Canada: How an urban farmer is changing the agriculture industry
Self-taught farmer Cheyenne Sundance runs a 1.5 acre farm in Toronto centered around food justice.
Farmer’s Footprint.
Sundance Harvest Farm
“Farming was the last thing I ever wanted to be when I grew up. I always wanted to be an actor or in creative arts.”
But instead of finding mentorship and a safe place to learn and grow, Cheyenne’s highschool experience was full of discrimination. She tried three different highschools, each one worse than the one before it. So she left, and this is where her journey to the farm would begin.
She laced up her dusty boots and at the ripe age of 18 she packed her bags and joined her friends on a trip to Cuba where they lived in a self-sustaining rural village. Here she would learn not through the aged pages of used books and jaded professors, but through the land. Her greatest teacher became the ecosystem. Food sovereignty, accessibility, and patterns of livestock intrigued her and her curiosity and her drive to learn more became insatiable.
After backpacking throughout Canada, she finally landed back in Toronto and got a job at a local grocery store. As a product of her own environment, she started to learn more about the local food system. “I began to notice the disparity between who received income from within that system. The store would only buy from established, white farmers with wealth who had been doing it for 60 years. They weren’t willing to support the small young farmer that just started out.”
Once Cheyenne began to see the injustice, she couldn’t unsee it.
