Join me and @offgridninja at the Young Agrarians 5th annual Winter Mixer!
A lot happened over the course of this weekend and so the whole thing will take up a few posts. Lets start with Saturday morning! Welcome to the 5th annual Winter Mixer, a gathering of awesome farmers, intentions and knowledge!
We started off the morning with breakfast and opening ceremonies, which included a welcome to Sylix territory by the very inspirational Pauline Terbucket. She was someone I really wanted to see at this winter mixer, as last year she gave a talk about bringing the salmon back to BC and told the story of the four food chiefs of the Okanagan people.
This year she did a simple recap of their importance and brought some to share, along with some other traditional foods. The four food cheifs incude saskatoon berry, the bear, the salmon and bitter root. The full story really is wonderful and I hope one day I can get permission to share it with you!
Here is pictured Sarah, one of the amazing people running the Young Agrarians, speaking about the event and the lovely Young Agrarians organization. Our goals for this mixer are pretty simple: fun, make friends, and learn stuff! It seems to be pretty easy for everyone to get along here, no disrespect to be found, just a bunch of friendly farmers!
I took some notes on the inspirational talks happening at the opening ceremonies. Lots of good reminders here, and my favorite quote from the whole thing;
"We are beautiful people because our land is beautiful" -Pauline Terbasket
I am note obsessed, I am totally able to scribble stuff down really fast because of it haha. Its important for me to write stuff down or I will never remember!
Now look at this feast! One of the best parts of this event is the food! This spread is presented by the local One Big Table, and thats an awesome name. Here, we are all eating from one big table. In the farming communities, it seems like feeding each other is a big thing. It is something I aspire to myself!
I like to joke around and say I want to reach grandma-hospitality level early, because thats what this is! It seems like all grandmas like to feed their guests and offer tea, and so do farmers. Lots of yummy food and tea here! And don't forget the deserts!
The spread we got to enjoy includes a varied veggie fries, including things like rutabaga. This is good, this way I can convince my community to tolerate my rutabagas and parsnips haha. Also, delish chicken and a couple kinds of fancy salad. We were well fed to start the day learning and sharing!
Lots of information available here, from info on taxes to land sharing to food sovereignty. I took home a little pamphlet on the subject of food sovereignty, here take a look.
There is a whole ton of information here! Enjoy!
That about concludes the morning of day 1!
After lunch me and @offgridninja split up, and I took a ride to the other side of town for a grafting and fruit tree pruning workshop! I have already posted one video from that, which you can find here.
Ryan went to learn about soil science, which is great since the first day they just covered the basics. There will be lots more on fruit tree pruning AND soil science soon, as well as water management!
I hope that this post inspired you and informed you. This event really restored a lot of faith in humanity for many participants and is dealing with many important and real issues. It truly is our food that nourishes us and it is the farmers out there in the fields that provide it for us, especially for city-folk. The Young Agrarians is a worthy organization doing real work to help real people grow YOU food.
If you eat apples, even if your in China or the USA, many of them come from BC! The same goes for lots of things, and if you live around here then you have a chance to get to know your food source/farmers personally through the Young Agrarians organization. I hope that more support will come to this organization so that it can continue growing at such a fast and furious rate, as food scarcity, food sovereignty and eating nourishing and healthy food are becoming more popular issues in the world.
Together, we can help provide food to everyone, save our seeds and eliminate food scarcity for good!
