Yet as we begin to see the shift to more demand for locally grown food, things appear to be changing again. Promotion of local Holland Marsh farmers is evident at farmers markets in cities and larger towns. A wider variety of produce is now being grown to support the tastes of a more diverse population. The desire to connect the produce to the farmer that grew it may help us see what can be achieved if we use what we grow in our city’s backyard. What if we could pair a five-acre plot with a city block? This arrangement would satisfy the consumer with food grown less than an hour away and provide the farmer with a reliable market. Knowing the farm and the farmer that provided the produce is a tangible connection and a smaller economy such as this could provide a better and more sustainable model for local food distribution. We are losing real ties to the places our resources come from. Fundamentally, we still look for those connections to the rural and food is a prime example. As more and more of southern Ontario’s farmland is consumed to make way for irresponsible, low density urban development and sprawl, we should take note of this engineered landscape, one that did quite the inverse. The grand civil engineering scheme provided the framework, but it may have been the five-acre plot that was its real success. Perhaps it deserves another look. – Holland Marsh Growers’ Association. http://www.hollandmarshgold.com/ farmers W H Day. Reclamation of Holland Marsh . Canadian Engineer, January 1927 Holland Marsh Drainage System Joint Services Board. http://www. hollandmarsh.org/ Holland Marsh Agricultural Impact Study , Planscape Incorporated and Regional Analytics, 2010. (The tenth installment in the Occasional Paper Series in Greenbelt Research presented by the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation) http://greenbelt.ca/research/greenbelt-research/holland-marsh- agricultural-impact-study
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