Back to July 2025 Newsletter

Building food capacity in NL

Dan Rubin, Founding Chairperson - Food Producers Forum

Here in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, physical isolation and the fairytale of modern life have conspired to remove residents from their traditional, local food sources. Since we joined Canada in 1949, a steady erosion of traditional agricultural practices, many of them uniquely local, has taken place, increasing our dependence on imported foods, especially fruit and vegetables, grown thousands of miles away. From more than 1200 local farms, we are now down to fewer than 500, and total acreage under cultivation has decreased by almost 50% in just 20 years.

The massive snowfall event on January 17, 2020 that we call Snowmaggedon completely blocked the streets of St. John's, leading to a public emergency and cutting off food supply. Next two years of Covid was an added wakeup call, delivering a solid reminder that our food sources are no longer secure.  At any given time, we are four days away from no food on supermarket shelves.

In 2019, a provincial non-profit group Food Producers Forum was formed to address this situation and help put food production back in the hands of local folks.   What has followed amazes even us. 

In just six years, our group has raised more than $600,000, and has launched a series of initiatives that have created innovative greenhouse designs, built raised-bed gardens for single parent families, launched an ambitious province-wide digital food conference and conducted a detailed survey of community food producers. 

The Where’s The Food? Survey in the Fall of 2022, gathered input from 742 farmers, gardeners, foragers, hunters and fishers in 167 communities who collectively grew or gathered 6.2 million pounds of food that year! The full report is available through a link on our website, www.foodproducersforum.com, which also is an online encyclopedia of reliable information for gardeners and growers.

We learned from the survey, and from our conference, that we needed to build a cohesive network of growers, right across the province, to have any chance of expanding production to rebuild real food sovereignty. 

So our next act was to create the Provincial Food Network, a project that brought together 15 sites including family farms, community gardens, Indigenous communities and food education centres.  The main focus in this work was knowledge exchange, mutual support and educational programs to restore traditional food skills.

That project alone raised $472,000 in funding from university, provincial, federal and international sources.  We not only had enough funding to help people build greenhouses and root cellars, purchase farm and composting equipment, add solar panels and battery banks to their sites, we did even more.  We built a lasting community, that has decided to continue, as a registered provincial community service co-operative.

With the needed paperwork almost wrapped up, a formal launch will be held this summer, and the Provincial Food Network Co-op will begin welcoming farmers, gardeners, foragers and anyone else who cares about good, local food.  With this organization able to speak for food producers, policy can begin to change, and new ways of transporting and distributing food across our province can be created.

Looking back over the past two years and this project, which is now wrapped up, we can see that, at its core, the real issue behind the food crisis is the need to rebuild community. We have learned that together we are powerful, that together we can do things that one person or family cannot accomplish.

Food Producers Forum, a non-partisan, multi-cultural collaborative group operates as an information hub, constantly searching for real, practical solutions to the issues we are facing. Our creative teams, by focusing on these problems, have consistently gone beyond politics and profit to generate community-based solutions in the real world.

Anyone curious about our organization and how we have done this is welcome to visit our website (www.foodproducersforum.com) and email us at foodproducersforum@gmail.com.

We are always looking for new ideas and new partners.

Photo - Food Producers Forum - Provincial Food Network project site representatives and advisors gathered in Cormack NL in October 2024 to form new provincial Co-op.

Back to July 2025 Newsletter