Join Dan Oostenbrink and Aaron Pete on a journey into sustainable farming, exploring the intersection of biodiversity, soil health, and community-driven agriculture for a healthier world.
Dan Oostenbrink, co-operator of The Local Harvest Market, combines his educational background with a passion for regenerative farming, producing a diverse range of crops using no-till methods. His decade-long journey in organic gardening is driven by a commitment to healthy soils, nutrient-dense foods, and the belief in building resilient communities through sustainable agriculture.
Join Dan Oostenbrink and Aaron Pete on a journey into sustainable farming, exploring the intersection of biodiversity, soil health, and community-driven agriculture for a healthier world.
Dan Oostenbrink, co-operator of The Local Harvest Market, combines his educational background with a passion for regenerative farming, producing a diverse range of crops using no-till methods. His decade-long journey in organic gardening is driven by a commitment to healthy soils, nutrient-dense foods, and the belief in building resilient communities through sustainable agriculture.
Welcome back to another episode of the Bigger than Me podcast. Here is your host, aaron.
Aaron Pete:Today, we'll be talking about the important role that farmers play in stewarding the land In indigenous culture. It is very important to us to maintain the land for future generations and that's exactly what we'll be talking about today. My guest today is Dan Osterbrink. Dan, you've described yourself as a designer, gardener, soil expert, plant person, entrepreneur, biologist, educators, computer scientists. Would you mind introducing yourself for people who might not be acquainted?
Dan Oostenbrink:For sure, my name is Dan Osterbrink. I'm from local harvest market and, together with my wife and our children five kids we operate a market garden producing food for this community and for restaurants in the area, and we also educate people on the importance of producing food using land that they own or lease or rent or borrow or whatever, and teaching them how to garden better and produce more food on less space with less work.
Aaron Pete:When did this become something that you were passionate about? Where take us back to excuse the pun, the roots of where this began.
Dan Oostenbrink:Yeah, so I'm 42 right now and we got married young and we always had a garden and there was a lot of joy in gardening and sharing food with others. So we send the kids down the road when they were really small with a wagon full of food and they would sell the food to neighbors, and slowly we're like, hey, this is something we could maybe do for a living and never had the opportunity because we didn't have the land available to us to make this happen. And I was also in education at the time, teaching secondary school, and so there was, you know, the opportunity just didn't exist. And then, when I was 32, so that's about 10 years ago, 11 years ago the dad approached us. So he owned a chunk of land on Lickman Road, a busy intersection, and asked if we wanted to start farming there.
Dan Oostenbrink:And so we, you know, we said yes and it was a pretty big decision because our kids were quite small and I didn't realize how much work it would be and how much, how exhausting it would be and how much that would drain, you know, the energy from. You know our energy should have been expended towards our children and I think they got lost a little bit in this. But yeah, so we started farming on this piece of land and slowly converted what I would consider a fairly nutrient deficient piece of land Didn't have a lot of fertility Dairy farm, which was existing pasture land into you know what looks today like a you know, food producing enterprise who would grow a lot of different types of foods, vegetables, fruits and nuts and seeds and all the rest for this community.
Aaron Pete:You strike me as a wholesome person, and that's a word that I care a lot about. Going door to door. How did that sort of come about? We think of old photos and videos of milk deliveries, and this seems like it's going back to that idea of neighborly connection.
Dan Oostenbrink:Yeah, I think that what probably keeps us going on a day-to-day basis is the fact that we're nourishing a community and, at the same time, building a community and becoming somewhat of a community hub. And so when you go door to door, these are your neighbors. You look them in the eye, they're people in your community, you care about them, and so producing food for them is, you know, exchanging a gift for them. You know giving them a gift and of course there's you know, in a sense there's no expectation of return. The return comes about through their thankfulness and happiness and joy, which is where it really started.
Dan Oostenbrink:But then, of course, if you're running a business, it has to return some financial gain, there has to be some financial sustainability behind it. And so you know, really you know people want our food bad enough that they'll give us their money in return and we're able to invest that money back into the farm, into the business, and do even greater things. So, yeah, community mindedness really is at the root of what we're doing, and we see it when there's people milling a boat on a busy Saturday outside the market, just having a conversation. They just happen to meet there and it brings together. It really does bring people together and yeah, so it's a really amazing feeling.
Aaron Pete:One of the interesting things is that food is often described as bringing us together, so I'm curious as to what principles you bring that are unique to you. What are your vision when you started this, when you started farming, what were some of your basic tenants, the rules that you wanted to follow?
Dan Oostenbrink:I think we more or less fell into it, like it was not as if we went in there with a list of principles or values and we said we're going to embody these principles in our farming techniques, in our farming methods, in our day to day, you know, going about as we went day to day. I don't think that's what it was really about. It was just you kind of fell into it, and so a good example, I guess, of that is one of the rules of agriculture, one of the universal principles of farming and gardening and home gardening is that you incorporate biodiversity on your property, so you have many different types of plants growing at the same time. And initially we didn't really start out that way, like we were more in tune with you know, we were going to head the commercial agriculture direction because people really said that you can't grow great food without the use of herbicides and pesticides. And I had bought into that doctrine and we started growing and I had bought chemical fertilizers. I had bought the herbicides and pesticides that I was told were needed in order to grow food because you couldn't do without it. That was, you know, what we were told, and early on in our first year we kind of. We were literally in the weeds and we were grasping for ways to keep the farm under control. We planted two acres of blueberries, two acres of corn, or probably more like ten acres of corn, two acres of raspberries, and we were going to run a market that would provide the community with some of the local foods that were commonly grown in this area, and then we would supplement with Mexican, californian food. You know that we'd import and we'd just be a market like a lot of other markets. So that's kind of where we started.
