Colin and I used to be on the Board of Directors for the Ottawa Valley Food Co-op. You would not believe the hours wasted at each and every board meeting while discussing ‘organics’. Now don’t get me wrong, I believe in true organics and am all for educating people (most Board members weren’t farmers). But these conversations never had anything to do with the agenda and only made the meetings drag on for 5+ hours -you can tell the others weren’t farmers, farmers don’t have that kind of time to waste ‘talking’. But I digress…
At these board meetings there was a ‘farmer’ that the others considered the be all and end all when it came to ‘organics’. He was always fear mongering and telling them that it was nearly impossible to find crop seeds that weren’t Genetically Modified. This drove me crazy. There are plenty of seed options out there if you bother to look. Which is what brings me to the point of this post.
You will likely recall that Colin started another business last year in attempts to actually make a living farming. He built a mobile seed cleaner and has been going around cleaning seeds for farmers. This way they can keep their own seeds. We’ve been doing this personally for years. You can only do this with non-GMO seeds!
Well, here is Colin cleaning his 1 millionth pound of seeds!! That means there are a lot of farmers out there growing non-GMO crops. There are even more out there that do it without cleaning their seeds first. Not bad when you consider the relatively small number of farmers there are in Renfrew County!
That is fantastic!
Excellent!
🙂
That’s a LOT of seed cleaning! 🙂
Very impressive. And this non-farm girl didn’t know there was such a thing as a seed cleaning machine…
Blessings, Debbie
Congratulations on your one-millionth pound!
You have no idea how sad I find it that a farmer can’t make a living anymore.
I narrowed your co-op members down to two but it really could be either one bitching about GMO. Colin told me once to watch your needles during meetings 😉
It is terrible that people who work 12+ hour days/7 days a week should have to have one or two other jobs just to make ends meet. And now we schlep around to the markets too. Between the animals and the machines, Colin puts life and limb in danger daily, you’d think he’d be entitled to at least minimum wage! But all the stores care about is getting the cheapest food possible.
Colin said he could always tell when I was getting upset at the board meetings. He said my knitting needles would click harder and faster as the meeting went along. All the GMO conversations just went round and round in circles AND had nothing to do with the functioning of the OVF. But what ticked me the most was the fear-mongering. Why can’t the organic movement stick to facts instead of fear??