Canada: City-bred farm workers
Is your next employee working today on an urban farm in Toronto?
By Angela Lovell
Country Guide
Dec 31, 2021
Excerpt:
“If you want affordable land, it’s pretty much a three- or four-hour drive out of Toronto, so there are a lot of barriers to start up,” Teitel-Payne says. “This is a way for people to both generate some income and do some learning as they prepare to do that move to a farm.”
Urban agriculture allows people to explore the multifunctionality of food growing in an urban setting, which offers unique opportunities that don’t always exist in a traditional, rural farm setting.
“When you’re growing food, you could do many other things as well,” says Teitel-Payne.
“There are lots of other things that you can do as well as farming,” she says, then adds “Some of them co-exist with farms better than others.”
Workers need to do the work that’s available to be done, so, for instance, young urban workers might create pollinator gardens, or get involved with opportunities for social interaction, education, tourism or health programs.
Teitel-Payne recognizes the irony. “In some ways there are a lot more opportunities to do that kind of thing here because the population is close at hand.