Dan Oostenbrink:And then, you know, we got the weeds, got out of control and the farm was unmanageable. And so I hired somebody in June of the first year this goes back to 2013, and he had done a one acre market garden organically. And when I hired him I didn't really know the direction he was going to go. All I knew is that he had experience in producing food and I had very little other than a home garden. And he said I'll work for you, provided you allow me some flexibility in how we produce food here. And the first thing that he said was we're going to get rid of all the chemicals. And I was. I mean, I don't really have a choice. Because he was a good worker, he had some experience and he had done this before. So we got rid of all the chemicals. I managed to, you know, add a discounted discount. I returned him back to the provider and he said the second thing we're going to do is probably get rid of a lot of this equipment that I had purchased. So commercialized equipment.
Dan Oostenbrink:You know corn planters, you know big, big skill stuff, cultivating equipment, planters, cedars and things like that. Not that this was a move against technology, but it was saying our skill was not such, our skill was too small to make these pieces of equipment beneficial to us on this farm. And he said you know, I'm not going to farm on the 20 acres 30 acres that we had, we were cultivating. He said I'm just going to do one acre. And I was like well, that's very little. You know, how are we going to make money doing that? He said I need to show you what we can do on one acre, what one person can do.
Dan Oostenbrink:And so he took one acre, which is just under 50,000 square feet, and he started seeding and planting in June and by July we had salad mix, spinach and radishes and things like that and by June or August we were coming into you know, some early carrots and beets and some of the early onions and greens that he had planted were, you know, we were starting to market these and it, over time, that first year, completely shifted my mindset about how we converted food. Like I remember some of the early cauliflower that we had planted, I thought you can't grow this without chemicals, that's what I was told. You had to cover them with plastic to keep the insects off. And it turned out that I remember my son running back from the field one day, you know, probably August, september, saying it's ready, it's ready, and he was holding a beautiful head of cauliflower which we hadn't sprayed. And it was just a complete mind shift for me that we could produce a lot of food on very little land without the use of chemicals, without the use of sprays. And it completely shifted how we did food and I'm very thankful for that awakening.
Dan Oostenbrink:And I started reading the works of John Martin Forche. He was a small market gardener. Elliot Coleman some of these other really you know famous market gardeners who were, you know, elliot Coleman was doing market gardening in Maine of the United States before. It was even cool and a novelty, you know and so completely changed how we did food, and so we started to observe how nature grows things, and it does so with lots of biodiversity, and so, you know, we incorporate a lot of biodiversity on the farm and, yeah, it's just amazing things that happen. So I guess we started off this train of thought by you asking the question you know, what values did we instill or embody on the farm? What did we go in with? We didn't really go in with any. They developed over time, and so one of those is care for the land and nourish the land, and then land will give back to you abundantly.
Aaron Pete:The big one that's standing out to me, though, is a willingness to change your perspective.
Aaron Pete:So many people, they've been doing things this way, and this is the way they're told that it's done and it's hard to buy into that, and the fact that you trusted this person making some bold claims before you were able to do all of this reading, before you had all of the evidence that it was going to work, and then to see it result. It seems like that would be such a meaningful experience to go through and watch the transition and see the evidence before your eyes.
Dan Oostenbrink:Yeah, dare to be different and dare to try things that you know one of the funnest things to do is if people say it can't be done. I've learned that you ought to try it and you'd be amazed. You know you might not succeed entirely, but you might take you down a different path. But this, by all means I think has been a big push from Big Ag is to really, you know, say it can't be done any other way. And then there are farmers out there who are doing it a different way and are successful in doing so. And so, yeah, dare to be different and try new things, to be surprised what you can do.
Aaron Pete:When you moved on to this land, you were in a trailer and that sounds like it was a humbling experience. It was a challenging experience. Would you mind walking us through that? Because you were willing to face some adversity and then now everybody's like you're killing it. You're doing such great work, but you were willing to put all your values to the test and move in and do this when people might have said like that's crazy, that's not a good idea, that's not comfortable. Can you tell us about those early days?
Dan Oostenbrink:Yeah, we moved from a large home in the country that was well established, on two acres you know, a beautiful little hobby farm and we moved into a mobile home that we put on the property with five kids. You know it was very tight and we made it work because we could recognize a future here and said this is a place that we want to raise a family and grow food for the community. So, yeah, there was, you know, quite a bit of humility in that step. For sure, At the same time, looking at what other people in our community you know, some of the impoverished neighborhoods in our community, and what people have to endure, we had so much and so much more. And so, from that perspective, you know, the amazing thing was living on great land. Sure, small little house, but we had so much because there was a future here and we wanted to carve that future and change the food producing landscape on that 35 acres of land.
Aaron Pete:Your family is a truly strong unit. When we talk about family, I feel like you embody so many of the important aspects If you're going to refer to someone, your ability to bring your children in, support them, and then now they're working on the farm. Can you talk about how that sort of came about?
