Chef Dwane & Farmer Robin
It has been quite the delicious craziness over the past couple of weeks which has kept me away from this blog and out in the edible world enjoying lots of food and food talk. Here’s one of the events I was party to.
Farmer 2 Farmer was a modest little conference held back on March 7. Robin Tunnicliffe, from Saanich Organics, was behind much of it, and Dwane MacIsaac of the Island Chefs Collaborative led the kitchen. The registration was around 100 in the week leading up, and the organizers prepared for around 120. But on the day there were more like 200 farm and food folk in attendance, chewing the fat over issues like options for farm labour, organic certification and creative fundraising solutions for farming, as well as more hands-on info on poultry nutrition, choosing berry varieties and techniques for direct marketing farm products. Most interesting to me (tethered much of the morning to the registration desk, and later to the book signing table after a short stint explaining Haliburton Farm‘s development in the context of a workshop on farm succession) was the generous lunch rolled out by members of the Island Chefs’ Collaborative. Bread from Byron Fry, Salumi from Cory Pelan and assorted wizardry from David Mincey and Dwane MacIsaac, with seasonal produce from local farms (squash, lentils, roasted beets, rutabagas, garlic), meant some pretty nifty loaves into fishes work and a good feed for all those extra bodies.
