Is it time to rethink Gardening in your city?

We may be starting to see a major shift in Canada’s agricultural practices with food experts saying that this may be a great time to rethink Canada’s food system and transform it into something more sustainable. 

It has become apparent that the Industrial farming that Canada has been so heavily reliant on is no longer sustainable to feed our population. In a COVID 19 world we have seen that Industrial farming does not work through a pandemic. We have an opportunity to support local smaller farmers and encourage our society to become more self-sufficient with their vegetable consumption by establishing their own home gardens. Not only will this help our social goals, but also environmental by making cities greener. Interested in building your own home garden? Contact us for a free consultation today at The Healthy Garden Co.

 Focusing on local production of food can bring a boost back into the local economies while also giving people ways of going back to work. Our food security programs throughout the country have been picking up the slack where others can’t, with some organizations serving over 2,500 meals a day for free! We have such wonderful organizations already established, why not build on them? Invest in the systems that are already working and learn from them to develop our new and improved agricultural system for our country. 

In the province of Ontario alone, replacing 10% of all the top 10 imported vegetables with locally grown produce we would be able to create over 3,000 jobs and a $250 million dollar increase in the provincial GDP. Our political leaders are looking for ways to boost the economy, well here’s one!

Resilience from pandemics comes from variety and more distribution. Instead of relying on the few top corporate players with industrial farming, let's put the resources and power into the hands of the smaller businesses who are already operating in a sustainable way. 

The same goes for livestock  in Canada, with the closures of restaurants the livestock farmers who are supplying large amounts of meat to various places across the country now have severe backlogs and are being forced to find other means to reduce the number of livestock they have. They are losing money, resources and there is no sign of them returning back to normal. Instead of relying on large decentralized meat producers, we should be sourcing locally. We could be more accurate with our supply and local demand to ensure that farmers are not wasting precious and expensive resources only for them to not be able to turn a profit. 

We are in urgent need of supporting our local economy. If this pandemic has taught this country anything it is that as much as trade is important for our economy, more self sufficiency is detrimental for our success. The way to be more self sufficient is to avoid buying from outside sources and go local. Local is the way of the future and it feels great to support local businesses.