Dan Oostenbrink:To be honest, I'm quite surprised that they're still working on the farm, because I'm very hard on my kids. I think I'm fair, but I demand a lot and I have demanded a lot over the years and some of that I regret at this point. You know there's really early mornings when you're shaking the kid awake at. You know he's 14, 15 years old and it's a Saturday morning in the summer and you're trying to wake him up at 4 o'clock or 5 o'clock because you know the sun's up and work's got to be done. And you put a hoe in their hand and you say, okay, let's go at it, we got to clean up this bed of weeds here. But at the same time I think what my kids have seen in myself and in my wife is a tenacity, a determination that is addictive and contagious. And I think they have also come to recognize the importance of the work, because I don't think we wouldn't be doing what we're doing if there wasn't a greater power pushing us forward to change the way food is done in the valley. I mean, we live in one of the most fertile valleys in the world and you know our land is so great and we have so much fertility built in. You know, the Fraser River used to flood its banks in this area, and so we have these incredible mineral deposits and we have, you know, a lot of growing days, good, great growing days. We have rain and abundance typically I mean, even in the last couple of years have been fairly dry, but typically we get even, you know, these good summer rains. So, and we have, you know, our coastal climate allows us to grow food through the winter, at least grow food in the summer and then preserve it in the winter in our gardens, on the farm. So such a great area to live. We have so much abundance, and yet most of our food is coming from afar. You know, if you look at the supermarkets, there's very little grown in BC food, let alone, you know, grown in Canada, I mean. And then the Fraser Valley being just this, you know, abundantly lush area, and yet we're producing relatively little food for this community.
Dan Oostenbrink:And so I guess that's the driving force behind what we're doing is we're trying to transform our food landscape, and we didn't want to just do that with talk. I think there's too much talk, you know. We wanted to do it with strong action, and it's easy for me to be critical of other farms, and I am critical of other farms and I'm, you know, quite unapologetic in doing it. I like my neighbors, I just don't like a lot of their practices, and but the best way to move forward is to stop talking and start working. And that means modeling what you believe good food production looks like, and that's what we've really tried to do.
Dan Oostenbrink:And my wife is always saying stop talking so much. You know she's always scared if I come on a podcast or if I do an interview. You know someone wants to interview me. She warns me beforehand and threatens me. You know that. You know don't stop blasting. You know knocking other farmers and things like that. And she's right to some degree, you know.
Dan Oostenbrink:But sometimes I do want to get my word in edgewise and just say the current system we're on is not sustainable, like in general, how we're producing food today is not going to keep working year after year after year. We are, you know, we're going to run out of fertility and the cost are too great to the environment and human health and all these other things. So no, we need to change our course. And so the way I only own, you know we own 38, I'm going to call it owning 35 acres. I'm a steward of 35 acres, you know I'm not, because when I'm gone someone else will be on there. Is it my kids, is it someone else? I don't know. But all I know is that during the time that I'm given, I'm going to do whatever I can to rejuvenate land, regenerate the land, produce as much food as I can, sequester as much carbon as I can try to bring in, you know, native birds, species of birds, back onto the farm by growing trees and snakes and reptiles and beetles and all the rest. So I really restored a mindset, right, a stewardship mindset.
Dan Oostenbrink:So those are the things that keep us going every day. I mean, when land prices were really high. They're still really high. You know, the easy thing for us to do was to capitalize on those incredible gains that farmers had through their land value, sell it, move on, live in a little home, little property somewhere else and not work a day in my life. I mean that was open to us, but we didn't want to do that. Number one we love the land too much and we got too much work to do. So we have no choice but to keep going and work hard. So, yeah, together my wife, myself, our kids and some really really great employees who are helping us in this endeavor and there is a there's this really great bond we have with each other as we work towards this common goal. It's pretty amazing. It's really great.
Aaron Pete:I'd like to go back to the family thing, but first I just want to understand this, because from what you're saying, I feel like people general citizens have abdicated their responsibility to stay informed on many of these issues.
Aaron Pete:So, it's placed individuals like yourself as responsible. And if I went to farmer A and said you should be doing it this way, you should be doing it the way you do it, or something they're going to go, what do you know about farming? So you're put in this position of actually understanding that it is possible and this is how you go about doing it, so you're one of the only credible voices that could talk about this. Yet you're a humble person. You're working hard, you're doing what you want to do for the betterment of society. Yet we need to see these changes long term.
Aaron Pete:And I interviewed an individual by the name of Paul van Westendorp who's interested in beekeeping. He's a provincial apoculturist and he talked about how, like our pollinators are still going downhill and ever since the Bee Movie which is kind of, I think, people's peak understanding of it it's still been going down and we don't talk about it. And he proposed for cranberry farmers and various farmers that you just leave a few plants untouched so bumblebees can stay and live there and still get nutrients throughout the year.
Aaron Pete:And the response he got from farmers was I can harvest that and make an extra couple hundred bucks. Like I'm not going to bother with your stupid plan, even though it would be better for bees, pollinators and for my harvest in future years. Not worth it because I can get more money today. And to have those conversations as a general citizen, we don't have the credibility that you have.
Aaron Pete:So to me you're put in this tough situation of being humble and doing what you want to do with your land, to steward it and take care of it, just seeing other people and knowing that they're ultimately, in the final analysis, going to have a vast impact on the valley when we suck out all of the nutrients out of it. Paul Van Westen talked about how the soil used to be very rich in nutrients a meter down and that's just been going down and down and one day it's going to be, he said, sand, but it's not going to have any nutrients in it for us to pull from and it doesn't feel like there's enough people talking about this issue. So to me it just seems like this back and forth you have of like talk about it, don't talk about it is impossible because it's like, you know, there's an asteroid heading for our earth and people don't want you to talk about it or judge them for how they're approaching it, and it's like, well what?
