Canada: Urban agriculture can help Regina feed the hungry and cut carbon emissions

“Saskatoon has over 50 community gardens, so there has been a really strong interest around that kind of agriculture,” she says. “Unfortunately, even before the pandemic most of the plots in the city had wait lists.”

Feature by Gregory Beatty
Planet S
May 13, 2021

Excerpt:

n Regina, Candace Benson and Miranda Holt have turned to the private sector for a solution. Through their company City Streets Farms (citystreetfarms.ca), they’ve arranged with seven homeowners to convert their front yards to garden plots. The women will convert the yards and maintain the gardens themselves, and plan to share some of the produce with homeowners, while also selling at Regina Farmers’ Market and donating to community fridges.

Benson has a farming background, and Holt is a dedicated gardener. Both have certificates in permaculture, and that’s how they intend to farm the plots.

“The philosophy involves working with nature, and harnessing what nature has available to cultivate a sustainable system that, after some human input to set things up, can make food on its own,” says Holt.

“From the larger-scale-agriculture perspective I had growing up, it was always thought you had to fight nature and put in so many inputs such as time, fertilizer and other chemicals to make a profit,” says Benson. “And even then, you’re just scraping by.

“But if you observe a bit, you can see the land is trying to tell you what it needs,” she adds. “If we work with the land, we can create a much more viable system that will eventually take less time, [fewer] inputs, and still provide so much produce while leaving the soil better off rather than depleting it.”

In the current food distribution system, Benson and Holt note, food is grown thousands of kilometres away and then trucked to your local grocery store. Any produce that doesn’t sell is sent to the dump.

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