. And the pod system also speaks to density. Half the people in Salt Spring live in or near Ganges. So for it to be walkable or accessible, then the farms have to be centralized in certain areas. So we actually made a map and we started to lay out the farms that we have and the farms have to be centralized in certain areas. So we actually made a map and we started to lay out the farms that we have and the farms that we need and see

what it would take to set that system up. And then as it happens, we were sort of in the zeitgeist and a government grant came along that links food security and emergency preparedness, and we applied for it, and we got a grant for $150,000 from the IAF, which gives us a person to start working on this system. And it's not infrastructure yet, that would be phase two, but phase one is to start linking up the farmers and seeing about how this would all fit together. Okay, and then Jason, he spoke about basically linking farms to restaurants, right? Yeah. That sounds like a very interesting idea. Yeah, we had several groups that came out of the summit that sort of more or less spontaneously arose and people signed up for.

One was the business people all sort of coalesced around each other and said, well, you know, capitalism is where we've, capitalism is where we live. So we got to make this work. Uh, Jason, uh, is a farmer, uh, and also a co-owner of the Hen and Hound Brasserie with his wife, Rochelle, and is a strong proponent of local food. They buy all the, they, his wife, Rochelle comes to his garden and takes all their food. So he has none for his kids and takes it to the restaurant and cooks it. They buy from Sweral at Duck Creek Farm. They gather as much food together as they can locally. And he went out with his connections

to all the restaurants on the island and the local grocery stores and has with Caitlin Powell, who's running Local Salt, if you haven't been to the root hub and gone to the refillery, it is an amazing experience of local food and refills and things. The two of them together set up a pipeline, sort of a pilot project, with a farmer named Bayon in the south end who has a hydroponic greenhouse that's growing, I think, more than 700 heads of lettuce a week, year-round now, and set up a pipeline from him to the local restaurants and grocery stores, and all that food is now being consumed on Salt Spring. So it's a way to use restaurant dollars, grocery store dollars, tourism dollars, to boost our food production on Salt Spring and create a more stable situation for farmers. Yeah. And I think you said he's in, you know, they got into Country Grocer and Auntie Pesto's

and his own brasserie and quite a few other places on the island too, right? Yep. So it seems like there's definitely a, you know, people see the need for it and they are actually responding to it, right? Yeah. The restaurant owners are always in a bind. Cost is always an issue. But as things get shakier in the outside world, sometimes local food isn't so expensive by

comparison to the stuff that's coming in. It was more about reliability, dependability, knowing that they can get the food that they need for their menu at this date on time. And the aggregation aspect of it all is what's going to make that work. So he's had great success, and there's a lot of business owners on the island who care deeply about local food and want to participate in supporting it. This whole idea of linking food security and emergency preparedness is an interesting one, isn't it? It opens up a whole different conversation, doesn't it?

Yeah. Well, with 50 Farms, it was an idea by Dario Zovia at Quarry Farm originally, and it was very much about distributed, decentralized food production, which can include neighborhoods also growing their own food. It doesn't have to be just big farmers or medium-sized farmers. And mentorship and a lot of great goals for young farmers and getting new farmers started and all that. But we thought, well, you know what, we're here on an island, part of a group of islands, but it's a long, fragile supply chain out there. The climate

is changing fast. Crops are failing in other parts of the world that we used to be able to depend on. So we've seen what happened to the Fraser Valley when it flooded. We know we're waiting for the 5,000-year earthquake at the moment. So we face a number of threats of disruption for a period of time. And in the olden days, maybe it would be a few days. Maybe it would be a week. But on an island, we thought, well, you know what? We need to be protected for a growing season, for a full year. And so we linked it up.

And originally, we went to Bowen Ma at the Department of Emergency Preparedness with a proposal and said, you know, we think this is emergency preparedness. It isn't just a couple of bottles of water and some backup power anymore. We have 11,600 people here who would need to eat maybe over an extended period of time. And we would like to be ready to meet that need, you know, internally or regionally. You know, we do want to work regionally no no no island is an island i guess john dunn might say um but to be certainly more self-sufficient and resilient than we are but there isn't enough product to satisfy the demand though at the moment right uh well the demand that jason created he he said in the meeting uh there's two million dollars

worth of demand and not nearly enough supply on the island to meet that demand from local farmers. So it takes coordination. The coordination costs money. The coordinator has to live somewhere. Like on Salt Spring, it's always the same sort of string of questions of how to find the right person and pay them and house them. But they've established that the pipeline can work, and now it's our job to build on that and grow that. And I think there's an enormous opportunity there