Dan Oostenbrink:are you supposed to do? I mean, yeah, I think it's what we need to do is we need to recruit more followers, and the best way to recruit followers and believers in this movement is to get people to actually do it themselves. And the challenge with that is there's so few landowners out there, you know, and there's a lot of land. The land is in the hands of very few. Our farm is 35 acres. There are farms in the valley here that are 1000 acres, you know, owned by a single family and not far particularly well, and so there is some reform necessary. I'm not sure how that reform happens, but really to rest the land from the wealthy and to distribute it equitably amongst the poor, I mean that sounds like a very socialist program and I'm not in that train of thought. I'm, you know, I like the capitalistic idea. At the same time, there needs to be a way to bring land from the few into the hands of many. But there are people who do own land, and so maybe that's where I need to begin is those who do own land need to grow food for this community on that land, and, I think, modeling and educating people on how much food they can actually produce, first for their own family and then for their neighbors, will eventually pay off. And I think it has to be profitable, because if it's not profitable, few people will follow it, you know. And so that's kind of where we have to begin. So in order to get more people on the movement on this train, we need to show them the successes and how they can change a bare piece of land, an old driveway, you know, a dilapidated, overgrown, weeded you know, weed infested part of their yard into a verdant food producing garden. And when people see what they can do and how much food they can produce on a small space, you know you can change whole communities. So we do have entire neighborhoods. You know people owning small pieces of land Maybe they only have an eighth of an acre to grow on, or maybe only a sixteenth of an acre that can produce a lot of food and encourage people to do front yard gardening right. So rather than, you know, have your garden in the back yard, put it in the front yard, allow your neighbors to see and hopefully other neighbors will catch on. And I really do think that this movement is a grassroots movement. It starts from the bottom up and eventually, hopefully, what happens is we can get more people owning land. How exactly that happens, I don't know. Sometimes it takes a crash for something like that to happen, right, not that I'm hoping for any kind of crash or a catastrophe, but something needs to change. We need to.
Dan Oostenbrink:You know milk is a great food. You know I have cream in my coffee in the morning and you can make great cheeses and things like that. Our industry in Chillowack and Abbotsford and Langley is very heavy on dairy. It's very heavy on blueberries, it's very heavy on, you know, raspberries is going to Abbotsford and a few other commodity type foods and I think that's great, you know, I think that's great agriculture. But I think we need to be in balance. There needs to be a balance here, and I also think that you know doing 100 acres of corn to feed cattle, even though you know cows need to eat, obviously, and corn is a great food for cows. We have a monoculture, and a monoculture is going to invite problems and the problems are going to come in the form of pest, and then you know, as farmers we need a one-up on the pest and that's a pesticide and eventually a stronger pesticide, and so I'd like to see some balance in how we do things.
Dan Oostenbrink:Now the question, people are the retort that people often have when they, you know, when I advocate for this type of farming that we're doing, which is, you know, I can best describe it as growing many, many different types of food on one property, in small amounts spread out through the year, but getting abundant yields using no chemical fertilizers, no herbicides or pesticides whatsoever, not even organic herbicides and pesticides. So when I advocate for that type of agriculture, the response is well, we can't feed the world like that. And my response is well, I don't know about feeding the world and that's too big of a problem for me, but I can feed my neighborhood, and I think that's where we need to begin. We need to feed our neighborhood and then our you know our city, and then, once we've achieved doing that, then we can go beyond. And the reason that I think there's an unwillingness to head in this direction of feeding people from our own land in this area is because the labor is, you know, we need a lot more laborers on the land. We need to populate the food producing landscape.
Dan Oostenbrink:We know a lot of people on the land, which is exactly what I'm pushing for, to say, you know, instead of having a 1,000 acre farm or 500 acre farms, let's say there's a you know a 200 acre farm out there, I would way rather see 10 families on no 100 families farming each two acres, and farming it very, very well, because on two acres you have enough land to feed your family, you've enough land to put a home, you can become self-sufficient on two acres. You might have to live a little more modestly, in other words, the fancy car, but what do you need the car for? You're on the land, you're pretty soon enough food. And then that neighbor next door, if you're short on, say, they maybe focus more on eggs and proteins, and the next one focuses more on bees. Then you can trade within the system. And so when I present this, everybody says well, you're getting a little romantic about this, aren't you? How are we ever going to do that?
Dan Oostenbrink:Well, by giving up certain things that we believe is necessary in our life and living a more humble, holistic, neighborly, caring lifestyle, which nobody wants to argue that that might be a good thing. So I really do think we, and not only that, we have the Fraser River running right next to us, teaming with fish. I think we need to fish more sustainably as well. Then we have the mountain sites full of vegetation, a lot of which is edible and medicinal. Then we have mushrooms, and we have deer and elk and bear and other animals roaming the mountains, which harvested sustainably. We have so much food in this valley. So can we feed the world using this type of agriculture? No, but I'm very sure we can feed, we're sure feed using the land that we have from Hope to Vancouver. We can feed all the inhabitants within that area. We can feed them really, really well, and we can have a very vibrant food system and one that also, financially, would be a huge boon to this area, huge boost.
Aaron Pete:The problem I have with those people who go like, oh, you're romanticizing this, oh, you're thinking of it this way, is you're not understanding the gravity of the problem because it's getting worse and we're going to start to experience it more and more and have a deeper understanding of how this is impacting us. As people's soil becomes dust and becomes unusable, you'll understand the problem more. Second is we have to have a narrative. We have to have a story we tell ourselves of where we're going.
Aaron Pete:If you're going to say you don't like this one, give a different one but, you have to bring something to the table, or disagreeing with you or saying that might be a romanticization is like okay, so then what? What is your alternative? You can't just say you don't like my idea because I think yours is right and this is something we just tell ourselves. It used to be you'd say you're going to get a home one day and you're going to own that. Now we're going. Maybe that narrative isn't for everyone. Maybe not everybody owns a home, and so we're just reducing what people can expect from their life. I think that there's a tragedy to that. With my generation, there's minds that you're not going to own a home. You might as well just give up on that, just rent your space, and it's like well, where's the hope? 100%.
