Maddy working at one of City Beet Farm’s pop up markets, credit: Elana Evans

Do you ever look down at your plate and wonder how far your food travelled to get to you? In my breakfast smoothie, I know that the blueberries were grown in the Fraser Valley and the bananas are likely from Central America, but I wouldn’t know where to begin in identifying the birthplace of the ingredients in almond milk or peanut butter. City Beet Farm is a small-scale urban farm in Vancouver that dissolves this layer of mystery between the origin of your food and its presence on your plate (or smoothie bowl). They work out of Mount Pleasant on fifteen residential front and back yards to grow a variety of flowers and veggies that are sold through community supported agriculture (CSA) and pop up markets.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Maddy Clerk, one of the co-owners of City Beet Farm, to discuss local food systems and how entrepreneurship can lead the way in sustainable solutions.

City Beet Farm was founded in 2013 but didn’t fall into Maddy’s lap until 2016 when her roommate and now business partner Elana heard about its availability through her work at the UBC farm:

“As a joke, Elana showed me that City Beet was for sale and I don’t know why - kind of just on a whim – I felt like we should buy it. I had a business background, Elana had a soil science background and had completed the UBC Farm Practicum, and it just went from there.”

City Beet Farm has become a way for Maddy to integrate a variety of passions – from working with her hands to empowering female entrepreneurs:

“Farming and specifically City Beet felt like this way that I could integrate my entrepreneurship while having my hands in the soil and nourishing people through food. It’s pretty amazing to get to work with incredible female farmers all the time.”

Women make up a minority of farmers in Canada. The 2016 Canada census of agriculture reported that only 28.7% of all farm operators in Canada are women. While this number is low, it is increasing over time which shows a positive trend towards more young women entering and succeeding in these spaces.

Maddy balancing the variety of labour that City Beet Farm requires, credit: Elana Evans.

Maddy supports this by taking on the role of educator to share her love for entrepreneurship and women in business: “A big passion of mine is making sure that people can build businesses that are financially sustainable and can support their lifestyle so that people can continue to do sustainability work.” She has partnered with The Bad Academy to teach a workshop on small business finance. Take a closer look at the workshop happening on November 19th here.

We discussed how overwhelming sustainability work can often be when one looks at the multitude of environmental and social challenges that humanity is facing. Maddy shares her outlook on what we can do as individuals to build sustainable solutions that make us and our society better.

“I’m a very action oriented person and sometimes when we’re feeling disheartened by policy decisions or things that we feel are so out of our control, tools like creativity and entrepreneurship really come into play. One of the reasons I love doing City Beet and teaching entrepreneurship workshops is that it’s such a vehicle for social change, so in a world where so much is out of our control, I think that what we choose to do and the actions that were taking and the businesses that were creating can have a really strong impact.”

Community Supported Agriculture is the economic model that the farm is based on which Maddy describes as “a veggie box subscription with the idea that by prepaying before the season, the consumer is essentially sharing the risk with the farmers. It enables urban farming or just small-scale farming to really exist.”

If you haven’t heard of a veggie box subscription before, the idea is that you pay for a weekly box of vegetables in the winter to support the farmer with income during the off season and then are able to enjoy your local veggies throughout the summer. City Beet Farm uniquely offers the opportunity to exchange the use of your land for their produce. This model means that Maddy and Elana’s days are just as occupied by conversations with passersby and the families of their CSA members as they are with managing their sites. Our discussion constantly circled back to this significance of community connection in City Beet Farm’s work.

“We really prioritize everything we do for the health of the soil and our community.”

An illustration of the Community Supported Agriculture model, credit: Elana Evans

This local and small-scale farming allows for a different kind of connection to the food on your plate than the one I described at the beginning of the article. Anyone who gardens will be able to tell you the difference in taste and satisfaction when eating food grown with your own hands. My family has gardened ever since I can remember and it makes me smile every time I hear my Dad proudly tell our dinner guests that what they’re eating is “fresh from the garden.” By eating food grown in their own backyards, Maddy sees CSA members coming excited to pick out their weekly vegetables and cultivate this unique food experience further.

We also discuss how our current food system often does not encourage us to buy local. This system forces small-scale farmers to have higher prices than large-scale industrial or monocrop farmers. Higher prices can hinder the accessibility of local food to all demographics and further the myth that sustainable goods and services come at a higher cost than the mainstream alternatives. When I say cost, I am not just referring to the value on the price tag - I also include the costs to our environment and society that we are accustomed to being excluded. Maddy explains this in reference to food:

Maddy among the flowers grown by City Beet Farm, credit: Ayla Amano

“Our prices in the grocery store don’t reflect the true cost of food. Small-scale farmers are using really good inputs and have the transparency to tell you exactly what goes into their food. They’re often not using migrant workers or receiving commodity subsidies - there are so many things that go into it - so of course our food definitely does cost more than you would see at the grocery store. It’s important to have those conversations and educate people as to why.”

While some have the flexibility to vote with their dollar towards the regenerative and ethical work that small-scale farmers engage in, Maddy also recognizes that is not the reality for everyone in our community:

“Something I struggle with is the accessibility of our food. It’s challenging as a small-scale farmer because you need to pay yourself but at the same time our food often isn’t accessible to low income individuals. Its important to me to have conversations with people about how we can as a society include low income individuals in these sustainability conversations and making sure that we’re able to build a just, equitable food system.”

A just food system involves the prioritization of environmental sustainability, farmer livelihood security, consumer food security and so much more. What does it mean to have a just food system in Vancouver and how can we support local agriculture? These topics are going to be explored in part two of this conversation to be released next week.

In the meantime, you can learn more about City Beet Farm and even convert your lawn into one of their farming plots at their website. You can also follow along with their farming endeavours on Instagram. Please leave any comments and questions about these topics below – this is just the beginning of our conversation on sustainable food and farming at Climate Hope Project.

Farming in the City with Maddy Clerk