Wildwood Farm

British Columbia

Hello this is Tim Ewert from Wildwood Farm, from Pouce Coupe, BC. My wife Linda and I came to the Peace River country in northeastern BC in 1974 and found a previously unoccupied piece of crown land.

We had our work cut out for us to develop this land into a farm. We have built all our buildings ourselves largely with logs from our own land.

We try to gain as much of our living as possible from our place. All our heating and cooking is done with wood from our land. Our limited-supply electricity comes from solar panels in our yard. Our first 20 years here we had no electricity at all so we really appreciate having a modest supply of electricity, it’s quite the convenience for us.

Horses mostly power our farm, right now we have 5 Percheron draft horses. We mainly use a 4-horse hitch for fieldwork, a 2-horse team for cutting and hauling hay and spreading compost and just general hauling things like wood. We also use a 2-horse team to power our grain mill, this prepares the feed for all of our livestock.

Our main field crops are peas, barley and oats, as well as hay. For up here around the Peace River country we have a very small farm, only 160 acres, half of which is in native boreal forest, we also rent 15 acres from a neighbor which is integrated into our organic management plan. Our crops are fed to our livestock, we have a few cattle, one of which is our milk cow.

We raise about 70 hogs annually from our sows. About half are marketed locally and the rest go to Vancouver. We maintain a small laying flock of about 45 hens, they range freely, and scratch in the manure pile and generally reduce all sorts of problematic insects and flies by doing that. We do feel that they do help to keep our whole farm in balance by completely ranging freely rather then being managed otherwise.

Our farm does produce most vegetables that will grow in our climate and we have been selling vegetables thought our local organic food co-op, however we do plan to reduce vegetable production because we just can’t keep up with all the work, it’s a pretty high labor demand here on our farm. We are attempting to keep our livestock production in line with the production capacity of our land, but we have found that yields do vary a lot from year to year and we are often forced to purchase organic grain locally.

We try to limit our driving as much has we can to reduce our fuel consumption. We do own one old pick-up truck which is our sole vehicle. We feel that our society’s over-use of fossil fuels is one of the most unsustainable features of our North American way of life, and for organic farming to be truly sustainable and compatible with nature we must reduce our fuel consumption as part of reducing our general ecological footprint. We tried to integrate our beliefs into our farming way of life.

Although we work long hours with almost no days off, we find that it is a quite a rewarding and meaningful sort of existence that we do have here.

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