Aaron Pete:Even if it's an uphill battle. You certainly looked at this and went this is going to be an uphill battle worth fighting. We have to agree that there's a direction we want to go in. It's not going to be easy, but it's going to be meaningful. It's going to reconnect us with community. I love being able to go grab organic eggs from a little egg stand that are $5, and then I go into a big grocery store and they're $9 for the exact same quality eggs and you go. Wait, I thought organic eggs were supposed to be more expensive, but if you buy them from your neighbor it's a completely different price than going into the big place. That actually does bring us to Restaurant 62, and somebody who looked at it. It's so shocking to think about because we talk about shopping. Local is more expensive, but he saw working with you as a more cost-effective way of doing business. How did that relationship start from your perspective?
Dan Oostenbrink:Yeah, that's an interesting one, because we're up against as a small farm. We're up against the GFS and the Cisco's of the world, which are the big food distributors that bring their food from California, mexico, south America wherever South Africa to restaurants at bargain prices. The question is why would a restaurant want to buy from us as a small farm 20 kilometers away? Well, the restaurant 62 is one of our big supporters, as are quite a few other restaurants in the downtown Vancouver area. The answer is I think it starts from a deep conviction that this is the right thing to do, because they see supporting the local economy, the local food system in its infancy, which is where it's at right now, as the only way to provide hope and a future for the local area. Plus, they're feeding local people. But they're also buying from farms like us, because they're getting less food waste, because they can order amounts that lend themselves to what they can use. They don't have to buy necessarily a case size amount. They can buy smaller amounts. The quality is higher and the food is fresher, and so there's necessarily less waste because of that and the taste is better. I think you put those all together, plus you got a story to tell when the customer comes in, if they say this was grown from Kiesbrecht, this meets from Kiesbrecht farms, the cheeses from Creekside Dairy and the eggs are from here and the produce is from local harvest. That's a much more powerful message you're conveying to your customers in the store. You're not just quick and dirty, you care about the people that are coming into your restaurant. You want to feed them well, you want them to have a great experience and you want to support a local economy. So restaurant 62 has done this, and our pricing is higher on quite a few items. We might be lower on items as well, but amazingly we're able to compete at a much better today than we have been in the past, because inflation is pushing food prices up for the big distributors, but not so much for us. My only increasing cost on the farm is labor, but that comes at the same time as improving efficiencies on the farm, so making those laborers much more productive, because we're learning, we're gaining so much more experience, and so our workers are twice as productive. But I have an increase, or wage, by twice. In the last 10 years it might have gone up 30%, but so we're much more productive on the farm.
Dan Oostenbrink:Compare that to the big distributors. Their prices are way up. Look at fuel prices. The instant fuel prices go up they tag on that fuel surcharge. You can see on every invoice and the food that's being produced in Mexico, california, that are dependent on chemical fertilizers. Well, we've seen the price of nitrogen fertilizer going way up in the last little bit. So price of diesel for the farmers, plus a lot of these workers in what we often term as third world countries sometimes I think that's a misnomer, but we'll call them what they're being called right now but they're demanding higher wages. So workers are coming forward saying I'm not going to work for pitons anymore, I want a higher wage. And so all these dynamics are actually working in our favor because our food prices are pretty much not quite stable. They are increasing a bit, but so we're able to compete in a much better way.
Aaron Pete:I want to take it really briefly back to family, because you talked about like I can't believe they still work for you. But I find it so admirable because in a time where it seems like anxiety rates are through the roof, depression rates for young people are through the roof, they're dealing with all these mental health issues. It seems like hard work, determination, grit is something that we're missing. I used to talk about it fondly, but right now obviously there's a tragedy going on in Israel, but they have the draft and not right now. But one of the benefits of that is that you work hard and that you have to be put to the test and you have to put in your best effort.
Aaron Pete:And again, that's not saying that it's a good thing during this period, but in shaping a person, having to go through tough times is a really good thing when you're a young person. But on top of that, having your dad being willing to be out there with you, there's some parents who go, oh, you should go run around and do stuff and do your chores and stuff, and it's more of like you do that and I don't have to do it. You being out there with them reminds them that we're a team in this, we're a family in this and we're going to work hard. So I'm just wondering if you can lay out your family's involvement in the farm, what they do, because people have taken up jobs that they're interested in and then they get to kind of chase it like the bakery. Are you able to talk about their work on the farm?
Dan Oostenbrink:Yeah, so the kids on the farm. You know we do everything together and what I've embodied on the farm is that if there's dirty work to be done, I'm going to be in there first, and so they've kind of copied me in that and we do the tough work along right along with our employees. And you know, the greatest success comes through adversity, and there has been adversity on the farm. I mean financial. Meeting our financial obligations is probably the biggest one over the years. I mean my dad. He was very supportive for us throughout and he covered us financially and acted as our bank essentially was really starting to ask questions after year five, six and seven, when the profits just weren't there and basically the message was you make this thing work or we just can't do it. It's not a hobby, there's a lot of money going into this, and so we really had to figure out how we could stay with our mission of producing local food for the community and at the same time, making these financial obligations that were required. And we did it and it just happened.
