Cabbage Patch | Janelle Herbert out with her daughter Evelyn at Riverbend farm.
At Riverbend Gardens in Northeast Edmonton, Janelle Herbert walks down a slight hill towards the North Saskatchewan River with her nine-month-old baby Evelyn bouncing on her hip.
It’s a beautiful fall day — cool and sunny, with a slight wind rustling the changing leaves, and Evelyn clearly loves being outside. Herbert spends much of her time during the spring, summer, and fall out in the gardens, and Evelyn happily sits outside as her mother works.
Taking over the farm from her father Doug Visser wasn’t always the future Herbert had in mind. As a kid, she used to hide under the sofa when she heard her father’s ATV coming up to the house. If she got caught lazing around the house, her father would find her some sort of farm chore.
“I couldn’t wait for school to start so that I could sleep in,” she says, laughing.
After high school, Herbert moved to Edmonton, became an assistant occupational therapist, and married her husband Aaron.
But now the 26-year-old new mother has returned to the family farm, and is slowly taking over 330 acres of “some of the best farmland in Alberta.”
The farm sits in a unique microclimate with a longer growing season and fewer frost days than most areas in the Edmonton region.
Her inheritance comes with a lot of responsibility. Besides learning how to run the farm, she must also master the art of marketing and selling produce at six farmers markets, and even learn the ins and outs of dealing with City Hall.
Reaching Urbanites
As she drives around the various vegetable crops in a motorized chart, Evelyn smiling on her lap, Herbert’s not surprised by my ignorance about growing vegetables. The disconnect between urban consumers and farmers is one of the reasons she became involved with the Greater Edmonton Alliance’s (GEA) efforts to introduce farmers to city dwellers.
GEA is an umbrella social justice group that includes churches, unions, and housing groups. In its search for locally produced food that was low on transportation miles and high on the local economy, the group met several area farmers and were so transformed by the experience it organized the Shake The Hand That Feeds You event this Saturday so that more urbanites could meet local farmers.
Pre-ordered baskets of locally grown food will be sold at the Southminster-Steinhauer United Church, but more importantly, Edmontonians will get a chance to meet and speak with local farmers.
The goal of the event is action, not just “raising awareness,” says Monique Nutter, one of the GEA organizers.
“We are interested in actually building relationships so that we have access to local foods. . . We talk about smart growth in Edmonton, but we keep expanding out and out instead of up or in. That has consequences for our ability to feed the population — even just the people that are here now.”
Residential development, gas wells, and the new upgraders in the northeast, as well as global competition, are all putting pressure on farmers in the Edmonton area. Nutter thinks Edmontonians need to acquire a better understanding of food and the threat that unchecked development poses to the city’s food security. Ultimately, GEA hopes to preserve more farmland around Edmonton, especially in the northeast.
“The land that they are talking about putting upgraders and residential development on is some of the best in Alberta,” Nutter says. “In terms of local food production, it’s incredibly important land.”
She’s referring to the city’s plan for the northeast, which includes small-scale industrial development as well as homes.
And of course, there’s also “Upgrader Alley,” a 300-square-kilometre area in four different municipalities northeast of Edmonton. By 2022, the industrial area could include up to nine upgraders, the plants that transform bitumen from the oilsands into synthetic crude.
A plan to rezone about 10,000-12,000 acres of land north and west of Manning Drive will be debated at city council early this winter. Ed Gibbons, councillor for the area, says about 18 per cent of that land will be preserved. He thinks the GEA action is a little “premature,” as the areas with the best farmland won’t be rezoned for years, and there’s still plenty of time to speak with council about keeping farmland.
Meet The Horvaths
This Saturday’s event isn’t only about farmers in the northeast. Three miles west of Leduc, Sherry Horvath and her husband Ed run an organically certified farm. They will come into Edmonton with eggs for the GEA basket.
Ed Horvath’s father emigrated from Hungary in the 1920s, and eventually bought the farm Ed now owns. At the age of 10, Ed helped his father clear the land. He spent 16 years off the farm as a mechanic and gas fitter before buying the farm from his father.
In the 1980s, Sherry and Ed watched a farming community to the west get completely taken over by the EPCOR Genesee power plant.
The Horvaths themselves recently fought the AltaLink 500,000-volt transmission line, a battle that was widely reported on, and involved the Alberta Energy Utility Board hiring private investigators to spy on landowners.
The Horvaths have a gas well and a pipeline on their property, but have decided against any other industrial intrusions on their land.
In addition to these development pressures, local farmers also struggle to pay themselves and their workers a living wage.
For 22 years, the Horvaths worked jobs outside the farm in order to make ends meet. “It’s brutal,” Sherry says, “because you work your eight hours and then you come home and start the farm life, which during the harvest goes to two and three in the morning.”
As they entered retirement age, the couple decided to focus solely on their farm. Their daughter Shannon worked with them until recently, when they could no longer pay her full-time wages, and she found a job at the Edmonton International Airport.
Back at Riverbend farm with Janelle Herbert, we have driven up to the cabbage patch where her husband harvests the crop with workers from Mexico. Herbert explains that because she’s competing with food grown all over the world at much cheaper prices, Mexican workers have become a necessity. Although she would rather not take workers from their families for seven months of the year, she can only afford to pay $12 an hour, and that salary isn’t enough to attract anyone from the Edmonton area. It’s just one of the things people need to keep in mind when they’re buying their groceries, she says.
“To have the kind of businesses that I do,” she says, “the only reason I can do it is because it was handed down to me. No one could start a business and pay Alberta wages.”
abrunschot@see.greatwest.ca
