I help people, plants and place discover their unique story or product and decide how to share that with the world.  My focus has always been on environmental conservation. As a person who loves to eat I have worked with organic wheat and agricultural biodiversity seed conservation. Wheat is a metaphor for Abundance. Bread is broken around the world as a symbol for Sharing of food.  "Red Fife" wheat is an example of a heritage variety being of 'value' to a food system that honors 'variety' and 'farmer' identification and 'taste' not just yield.

I create festivals (Canada's first Seedy Saturday, the first Apple Day held in B.C. in 1987 and Canada's first Bread and Wheat Festival in Victoria B.C. for example) to bring people together around conservation. I revive old varieties into today’s marketplace (Red Fife and heritage tomatoes) and believe that if we had more respect for the ‘spirit of the place’ we’d recognize ‘values’ with old buildings, landscapes, trees, wheats, stories, cultures and people.

I love to link all kinds of things together into pictures, plans and strategies. Sort of like making a brain collage of all the neat things I've seen travelling around the world, visiting gardens of amazing plants, listening to people tell stories and linking it with the glues of possibility, empowerment and hope.  Sometimes I use puppets, colors, songs, costumes, stories and heritage to find creative ways to identify, brand and promote events, products and ideas.

I believe in 'value adding' so people can make money and I believe in keeping Canadian farmers producing food for Canadians. I've been rearching and practicing organic agriculture, heritage gardening and seed saving since 1986.

I come from Mennonite farming genes and know that farmers are smart so 'on farm plant breeding' and farmers saving seed makes sense. I help remind farmers they can do their own research and save their own seed.

I created Seedy Saturday seed exchanges in 1989 to bring community seed savers, academics, researchers and agronomists together to share seed and story. As agriculture extension services are gone, we need community based solutions to food security and this starts with seed collections.

People everywhere should be collecting and sharing information about how food crop varieties are changing and hopefully adpating to climate change in their communities.

Ideally community seed centers come together where people collect and integrate the plant adaptation information into decision making policies about land use management. It can help communities make choices for varities to have as the foundation of their local food security programs. 

People will have to learn how share assets, land, seed and ideas and  rediscover how to be a socially responsible group of people living gently on this Earth.  

I'm hoping to find a community in Canada, not a third world ex pat community, where I can live very affordably following cooperative principles, cohousing on shared land, eat and produce organic food where I'm living and continue to be of 'service' to community as an older person, a community, environmental and social activist in my youth and middle age, in our society.  

This model of radical senior housing doesn't exist -yet- but in the 1980s we were called the  'lunatic fringe' who were practicing and promoting organic agriculture.  I'd like to age with other old activists...if we didn't fit into 'the system' as youngers we won't as olders. We just need to find ways of making it happen.  

 

 

"The hand that holds the seed controls the food supply. May seed always be in the hands of gardeners and farmers who will save and share this wealth.”

- Sharon Rempel