Hello People! This is a page about me!

I am not very good at talking about myself so you will have to bear with me as I try and create a biography about me.

I was born in Toronto and lived there for 20 years. After high school, I had to decide which university to attend and I chose UBC because I liked the pictures. I know it’s not a great reason for choosing a school but I heard good things about it and thought that I couldn’t really go wrong with a school with such a great reputation. While at university I studied plant biology: the study of how plants grow, not how to grow plants. I realized this limitation when I left school and wanted to start a career growing plants. After graduating, I ended up working on a farm for the summer and it was here I decided that I wanted to grow food. So I began my second school in a greenhouse where I grew herbs and vegetables mainly for sale to high end restaurants in Vancouver.

In the greenhouse, I did not get a feeling of fulfillment in terms of growing real food. While I was producing food with no pesticides, it somehow didn’t feel right to grow food under artificial light and feed them artificial food. I also felt “out of the loop” as I never met the people at the end who were eating the food. I remembered reading a book called “The One-Straw Revolution” by Masanobu Fukuoka many years before. This book helped me understand that there was another way to grow food that looked at the systems found in nature as a tool to help us grow food. I observed that a lot of the agriculture around me saw these same systems as a hindrance and something to either fight or control. So I decided that I wanted to grow real food, naturally and sell it directly to the people who were going to eat it.

This is where Glen Valley Organic Farm comes in.

There is this wonderful place called Glen Valley Organic Farm which is owned co-operatively by a group of people interested in preserving organic farmland. I was forwarded a description of an opportunity to farm at Glen Valley, but this was no ordinary opportunity. This was an opportunity to not only farm, but to take over an existing, established organic farm business. It was also an opportunity to learn from an experienced farmer and have him as a mentor and advisor while learning to farm. It was also an opportunity to have secure access to high quality farmland at an affordable price. In other words, it felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity that I had dreamed of. Thinking that it would have been a huge mistake to not take advantage of this opportunity, I came to Glen Valley. It was here that I have lived, worked, learned and grown for the past 5 years.

Now here is where Pitchfork Farm comes in.

While I was content working at Glen Valley Organic Farm, I found it a little to big for me.  As with most businesses, the bigger you get, the more help you need. The more help you hire, the more managing you need to do. After a while, I felt like I was spending too much time managing expenses and labour and not enough time in the field growing food. So I decided to start another business called Pitchfork Organic Farm. This new business is still located at Glen Valley Organic Farm but the scale is much smaller. This will allow me to fulfill more of my desires to experiment with alternative growing methods, seed saving, heritage poultry breeding, etc. The possibilities are endless and I look forward to the future. A future filled with delicious and nutritious food.