The Birds and the Beans are a group of four
new farmers, leasing land in Courtenay, BC. This year, we’re growing vegetables, raising pastured poultry, and growing staple crops to sell at the farmers' markets.
The Birds and the Beans aims to feed people
fully. We want to empower people to
supply a greater portion of their diet with wholesome and local food. When people think of eating local, there is
often a focus on fruits and vegetables, but staple crops are often
overlooked. We want to begin filling
this gap by growing not only vegetables, but also meat and staple crops.
Producing the components of a full diet on
a single farm is not only beneficial to the consumer and local food system, but
also to the ecological health of the farm.
Wastes from one venture are the nutrients for the other, maintaining
healthy soils, crops, and livestock. It
also keeps the farmers happy, managing a diverse and dynamic system.
Before we were farmers, we were friends at
university. We met in classes, but bonded
by working in the student garden, chatting casually about beans, soil
management, and innovative methods of composting. In our final days of undergrad, we stumbled
across the opportunity to lease land from an existing organic farm, and we
jumped on the opportunity. We now find
ourselves able to make the idealistic dreams formed in university a
reality. We will start from where we
began, working a plot to grow plenty of beans, manage our soil carefully, and
experiment with creative methods of composting to bring you wholesome food and
build into the local food system of the Comox Valley.