Dan Oostenbrink:I think people in the community value the hard work they really do. Like people who drive by, they're happy to see us in the field and I think nothing gives them greater joy because often it brings them back to their childhood, when they worked hard and struggled, and that's one reason they also know their food is grown with love and it's grown with care, and I think that makes food taste better, you know. So those are things that the other challenges that we've had is just staying on top of the weeds. You know like it is intimidating when you've got acres and acres to go through and you're not using a herbicide. You're pulling those weeds, each one individually, and how do you over? You know, how do you reduce your labor. And so we started incorporating what we call a maltrin or no tail.
Dan Oostenbrink:We went the no tail route and that had huge benefits for reducing weed pressure, but also for higher productivity, more fertility, and so every time we overcame an adversity, we seem to be stronger for it. And so now the kids are, they see the farm as there's, you know, and I want it to be there's because I'm not going to be here forever and I want someone to take it over who cares and loves for it, and I think nobody cares for and loves for it like the people who work it and know it and have an intimate relationship with it, which, again, we're kind of into the romanticizing of food production, but I cannot separate the two. You know, it is really a labor of love. It's not just a cliche. That is what's happening on the farm. So, yeah, the family's an integral component of what we do.
Dan Oostenbrink:Plus, they know the story of the farm and we've we know how to farm the land because we've we have farmed it wrong in the past. We have made mistakes, and because the kids were part of those mistakes, they're not going to replicate them. And and we have had, you know, manure piles that were leaching into the ditch, which is a you know happens on a lot of farms. We've corrected that problem and there have been other problems on the farm that we've, you know, drainage issues been a big problem and so we've corrected these problems and now we're higher, you know, more productive for it.
Aaron Pete:Can you talk about their development and finding their own passions on the, on the farm and what they do?
Dan Oostenbrink:Yeah, so we, we we have a bakery on the farm. We we buy all our grains from a needed organic mill and it needs organics. Buys, gets a lot of their grains from BC, different parts of BC and also the prairie provinces. So we're using an organic grain and they mill fresh and so that when they mail you know we're getting you know flour that's been milled either the day before or two days before and we're producing sourdough breads with that. Now Dustin is the head baker in in the business, and so we've we've paired the.
Dan Oostenbrink:The one thing that people cannot do without is convenience in shopping. So if you go to a place for your, your, your vegetables, and next place for your eggs and next place for your, you know you could be busy all day shopping around. People want more or less a one stop shop, and so the bakery was, was an integral part of the business, and so he learned how to produce food from, or how to grow, how to bake bread from, magpie's Bakery, which was a bakery that worked with us in our early days, and Magpie's Bakery is still around in Chilohack today. Nick is the head baker there, and so Nick and Chris, they helped Chris, helped Dustin learn how to mix sourdough bread in a wood fired oven. We were using a wood fired oven in the early days, which you know requires you getting up at one in the morning, get the fire started, get it hot. By nine o'clock you can do your first bake. And that's how Dustin had had gone through his training and he was 16 at the time he was homeschooled for the last year grade 12, and that allowed him to to really hone in and gain his expertise. Now he also wanted to have a fun life that most teens teens want. So I, you know, we did what we can to keep him focused, but there was a time there when he actually left. You know, I said I can't do this, not for me, I don't want this, it's too exhausting and. But within a couple of years, around the age of 19, he returned and he took, took the bakery back and now he's built it into an, into an amazing business and producing just top quality.
Dan Oostenbrink:Like we don't, we don't compromise anywhere. Like we don't buy cheap ingredients. We use real butter from BC, real cheese on the pizzas from, you know, creekside Dairy, or a smidge cheese down the road. We use farm ingredients and the pizza toppings are all farm ingredients. The meat is from our, our pigs on the farm. So there's there is no compromise in this work. You can't substitute for something inferior. It's the best. You have to only provide the best in whatever you do, like with the ingredients, with your effort. Yeah, so every aspect is and I I think it comes through and in the taste and people appreciate it.
Aaron Pete:When did you go all in? Because, as you kind of described, you started from this position. You started to see that there were maybe other benefits. But now you're all in and you can see the benefit of putting yourself 100% into it, not going halfway on anything. When did that become like okay, it's, it's all in, it's not halfway in anymore?
Dan Oostenbrink:Yeah. So when we we moved into no-till agriculture about eight years ago so we've been in operation for I think we've gone through 11 seasons now so at about year three, four, we switched to no-till. We really we, we we observed what nature does. What nature does is it keeps the ground covered with a mulch, like a composting mat over the forest floor. We simulate that on the farm with a compost, a breaking down, a broken down plant material, whether that be in the form of animal manures or straws or wood chips or anything like that. We strew the ground with that, with this material. The second thing we we did was we we incorporated a lot of biodiversity in the form of perennial plants, trees, flowers to attract beneficial insects. And you ask, when did you get all in at, at when we started to see success in that approach? So when we noticed that we could come past through the incorporation or the addition of flowers on the farm you know from earliest flowers, starting already in probably May, all the you know we still have flowers on the farm, we're in late October with facility and you know some late blooming Acanaceas and when we, when we noticed that we could combat past and weeds and produce greater food for the community and recognize the community's gratitude for that, then at that point in time we, we were all in. So I guess that we've been all in for sure for nine years, 10 years, and you know kind of from those those early days when we changed, and I don't think I would have been all in if I had been gone. If I had gone with the chemical route like I talked about earlier, I don't think it would be far me today.
Dan Oostenbrink:Number one it wouldn't have been successful. The population would not have been pleased with us, the local population. They're looking for food that's grown with care. Like I can. I can put cauliflower on the shelf. Today we're October. What do we have? October 13. Cauliflower, we should have that all the way up until Christmas time. That is pure. It didn't require any sprays. And typically commercially grown brassicas like cauliflower, broccoli, kale are sprayed.
