Shelly Harris, Fraserland Farms - Lower Mainland, BC

Like any farmer Shelly Harris keeps one eye on the sky. The weather is an ally and a nemesis. It can swell a crop as quickly as it can batter one into submission — and that usually means money.

Harris is waiting for warmth to start harvesting Fraserland Farms’ bounty of organic crops.

“Everything’s late this year because of the cold weather. Generally we’ll have broccoli on now, but we’re probably 10 days away from that.” It was late last year, too, which meant farmers couldn’t get their produce to the vendors and the grocers couldn’t put it on the shelves. Organic goodies had to be trucked in from elsewhere.

“People are ready to get local … everything’s a little bit late so that’s just another couple of weeks of crops coming from other places.”

The Harris family has owned Fraserland Farms in the Lower Mainland for five generations. It’s a sprawling 1,200-acre operation parceled up into 40 different lots spread all over Delta through familiar territory.

“If you’ve gone to the ferry (at Tsawwassen) you’ve driven past a lot of it,” says Harris.

Fraserland went organic in 1994 (eschewing harmful pesticides and chemicals for old-fashioned, roll-up-your-sleeves know-how), starting with a 10-acre “experiment” of sweet corn that Harris says worked so well it was expanded to the full scale of their land.

Some farmers who switched from conventional methods were ridiculed during the infancy of the organic movement, but Harris doesn’t recall any whispers and stares.

“I don’t think we really ruffled any feathers.”

In fact, after Fraserland started doing the organic thing, other farmers in Delta saw the value in their new thinking and converted. Fraserland Organics is a collective of three independent growers from three different farms in the area.

Going organic was a natural. Harris has young children and wants to give them something that not only tastes better, but is better for you. “I’m proud to be a part of it. It’s important to make healthy decisions when you eat.”

Now consumers are demanding it.

“People are starting to take a little more notice of where their food comes from. You know, you can do without a cell phone, but you can’t do without food.”

The biggest crops for Fraserland Organics are green beans (from mid-July to early September) and potatoes (new potatoes and Yukon gold in early August, then russets the first week of September, as well as reds and yellows which keep them around a good part of the year). Other organics include English peas, snap peas, and snow peas, yellow wax beans, and broccoli, which Harris says has a short July to mid-August growing window.

There are challenges for the organic farmer — and not just the weather.

“We grew cabbage one year and had some pests that were affecting it, but we had no tools to fight it. We couldn’t spray pesticides or chemicals so we had to (plow) the crop under because we didn’t want to affect our neighbours.”

Sometimes an organic farmer has to sacrifice a particular planting to allow the land to find its natural balance. One year a pea crop had to be lost because of aphids. But by the next planting the environment had naturally restored balance by building up its predators, ladybugs in this case.

“That’s one of those a-ha moments in organic farming,” laughs Harris who hopes organic production interests young farmers. “It’s important to keep the vitality in it.”

Already, farmland in Lower Mainland is shrinking every year as developers turn fields into condominiums and fewer people want to farm for a living.

Perhaps the organic revolution will be the revitalization… or the salvation.

Harris is noticing the increasing demand for their product. “In the last six months to a year the awareness (of organics) has just been incredible. People are starting to become more aware of what they can do.”