Growing Urban Grains: Local Wheat On the Edge of the City

Waving fields of wheat as far as the eye can see: this is the mental image that the word "prairie" conjures up in the minds of most North Americans. However, on the wet West Coast of North America, grain is growing in an area just outside of the city, right in the middle of the temperate rainforest. Two weeks ago, my daughter and I went out to the local farmer's market to pick up our share of flour. Our family was one of the first members of Urban Grains, a local wheat cooperative that is changing the way agriculture is done in this urban environment. It's also making for some tasty local pancakes.

Farmland around cities is dwindling. It's hard to eke out a living as a farmer when the plush jobs of the city call. It's also hard to resist the intense pressures of development - when the prices for your farm far outweigh the cost of the food that you hope to produce on that farm. Such is the tale of agriculture on the urban fringe.

When Vancouver's Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon began a year-long study in eating locally, they didn't expect it to become a large-scale movement. However, with the creation of their web site for the 100 Mile Diet and the birth of their book Plenty, they popularized the movement to relocalize food in North America. One of the grimmer segments in the book outlines their attempts to find grain grown within a hundred miles of Vancouver, Canada, their home city. In a desperate move to make pancakes, they use grain that is less than edible and full of wriggly bugs.

Ironically, despite the fact that it is a moist and distinctly un-prairie-like environment, the areas around Vancouver used to be a hub for growing grain. In fact, one of Canada's original experimental farms was located in the Agassiz area just outside of urban Vancouver. One of the dominant wheat varieties of the early twentieth century was developed here. Until the 1950s, Marquis wheat provided up to 90 percent of Canada's wheat crop.

What changed? Over the decades, the push for cost efficiencies moved grain production out of British Columbia to the Canadian prairies. Like heritage apples, the heritage and local grain varieties that were well-suited to British Columbia's locales began to wane in popularity. Now relocalization is making a comeback, as the need to produce the food that we eat becomes more prominent in peoples' minds. The wheat that's making our blueberry pancakes comes from the 100-acre Cedar Isle Farm in Agassiz, just down the road from that old experimental farm. Today, as we eat the wheat that's been grown less than 100 miles from our doorstep, we've come back to the land that used to sustain us, and we look on it with an eye fixed on the sustainability of our local food supply.