Dan Oostenbrink:Brussels sprouts are sprayed, you know, every 10 days with a concoction of different sprays to combat. You know the aphids and the cabbage butterfly and you know club root, and you could start listing off all the pests you have to deal with. We didn't have, we don't have. Well, we have those pests, but they're in balance with the predators and and so we can put that out in the store. Like I can pick carrots that don't have carrot rust, fly. You know, disease free carrots, pure, perfect products grown on fertile land, like oh, so there's no return anymore.
Dan Oostenbrink:So I think that had I gone the chemical route, we would have ended up with soils that were more depleted. We would have had increasingly high cost on pesticide, herbicide use, because when you, when you apply a pesticide, pests get, get get smart and they, they adapt. You know, and then you get, you get what you call super pest. We would have had an unhappy population saying you know what's going on. We can eat your food if it's all sprayed. You know we want you to be different. You know you got to be different. And we wouldn't be able to compete with the, with the other farms in the area and the big commercial farms. So we would have been done, we would have been exhausted.
Dan Oostenbrink:So, yeah, had we gone the chemical route, we wouldn't be farming today. We'd have a valuable piece of land that we could sell, and that's what a lot of farmers see. You know they don't look at land for its its. You know abundance and fertility, the biodiversity on the land. You know the worms and the beetles and the critters that are in the soil. They don't look at soil health. They don't determine that when determining the, the, the value of the land, it's irrelevant. It's a square footage or the. You know the acreage and it's so much per acre, like if we sold our farm today I couldn't sell it for any more than you know my neighbor's 35 acre farm. They would you know say they're about the worth the same, because it but one has trees on it, not burying trees as an orchard on it.
Aaron Pete:That's a crazy point.
Dan Oostenbrink:You know, like they don't look at it that way, because I know that if, if, if our farm would sell tomorrow, probably the first thing that would happen is all the trees would be chopped down and it would be planted with corn and grass next year in a monoculture, almost for sure. So yeah, they're, they're. I'm not sure how I got onto that.
Aaron Pete:Can you talk about the the health benefits of not using these pesticides and stuff? We hear about it, but from your perspective, having your hands in that dirt, what are the health benefits people are getting by eating organic, no GMO, no added stuff to it?
Dan Oostenbrink:Yeah, so it just allowed me to give a little, a short little science lesson. So plants plants are essentially sugar factories. Sunlight hits the plant leaf, combines it with carbon dioxide and water and other components and produces carbon sugars or carbohydrates. So plants are really carbon factories and they produce these carbons and a lot of the carbon they use to grow, you know, healthy stems and leaves and flowers and roots and fruit, but a lot of the carbon sugars that plants produce they push down into the soil to feed the microbes in the soil and bacteria and fungi in particular, which are kind of on the lower end of the food web. They move in to feast on these carbon sugars that the plant is sharing.
Dan Oostenbrink:Now why is the plant doing this? Has an ulterior motive. What happens is these bacteria and fungi gorge on the sugars the plants providing and they reproduce really quickly. We know bacteria in a petri dish can reproduce very, very quick under the right conditions. Same thing underground around plant roots. They reproduce and the population of bacteria and fungi blooms In response to that. Other critters on the soil food web or the food chain come along to start to absorb these, you know, nutrients into their bodies. So these bacteria and in the bodies of bacteria, in the biomass of bacteria and fungi.
Dan Oostenbrink:You have a whole host of different elements and components. You could go to the periodic table of elements and start listing them all off Nitrogen, potassium, sodium, phosphorus, magnesium. Everything on the periodic table of elements is locked away in the bodies of these minute organisms, microscopic organisms. So when the nematode or the protozoa or the next level organisms come along to eat them, they extract the nutrients they need for their own benefit Some of the carbon, some of the nitrogen they'll need, but there's vast amounts of nitrogen that they don't need. The nematode, when it eats a bacteria, will excrete massive amounts of nitrogen and so that you know, poop or excretions is deposited around plant roots in the form the plant needs at exactly the right time. So you get this little sugar factory or this sugar.
Dan Oostenbrink:What initiated is a sugar factory, a fertilizer factory, happening right underneath our feet, around plant roots. So plants, they absorb these nutrients that are the excretions of myriads, millions, billions of different organisms in the soil. So they're all eating and feeding and we get this crazy web that happens Until you come up to the organisms that you can see within the naked eye, like mites, small little springtails, very small organisms that are skittering around on the surface and below the surface. They're all eating and feeding on the nematodes of perzo and lower level organisms and they're also excreting plant-available nutrients. And then you move up to the beetles and the centipedes and the millipedes and the spiders and other micro-arthropods that are on the surface skittering around and they're all eating each other and pooping and excreting all plant-available nutrients. So what the plant initiated as sugar that it deposited around its plant roots now in turn gets the soil activity, the soil life, replenish the soil life below the surface and on the surface.
Dan Oostenbrink:Because the next you get, you know, earthworms, for example, are bacteria consumers, nematode eaters, fungi eaters, so earthworms from deep down. You can take a trench four, five, six feet down. You're going to find earthworm holes. They're coming up from deep down and they are starting to take in soil around the plant roots because that's where the carbon is and they need carbon for their existence, as we do, because they can't produce it themselves, because they can't do photosynthesis. So they start to absorb these bacteria, all the soil, into their bodies, they extract what they need and then they excrete these worm castings which are very high in magnesium and sulfur and all kinds of other nutrients, and they're depositing that right around plant roots, they're aerating the soil, they're creating these massive networks and tunnels around soils and now we get oxygen-rich soil, an oxygen-rich environment, and birds come onto the scene, because birds like worms, birds like beetles, birds like all these other insects they're depositing large amounts of phosphorus on the surface, and so you have this amazing food web in the soil that develops from this.
