As grocery prices climb, one farmer bets on growing African staples in B.C.
As grocery prices climb, one farmer bets on growing African staples in B.C.
A B.C. farmer bets on growing African foods | The Narwhal
cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/7298204
People said he was crazy to start a farm based in African foods. ‘It’s good to be crazy in a good way,’ Canadian Black Farmers Association founder Toyin Kayo-Ajayi says.
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Toyin Kayo-Ajayi’s favourite meal is pounded yam, with cassava and egusi — protein-rich African melon seeds, roasted in oil with spices and blended into a paste (pumpkin seeds will do if that’s all you can find). You can add turkey, chicken, fish, shrimp, kpomo (cow-skin) — any meat you want, with some broth and African spinach or amaranth — to turn it into a stew.
Cassava and yam are central foods in his Nigerian culture and other Black cuisines across Africa, South America and India. He’s growing the tropical produce in greenhouses in Miracle Valley just outside Mission, B.C., about a 90-minute drive east from Vancouver.
Kayo-Ajayi was told again and again that farming in Canada would be out of reach — it would be too expensive, the climate too unforgiving for the tropical crops he dreamed of growing. It wouldn’t last.
But he says enthusiasm for his five-acre farm has only grown since he got started in 2020. For five months of the year, he can grow tropical produce in greenhouses. His soil, which he makes himself, consists of clean silt, sand and goat manure. It’s working so well, he says, he is now selling it online and trying to get it stocked in stores. He’s still experimenting at a small scale, but the food he grows, like cassava and yam, he mostly supplies to the African Foods Food Bank, an organization he launched to provide healthy food to Black families.
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Donating to the food bank helps more people access African produce that may be out of reach in Canada. Imported cultural food, like cassava, can face extreme mark-ups by the time they get to the grocery store. On top of rising grocery prices and systemic income inequality, those mark-ups can put these foods out of reach. “If it’s somebody that is still low-income, now, he’s struggling to afford the cultural food,” Kayo-Ajayi explains.
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Food growers are the roots of the entire agricultural sector, which generates $149.2 billion annually, or seven per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product.
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While Kayo-Ajayi’s priority is getting cultural foods into Black homes at reasonable prices, he says supporting food growers stands to benefit all Canadians as the United States imposes tariffs and threatens annexation.
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“It’s something that is beneficial for our community and for Canada,” he says. “Everybody wins.”
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Kayo-Ajayi says he invested a lot of money personally before he started getting funding. “You have to prove that you can do something before you can get support,” he says.
Since then, the Canadian Black Farmers Association has received funding from organizations like Agriculture Canada, the Vancouver Foundation and the Supporting Black Canadian Communities Initiative. But he says he needs a lot more funding to get the farm going at a bigger scale and get to the point of selling soil.
“This is my passion,” Kayo-Ajayi says. “To me, somebody has to do it. It costs a lot, but guess what? The reason why you have a little is to be able to use the resources you have to make a difference in somebody’s life. To me, investing in another human being is my best investment, and I’m doing it this way.”