If you live in Canada and haven’t been hiding under a rock for the past three months, you’ve heard about the flooding in Alberta. In just a few days, the rivers running through Calgary and other communities broke their banks, and destruction ensued.

It was shocking to see pictures of Calgary’s iconic Stampede grounds filled with water, and devastating to hear of homes either hugely damaged, or washed away altogether. Even if people’s houses or apartments weren’t directly hit with water, many were evacuated and couldn’t return home for weeks. After the waters receded, two things were certain: nobody has seen flooding like this in decades, and southern Alberta proved itself as a tenacious and overwhelmingly supportive community.

High River, located just south of Calgary, was hit especially hard. We heard about it first-hand when we visited Highwood Crossing Farm, operated by Tony and Penny Marshall.

I met Tony years ago when I lived in Calgary, and was delighted to see where the canola for his famous cold-pressed canola oil is actually grown. The land he and Penny farms has been in his family for over a century.

Their canola oil is usually pressed in nearby High River, but that all changed when their production facility was badly flooded. They had to rent a truck, pack up what equipment hadn’t been damaged, and drive it back to the farm.

Not that it was safe from the water, either. Their house sits directly on the river, and its basement flooded, as well as one of their fields. Stoic as ever, Tony and Penny spoke of this misfortune as only farmers would – it was something to get through, and many others were worse off than them.

Tony showed us the small facility on the farm where they’ve temporarily setup their flax oil and canola oil press; the seeds are brought through pipes, come down into the machine, the oil is extracted, and the ‘leftovers,’ which look like giant bran pellets, are dumped into a bin. They still contain oil, and are a rich, healthy feed that local farmers buy from Tony to feed to their cattle. For a full list of their products, see their website here.

We also had a chance to explore their perfectly green garden.

Penny dug up potatoes for us, we picked handfuls of haskaps (our faves!)

and we saw our first bush of seabuckthorn berries, a super food I’d only ever seen in oil form at Whole Foods. I always assumed seabuckthorn was exotic, sourced from a remote corner of Nepal or perhaps a rural micro-climate of southeast Madagascar. Nope, apparently it is available right here in Canada, and it’s been added to my ever-increasing list of berries-I’d-never-eaten-before-FEAST.

Not yet ripe.  At full ripeness, seabuckthorn berries are bright orange, and taste like unsweetened orange juice. — Not yet ripe. At full ripeness, seabuckthorn berries are bright orange, and taste like unsweetened orange juice.

We sat on their deck overlooking the river (now back to its low, easygoing self), and had the most wonderful haskap/berry/cornmeal cobbler with ice cream.

When we left, we were sent off with more haskaps, potatoes, honey from their farm, ‘pre-flood’ Highwood Crossing granola, flax oil, (awarding-winning!) steel-cut oats, rolled oats, turkey jerky, and some banana bread, just in case we got hungry.

We had the most lovely afternoon with Tony, Penny, and their visiting friend Paul. If we take only one thing away from this project, it will be that Canadian food producers are not only hardworking and resilient, but also wildly generous. Also, they make a mean, mean cobbler.

If you’d like to match them on the generous front, you can donate to the Alberta flood relief effort here.

Here's Corb Lund, who played at the recent Alberta Flood Aid Relief Concert, which raised $1.5 million.

-LA

Goat milk is a niche product. It is closer to human milk than cow’s milk, and for this reason, it is often easier for people to digest. Rock Ridge Dairy is a family run organic dairy farm that primarily produces goat products, but recently expanded to include organic cow products as well. Their operation is quite large, but they have very few staff and work long hours. They are distinct from a lot of other producers we have visited because their main market is to grocery stores, and they sell their product under various other names.

We toured through the facilities with Cherylynn Bos, who owns the dairy along with her husband, Patrick Bos. We were able to sample their whole product line, which was fantastic. Both the cow’s and the goat’s milk were sweeter than conventional milks, and the feta and chevre were incredibly creamy.

We have consistently been astounded by how much skill it takes to farm sustainably, produce excellent products, and find enough time to sleep, but talking with Patrick and Cherylynn gave us a new appreciation for the challenges involved in getting farm products to market.

In order to list one product in one grocery store, it generally costs around $4000 per year. To list the product across Canada can be several tens of thousands more. If a product delivery misses the 15-minute window provided by the grocery store, the producer will be fined $1000. In preparation for these deadlines, Patrick and Cherylynn tag team between sleeping and working so that production can run all night.

They emphasized the importance of growing slowly and steadily. It’s important to have a well-managed operation in order to guarantee supply and quality of production. They have about 500 goats, milking about 300-350 of them twice per day, year round. They need to maintain a steady rotation of baby goats in order to ensure a constant milk supply: if their supply is too variable, they risk losing clients to more stable sources.

Producers don’t have independent access to everyone who would be interested in selling their product. Hiring a distributor establishes this link, but doing so costs the producer about 20% on all the profits. In the end, the producer may end up making significantly less than the distributor, even though they have done all the labour and carried all the risk. The benefit, of course, is that the product is able to reach a larger audience. Because of these difficulties, producers have to be pretty confident of their product’s ability to sell well.

The Bos family is extremely ambitious and hard working. Their product line currently includes organic cow’s and goat’s milk, goat feta, and goat chevre, but they have plans to expand both their cow and goat lines. Albertans can (and should!) purchase their Rock Ridge Dairy products at any of these locations. In Western Canada, they also sell under a number of different names, including Happy Days Dairy and Oak Island or, when they’re sold under a grocery store’s brand, their products can be found by searching for the plant code ‘4210’ on the package.

Talking with these two really gave us perspective as to how much producers have to sacrifice in order to deliver their products to consumers. It also illuminated the struggles producers face beyond managing the risks of production. We left with a deepened respect for the many people whose life work it is to provide food for the rest of us.

-DV

Highwood Crossing and the 2013 Alberta Flood

Life in Dairy Land