After much consideration and deliberation, we have made the decision not to accept new students to the Richmond and Tsawwassen First Nation Farm School programs this year. We are taking this year to focus on our incubator program and carefully consider how to improve the sustainability of our first-year farmer training programs. In the absence of first-year programming, we will also be pausing our CSA program. We understand this will be disappointing to many and want to express our gratitude to our community members for supporting our programming over the years. Without your support we would not have been able to train dozens of new farmers in regenerative agricultural techniques and feed hundreds of families with locally grown, organic produce each season.
We want you to know that we continue to be committed to the work of supporting new-entrant farmers in regenerative agriculture and advocating for the development of sustainable regional food systems. We hope to be able to relaunch our programs when the time is right and will keep you abreast of all programmatic updates as they develop. We will also be in touch with updates throughout the 2023 season about ways in which our community members can engage, such as volunteer opportunities, farmers’ markets, field days, and workshops. We hope you continue to support local, sustainable food production in the meantime by joining one of the many CSA programs offered throughout the Lower Mainland. FarmFolkCityFolk offers a comprehensive map of CSA programs in BC which can be found here: https://farmfolkcityfolk.ca/strengthening-community-supported-agriculture/community-supported-agriculture-map/.
If you would like to continue to support KPU students, the KPU Sustainable Agriculture program still operates at the Garden City Lands. There will be plenty of local, organic, student-grown produce available at the Kwantlen St. Farmers Market and through other local vendors.
If you are interested in learning more about our current and published research and extension projects at the Institute for Sustainable Food systems we encourage you to visit our website at www.kpu.ca/isfs. Of particular interest to some of you may be our Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Food Systems and Security, details about this program can be found on our webpage at https://www.kpu.ca/arts/sustainable-food-systems-security. For those interested in learning more about our 2023 programming updates, graduate certificate program, or the work of the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems in general, please contact wallapak.polasub@kpu.ca.
For those graduates who have expressed interest in being a part of our incubator program this year, we will be in touch with each of you soon to review the details of the program and registration process. For any graduates who may still be interested in the incubator program and have yet to reach out to us, we encourage you to get in touch and we would love to discuss program options with you. By focusing our attention on our incubator program this season, we plan to expand the resources available to our incubator farmers and strengthen the programmatic components. If you have questions about our incubator program, please reach out to micheal.robinson@kpu.ca and katherine.hastie@kpu.ca.
We thank you for your continued support as we navigate this year of revisioning and express our sympathy for the impact this news will have on those of you who were looking forward to being a part of our programming this season.
Sincerely,
The ISFS and KPU Farm Schools team
Have questions? Please email us at farmschools@kpu.ca
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