About The Blogger

My name's Michael, and although I'm originally from a small southern Ontario town in Hastings county, these days I live in the Timiskaming district, smack in the middle of a great rift valley known as the little claybelt of northern Ontario. I'm now the proud owner of a 40 acre homestead here in the north, after several years of working in crop scouting and as a farmhand. My partner and I are in the process of building up a small, sustainable farm that we eventually intend to support us full-time.

I have college diploma in agricultural technology with a concentration in horticultural production from the Alfred campus of the University of Guelph's Ontario Agricultural College - a satellite campus that is now unfortunately shuttered for good. As life here in la ceinture bilingue demands, I am bilingual (first language English, second language French).

I initially started this blog while still in college to jot down commentary on various problems and facets of agriculture in the local area I was living in at the time - the Ottawa valley of eastern Ontario. At the time I was far less confident in my technical grasp on farming, and far more confident in my ideas on agrarianism, than I am now. If you feel like browsing through any of that, it's still up for now, but going forward I'm going to try and talk less about the political and more about specific crops, agricultural techniques, and the particulars of farming here in this new, northern valley that I call home. If you want to reach out to me, I can usually be found in the ##gardening IRC channel on Freenode under the nick "emmeka", where I end up discussing a lot of the topics that probably better deserve a long-form write-up on this blog.

My specific interest and area of expertise is in fruit and nut crops, and to a lesser degree vegetables, but I also have practical experience with sheep, pigs, poultry, both dairy and beef cattle, as well as cash cropping. Of particular interest to me is the integration of livestock and crops in the pursuit of sustainability and diversification - such as sylvopasture, alley cropping, weeder geese, orchard grazing and grazing of stubble and cover crops.

As a disclaimer I should mention that I'm neither opposed to nor in favour of organic agriculture, biodynamics or permaculture and instead see specific components of all of them as worth integrating into my own operation, and other components as worth discarding. You could say that when it comes to production styles, my approach is eclectic. I'm not afraid of "chemical" products on the farm, provided they are the last resort in a large toolkit of best practices and not the first and only tool in the kit. If that lack of puritanism is unacceptable the views on this blog may be unacceptable to you as well.

For non-locals, Timiskaming (the district of northern Ontario where I live) is the southernmost point of the vast alluvial plain we call the claybelt. I will talk about the claybelt a lot, and so a brief description of it first is probably in order: stretching from Fabre in the south, to Calstock in the northeast and Senneterre in the northwest this region remains barely cultivated despite its very fertile soil, with only 5% of the claybelt's arable lands being cropped, the vast majority of that being on the Québec side. Good land can be had at under $500/acre, and turnkey working farms can be had for half the price of a condo in Toronto. Having spent these past 5 years here I can only say that anyone considering taking advantage of the opportunities available here do so, and call this growing region home just as I have.