Growing Our Organic Farm: 16 New Acres Between Enderby and Grindrod

We've been quietly working on something pretty exciting behind the scenes.

We've secured a long-term lease on 16 acres of beautiful Class 1 farmland between Enderby and Grindrod, BC.

For our family and our certified organic vegetable farm, Shuswap Organics, this is a significant expansion.

But perhaps not quite in the way you might expect.

Yes, having more land will eventually allow us to grow more local vegetables for Nature Delivered customers, restaurants and other businesses throughout the North Okanagan and Shuswap.

Just as importantly, though, it gives us something we've wanted for a long time:

More room to rest and rebuild our soil.

The First Crop We're Growing Isn't for Sale

This week, the new ground was worked and planted with its first round of cover crops.

And then it rained.

After an incredibly hot, dry summer here in the North Okanagan, watching gentle rain fall on freshly planted ground felt pretty wonderful.

We'll need much more precipitation to recover from the drought conditions our region has been experiencing, but this particular rain arrived at exactly the right time to help get those new cover crops established.

And those crops have an important job to do.

Why Cover Crops Matter on Our Farm

When you picture our vegetable farm in Grindrod, you probably picture rows of carrots, lettuce, potatoes, cucumbers and other vegetables eventually destined for someone's dinner table.

But some of the most important crops we grow are ones we'll never sell.

Cover crops are planted specifically to protect and improve the soil rather than to harvest for sale.

Depending on what we plant and how we manage them, cover crops can help us:

• add organic matter to the soil

• support soil microorganisms

• improve soil structure

• protect bare ground from erosion

• cycle nutrients

• improve the soil's ability to absorb and hold water

That last one has become especially important to us.

Farming in the North Okanagan means adapting to increasingly challenging summer conditions. Long stretches of heat and very little rain put enormous stress on crops—and on the soil they're growing in.

Building organic matter helps soil hold onto more moisture and gives us another tool for making our farm more resilient during periods of heat and drought.

It isn't something that happens overnight.

This is farming for the long term.

What We'll Grow on the New Farm

In 2027, we're planning to move several of our largest certified organic storage crops onto the new land.

Carrots, beets and potatoes will be among the main vegetables grown there, alongside several acres devoted entirely to cover crops.

These storage vegetables are an important part of what we grow at Shuswap Organics.

They're also part of how Nature Delivered is able to continue offering locally grown produce well beyond the traditional summer farmers' market season.

A carrot harvested in October can still be feeding a local family months later.

That's something we're pretty proud of.

And moving these crops to the new farm creates another opportunity back at our existing farm in Grindrod.

Instead of immediately filling all of the newly available space with more vegetables to sell, we're planning to put roughly half of our current farm into cover crops for the season.

For a small farm, choosing not to grow a saleable crop on productive land can feel a little counterintuitive.

But healthy soil is what makes everything else possible.

We're farming for next year's harvest, but we're also trying to make decisions that will leave this ground healthier five, ten and twenty years from now.

Expanding a Small BC Farm in an Uncertain Economy

I'll admit that it feels like a strange time to expand a farm.

Food costs have risen considerably. Household budgets are stretched. Restaurants, chefs and independent grocers are trying to protect increasingly tight margins.

We completely understand why people are paying closer attention to what ends up in their grocery carts.

Small farms throughout the Okanagan and Shuswap feel those pressures too.

Locally grown vegetables produced on relatively small farms don't always win when the only comparison is the price on the shelf beside a vegetable grown on a massive scale and transported into BC.

There's also been a lot of conversation lately about buying Canadian and supporting local farmers, particularly as trade issues with our neighbours to the south have put more attention on where our food comes from.

We appreciate that renewed interest enormously.

But we don't think simply telling people they should buy local is enough.

Local food still needs to provide real value.

What Does "Value" Mean When You're Buying Local Food?

We're thinking about this a lot as both Shuswap Organics and Nature Delivered grow.

Price matters. We know it does.

But value can also mean buying vegetables that were harvested when they were actually ready.

It can mean choosing varieties for flavour rather than their ability to survive a very long trip.

It can mean knowing the farm your carrots came from.

And it can mean making local food convenient enough that you don't have to visit four different farm stands every week to support the growers in your community.

That's a big part of why we created Nature Delivered.

We grow a lot of the certified organic vegetables ourselves here in Grindrod, but one small farm could never grow everything our customers want to eat.

So we work with other farms and orchards throughout Enderby, Armstrong, Salmon Arm, Vernon, the North Okanagan, Shuswap and farther south in the Okanagan to bring their food together in one place.

Then we deliver it directly to our customers.

Our goal is to make it easier to find a practical balance between cost, quality, convenience and supporting local farms.

Sometimes that means certified organic carrots grown by us in Grindrod.

Sometimes it means beautiful conventional BC fruit from an Okanagan orchard.

And very rarely during the parts of the year when something simply can't be grown or stored here, we source farther away.

We always tell you where your food comes from so you can decide what matters most to you.

Why Growing Our Farm Matters to Nature Delivered

Shuswap Organics and Nature Delivered are closely connected, but they're not quite the same thing.

Shuswap Organics is our certified organic vegetable farm in Grindrod. Nature Delivered is the local food delivery business that grew out of it.

Nature Delivered allows us to combine what we grow with food from many other farms, orchards and local producers and make all of it easier for people in our region to access.

Today, we deliver local food to households in communities including Enderby, Armstrong, Vernon, Coldstream, Predator Ridge, Salmon Arm and Lake Country.

We also supply fresh produce to restaurants, chefs and other commercial kitchens in the region.

That means expanding our farm isn't simply about producing more vegetables.

It's about strengthening one piece of a much larger local food network.

We want our own farm to be productive and financially sustainable.

We also want the farms around us to have reliable places to sell what they grow.

And we want people living here to be able to buy genuinely local food without local food shopping becoming another part-time job.

Thank You for Helping Us Grow

Taking on another 16 acres feels exciting.

And, if we're being completely truthful, a little scary.

Farming doesn't offer many guarantees, and the current economic climate certainly doesn't make a decision like this feel risk-free.

But we believe there's a future for small and medium-sized farms here in the North Okanagan and Shuswap.

We also believe it's worth investing in the soil that will feed people long after this year's harvest is finished.

Every time someone orders carrots grown on our farm, fruit from an Okanagan orchard, or a box filled with food from the local farms we work with, they're helping create a viable market for food grown here.

Those orders are what allow farms like ours to keep investing, improving and growing.

So for now, our newest 16 acres aren't producing vegetables.

They're growing cover crops.

And we think that's a pretty good place to start.

— Emily & Owen
Shuswap Organics + Nature Delivered
Grindrod, BC