Canada: A new SPIN on urban farming
Satzewich fully believes there is huge untapped potential for urban ag in smaller rural towns and villages.
By Angela Lovell
Country Guide
Oct 8, 2021
Excerpt:
“Small towns certainly can be considered urban, and have huge potential for this style of agriculture, or market gardening, and that’s a great new frontier in my mind,” he says. “A lot of them have been depopulated over the last generation, but they still have infrastructure, they have properties, and they have huge, vacant land bases where you can buy lots for next to nothing. So, where we’re at right now is exploring and taking forward that option with four properties that we bought in the village here. We don’t rent from anyone right now, but that’s always still an option if we wanted to expand our land base. I’ve been through a lot of scenarios: out in the country with a conventional setup, then in a large city with that form of urban farming, but the dream setup for me is this one in a small town or village.”
Satzewich hopes more people will adopt small plot intensive farming, which is sort of like market gardening reinvented, because he sees it as being a great opportunity to revitalize some smaller urban and northern communities and help them become more self-sufficient in food production. He and Christensen recently gave an online, two-week learning workshop to a Metis settlement in Alberta called Fishing Lake, sponsored by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
“They have the land base, and we are trying to give them some resources and knowledge about how to use it,” Satzewich says. “We’re hoping to ignite that sort of movement.”
