Closing the Loop

Glen Valley Organic Farm Co-operative is a spectacular 50-acre farm in the low lands beside the Fraser River. Off in the distance there is the sound of boats working the river and small-aircraft pilots practicing their maneuvers well out of the flight path of the major airports. The rumble and rattle of trains is constant and often not-so-distant, the tracks running along the northern edge of the property. John Switzer farms about 40 acres of the co-operatively held land, working thick top soil laid down by the workings of the river over the thousands of years since the last ice age.

Geographically, Glen Valley is a long way from Carbury, Manitoba where John grew up. But Carbury is farming country, much like most of the Fraser Valley. “My dad owned the little red and white grocery store there. His dad farmed and my grandmother taught school,” he recalls.

Like a lot of prairie kids, John left the farm to see the world. He traveled around the country in the late 60s and spent the most of the 70s working in a shipyard. He recalls that shipbuilding prepared him well for farming. “It gave me a bigger chunk of my farming background than one would think,” he says. “On a farm you’ve got electrical, plumbing, carpentry—you name it. In a shipyard you’ve got the same material. I got familiar with building materials as well as insight into some of the practices like welding.”

While working at the shipyard he started converting his lawn into garden. His notion was to grow more of his own food, to be more self-reliant. As he converted more and more of his yard into vegetable garden, John started to look at the long-term viability of growing his own food. “The self-reliant thing was very strong in getting me into gardening,” he says.

However, gardening in the conventional way turned out to be somewhat disappointing. He remembers, “One of the first things I did was buy a great big bag of nitrogen fertilizer. I’d heard that was a very important part of growing, and I used it for the first year. Then I saw the amount of inputs I had to buy. That didn’t fit my plan.” Dissatisfied with the notion of relying on chemical companies, he started to pursue organic farming methods. He developed a huge worm composting system in his backyard that could handle large amounts of compostable materials. He also started to practice seed saving and a variety of other methods to help “close the loop”.

Just around the time he was thinking of putting his entire front yard into potatoes, his life went through several changes. The shipyard was going downhill but his house was paid off so he didn’t need a lot of money. He started volunteering at the Western Canada Wilderness Committee and with an integrated pest management firm. In 1995, he started working as a farmhand at Edenvale in a CSA (community shared agriculture) operation. The next season he worked for the Glorious Garnish and Seasonal Salads Company at Fraser Common Farm Co-operative. Around that time the Glen Valley property was purchased by a group of shareholders who formed the co-operative farm. He started volunteering two days a week for the Co-op. “The farm sort of came to me in that way, the two days a week volunteering turned into seven days, fourteen hours a day and that was six years ago,” he recalls. John admits that in his first farming experience he was a little naïve; fifty acres was an enormous challenge. “I was so green as a farmer that I had little apprehension. ‘Oh yeah, we’ll just put the seeds in the ground,’ I thought.”

Mostly what he puts in the ground these days is market vegetables. The bulk of his produce he sells directly to the public at farmers’ markets. Any surplus goes to organic produce brokers. John tends a small apple orchard with 29 different varieties of heritage apples— mostly a project at this point. In an age where many people wouldn’t even consider farming a real career choice, John derives great satisfaction from both the process and the results. He remembers, “Brenda and Allison (the market sellers) came back from the market and said, “Everybody talks about your rhubarb. ‘How do you do this? This is the most beautiful rhubarb we’ve ever seen!’” John adds, “[I] get a sense that what I’m producing is being appreciated. The times I go to farmers’ markets I hear a lot of people saying, ‘Thanks for being a farmer.’”

A big part of life at the farm is the educational aspect. First, there are shareholders that are interested in farming but have little experience and then there are tours and open houses. “I really enjoy, passing on what I’ve learned. It feels really good when I can give somebody some insight.”

From the beginning, a big part of John’s plan was to be more self-reliant. So it is ironic that he finds himself in such a broad circle of people. “Along the way, I discovered a community of people who were doing similar things, and a lot of them, like me, were idealists.” For John it was a big surprise that after working towards self-reliance, he found such satisfaction in working with a community of people. He acknowledges that it was necessary to make changes both in himself and with his plans in order to make this work. “I never would have thought I’d be able to learn to do that. It’s not part of the self-reliance model—that closed circle—the way I first envisioned it. The circle got enlarged and a bit cumbersome.”

John sees his role as a “passiveactivist”— living the changes that need to be made in the world rather than talking about them. “It’s the doing it that is my statement,” he asserts. With the current interest in organic standards and practices, John is part of a small network that is inventing the methods appropriate for this part of the world.

The irony in his life is not lost on John. He had to leave his hometown in a farming community, go see the world, and work toward being self-reliant before he could become part of a farming community. On a warm afternoon in the shade of an old fruit tree, looking out over the pastures, the cattle grazing, the vegetable fields in newly ploughed rows, he muses, “Yeah, it frequently dawns on me that I’m kind of back where I came from.”

Michael Marrapese,
Summer, 2003