Reply to Maria’s Big Question: that is a great question to ask Maria and I must thank you for asking it. Where we live, there are so many different things that we can and cannot grow here due to our fast changing four-season climate. We have great rich soil to grow crops however there are limitations to what we can grow as we are located in western-central Canada where our winter is our longest season and we manage to get plenty of weather extremes with each season. 

Our growing season is of course only in the summer, it is a short season and is too cold to produce such foods as pineapples, grapes, bananas, oranges, peaches, apples, kiwi, pears, limes, lemons, watermelons, cantaloupe, etc.; basically most fruits and nuts are unable to properly grow here.  

We do however grow our berries, vegetables, and herbs, some spices and rotate our crops with most grain types each year.  We also raise livestock therefore we provide our own meat each year and yes, we do sell locally and across borders.

And we buy our honey from a local Bee Farmer; some of our dairy products are produced and sold locally, but most dairies are either shipping from Alberta, British Columbia or Ontario.

Locally, we also are surrounded by kind Huderite Colonies that too grow and produce their own food and do sell at stands, in stores and donate to the hospitals near by. Our province is based of heavy agricultural ways of living and true, our province has little money to keep people here thus causing many to quit farming the land and move up to the Oil Sands of Alberta where the big money is. As for our country, the true grain land however is based in central Saskatchewan.

Yes, I am all for keeping locally grown food, local, and luckily we pretty well do that already but we also have to allow outside food arrive from across the border and from over seas. So I suppose that I am somewhat neutral, as we are rather dependant on that foreign shipping of the things that we cannot produce here.  

If we only kept to eating food grown and sold within our 100mile radius, we would not get much of anything to eat, I would only be standing on one of many sections of land that we own.  At 250miles, I would be on my neighbor’s farmland. If we kept to within the only towns that are within 1,000 miles, then we would only have what is available from the only two towns that are the closest.  

For an example:  If you think of the country Germany, well you could fit the entire country inside of Saskatchewan and still have room all around it… we have a lot of land but far less people. If we stuck to only eating what is available from our farm to the closest towns to us, but did not eat anything that was foreignly shipped to us, we would die of malnutrition; no fruit or nuts, etc. 

And if you think of the multivitamins available that are of course not produced locally, most of them are insufficient for a proper full balanced diet (i.e. too much Vitamin A will harm you), which is why you really have to have the real deal to eat, live and be merry.

We just love fresh vegetables from the garden, and we will continue to keep it that way of course. 

So I hope that I answered your big question as best as I could.  I do believe in selling locally and we do strive to keep it up. Thank you for your question Maria.