for those of us who can afford eating out and all the amenities, if the restaurant owners and the grocery store owners make it clear clear what has local food in us in it for us to go to that and help fund uh farmers in stabilizing and even growing their food production and that is all good for us in the future yeah now you said that it wasn't roosters that were waking you up for it was it was the fear of not having enough to eat i looked back i looked back at the rooster wars thing and and uh and and and and uh you know poor poor gary comes to this meeting gary holman who is a is a dear friend actually and i get frustrated because i hear from farmers

that are stuck between the regulations of this agency and that agency but um, you know, the quote in one of those articles was that the people who are complaining are getting woken up at 4 a.m. in the summertime by roosters and who are there to protect the hens from whatever. Like there's that whole story. But, you know, I thought, yeah, I wake up at 4 a.m. too. Not just in the summertime all year long. I wake up and worry if something happens,

are we going to be able to feed everybody on this Island? Uh, and there's a lot of us, uh, we have a lot of great people. We haven't all necessarily been rowing together, um, because there are so many fires to put out, hopefully metaphorically not literal ones um but i think we can gather together and start to do that and that's really so my mission is is just a very large one is just to make sure that if things go wrong we have food to eat yeah how hopeful are you that this will actually come to be uh in the future i i i you know events are going to evolve and there's no way for us to know what those events will be or when they'll come or whatever. And there are many opinions on that.

But what I have found so hopeful is meeting with people, is getting to know people and creating friendships. You know, for me, I look at the prospect of what might happen in the future as sort of the largest fender bender in history. And if you're driving through town and somebody hits you and you have a fender bender, it makes a lot of difference whether that person is your friend or not. If they're your friend, it's like, oh, damn, that was stupid. Like, well, yeah, let's go get a cup of coffee, right?

So my whole drive is to make sure that as many of us are friends as possible. And I see that happening. In fact, I think people are hungry for it. I think COVID and real estate prices and other things demographically that have happened on the island have broken a lot of relationships and isolated people. And I think people are lonely and they want to be part of meaningful stuff that leads to having dinner and wine with your friends and a great time

and talking about how to get stuff done. Like, that's a rich life, and it doesn't require a whole lot of money necessarily. So what can individual salt springers do then to help our situation, apart from becoming friends with each other? Start there. Have a dinner with your neighborhood.

I think the Farmland Trust is, you know, we're only a bunch of volunteers as well. And, you know, we're looking for new members. We're looking for people that want to take on various areas, maybe the things that they particularly love that they want to work on. But I think to get engaged with local food, understanding, yes, it is expensive. Not everybody can afford it. That isn't in fact a problem. It is expensive relative to subsidized food that comes from somewhere else that's made under other conditions, but is a much smaller part of our overall income pie than it used to be. Other things, inflation, obviously are pressuring all of us. So get engaged in that way as much as you can. But some people have time. Some people have

expertise. Some people have land. We have a huge succession problem on the island. Farmers are aging out. The price of real estate is much too high for young farmers to come in and buy land in most cases. So we are all going to have to say, well, you know, I have this capacity. I have this piece of land and I could make a deal with a young farmer to come in and farm that land. And or I could volunteer or I could get my community together growing some food locally that we can all share. All those things are possible. Get involved with food, get involved with the people around you. If you're not sure what to do, come talk to us. I have conversations with people all the time about how we can get engaged. And we hope to do public events as well that everybody can join into. We would love to do

a series of potlucks, for instance, to benefit different sectors of the community, community services, or the Scale Learning Society, or whatever it may be. Let's have island-wide potlucks. Let's wait for the warm weather. Let's 1,000 of us get together and each bring enough for six people and meet people that you wouldn't meet, not just Southenders or Northenders. Let's all get together, right? Because we all want to support the community. And, you know, that's, that's how it's going to be when, you know, when and if things go awry, it's, it's going to be us taking care of each other. And that's the way it was 200 years ago. And that's the way it's going to be again. And how do they get in touch with you? Just by googling Farmland Trust? Yeah, you can contact us through the Farmland Trust.

Yeah, that's the best way. And there are so many great organizations and we're not the only ones working on food security. Community Services is working on food security and needs support. Transition Salt Spring is doing great work on the food security. You know, there are many, many organizations, IWAVE, you know, they're all involved in one way or another that is connected. So, you know, volunteering is part of what being on Salt Spring is about, I think. You know, we can't just rely on volunteerism. We, you know, we obviously have to fund younger people to, you know, so they can eat and have a place to live and so on. But, um, you know, it isn't, it is a sense of responsibility, but in my experience, it's also been what makes my life most meaningful.

So, you know, do it so you won't be lonely anymore. Do it so you feel good about your life. Like that's the reason to go and do it into it and get engaged in the thing that you most love. Don't pick some dreary thing that sounds like work. Do the thing that is your hobby, you know, or the thing that you're most passionate about. Pick that and make that into something connected to food. Okay. Thanks for coming in, John. You've been listening to Ask Salt Spring Answered on Islands Radio. CHIR, the voice of the Gulf Islands.