Dan Oostenbrink:Now why this is so important is when farmers apply chemical fertilizers, plants shut off their sharing capacity with microbes. Plants are like, oh, I got my fix of NPK, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, I don't need to share anymore. I kind of have the macronutrients I need to survive, not thrive, survive. So they say, ok, I'm not going to share anymore, I'm not going to share any more of these nutrients with the microbes in the soil. So they stop sharing the carbohydrates that they produce and the organisms down below the surface start, and so the plant doesn't get all these micronutrients that it needs the zinc, the cobalt, more the rare boron, the more rare things on the periodic table of elements. And when plants no longer get those trace minerals now they're nutrients they get nutrient deficient, and a nutrient deficient plant is a banquet feast for pests. Pests move in to clear out the week. Plants are weak, they can't fend off these pests. Pests move in. A farmer's response to pests is a pesticide, further weakening the plant, and you could see where this all goes.
Dan Oostenbrink:And so understanding the soil Food web, which is an integral part of what I talk about in my gardening course when I teach the gardening course in the spring, is informing people of the importance of the soil food web. So why don't we tail? Why don't we take the tiller through the field? Because I don't want to destroy those networks and pathways the earthworms and the millipedes and the centipedes have created. I don't want to destroy that, and I don't want to A tiller. What it would do is someone coming into your living room and flipping over the table and breaking the lights and just destroying the room, and you, coming home, you can't live in that environment, and so then you have to fix it up first, and so that's what happens when you run a tiller through our gardens. And so, instead of tilling, what we do is we layer on top. Just like leaves falling in the forest onto the surface, they decompose, and that's how we. That's a system that we engage in on our farm.
Dan Oostenbrink:So understanding the soil food web is crucial to becoming a good gardener, a good steward of the land and a good farmer. Plus, when we tail, we break open the surface of the earth. Carbon and nitrogen are very volatile. The carbon from the soil immediately wants to return into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, nitrogen into the atmosphere as N2. So we lose our nitrogen and carbon, the exact elements that we need to keep locked away in the soil.
Dan Oostenbrink:Everybody's talking about climate change today.
Dan Oostenbrink:Well, the best way to reverse climate change is to take the carbon from the atmosphere and get it back into the soil.
Dan Oostenbrink:How do we do that? With plants working in conjunction with soil microbes. So there's this symbiotic relationship plants have with organisms down in the soil is kind of a metaphor for life as well. I mean us sharing with others gives us in a measurable return. The amazing thing with plants is they're able to, based on their needs, to change the tasty tidbits they put into the soil. So if a plant needs, say, more boron or something like that, then the plant is able to send down a certain taste, certain kind of carbohydrate combination, to attract bacteria that have, say, more boron locked away in their bodies and then those ones will produce, and then they can unlock that when they're eaten by higher level organisms and then the plants can absorb that boron in order to produce, say, better flower or better fruit or better. Maybe it's really hot outside and they need a bit more UV radiation protection and the plant can immediately respond to those changing environments by asking for help from the community of life in the soil.
Aaron Pete:This has been one of the craziest conversations. That whole piece right there just blew my mind. I love learning about nature because we get so distant from it when we're going to the superstore and we're grabbing our apples. And, to your point, about the love and the connection and seeing you working on the land. There's something about getting something for nothing Like you paid $5 or whatever for your stuff but there's something about not knowing the value of it. That, I think, makes us feel empty inside, that we're not grateful for it because we don't understand the work that went into it.
Aaron Pete:So when we see someone out there actually working on it, we're like, man, I wouldn't want to do that job. And then our head we're like, well, I need to be grateful for that, because I don't want that job, or I wouldn't be able to do that myself, or my job is this and I couldn't do that, and so I think this is so valuable for people. I'd love to do this again in the future, because I feel like we really have scratched the surface of your knowledge, specifically with the scientific elements.
Aaron Pete:I feel, like you have a really good grasp on that. Can you tell people how they can connect with your educational resources and follow along on your journey?
Dan Oostenbrink:Yeah, so I teach a gardening course every spring and I used to do a lot more writing and I love writing and it allows me to put my thoughts down for myself primarily, but I haven't been doing that too much on social media.
Dan Oostenbrink:But I teach a gardening course every spring and people that are interested should visit our website, and it's usually February, march, april, just before the growing season begins, and I touch on what I call the six, seven principles of gardening basic ideas that you can apply in your garden today to get instant results. I mean that sounds like everybody wants to sell that to us, but it really does improve your ability as a gardener to work with nature and nature's plan, nature's pattern, in order to produce more food on less land without inaking back, and work in harmony with nature and grow nutrient dense food year round, like even push food production into those really lean months like January, february, march, like what are you going to harvest in your garden in those months? Well, it's surprising this area. You can produce a lot of food in that area. So we're also thinking of an online gardening course. We've done one in the past and that kind of fell with a wayside. I probably want to resurrect that again, but for now it's just an in-person gardening course.
Aaron Pete:Where would they find that?
Dan Oostenbrink:Local harvest on our web page. Just Google local harvest to find it.
Aaron Pete:And I know people can follow you on Instagram, facebook and keep up with your journey. Thank you again for being willing to do this, yeah you're welcome, my pleasure.
Dan Oostenbrink:It's a fascinating conversation, thank you.