A trip to an A Rocha farm will totally flip your mental picture of farming. Let's be real: when someone says "farm," who doesn't envision a humongous wheat field, with rows as far as you can see, with a bright green tractor, under white, puffy clouds and a beautiful blue sky?
A Rocha kinda breaks that mould. And by kinda, I mean by a lot. You can keep the sunshine, and maybe even the tractor, but scrap the endless vistas of that one crop.
Basically, the people at A Rocha think that in order to have healthy crops, we need to go farther than the crop to the soil itself. If the soil isn't healthy, well, you aren't going to have good crops for decades. So they start with nurturing their soil with compost, and instead of planting one crop on every square inch of space, they have a variety, all with different purposes. In some areas, they have pastures for their animals (chickens, geese, ducks), in another they have pollinator garden. They know that pollinator animals are vital to the success of their farm, and a garden just for them will attract pollinators from miles around. Every year, A Rocha farmers rotate their crops, planting different groups of crops in different areas each year so the nutrients in the soil doesn't become depleted.
For more info about A Rocha Canada, check out their website here.
So, after checking out their farm, and snagging some fresh, organic veggies, I decided to make some good ole potato leek soup. But this soup is different, it's got kale (don't worry, it tastes great).
Get my Potato Leek Kale soup recipe here.
Here are just some of the incredible benefits of eating local:
1. You're helping out your neighbours! We can support local economy by buying local groceries rather than shipping them in from far away.
2. There is less environmental damage, because the shipping process is so much shorter! Shipping within your region is way more environmentally-friendly than flying and trucking produce halfway across the world.
3. Your groceries are more fresh, because they can get to you faster from the field nearby than the one far away.
4. The nutritional content is higher, because the produce doesn't have to be picked before its ripened to make sure you get it at its prime. The produce can develop fully, allowing more nutrients to develop and get into our bodies.
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