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Urban farming: Grow your own way

Raena and Rob Blusson both have full-time jobs in Vancouver, yet begin and end each day on their working 10-acre farm in Maple Ridge
Raena Rob Blusson
Raena and Rob Blusson balance full-time careers in Vancouver with farm life in the suburbs.

For one Vancouver couple, the concept of farm-to-table didn’t exactly translate to dining at Fable a few nights each month.

In 2011, Raena and Rob Blusson made their urban farming dream a reality — purchasing a 10-acre plot of land in Maple Ridge while living and working downtown.

Three years later, the duo now wakes up every morning in Maple Ridge, tends to the animals and chores, and then rides the West Coast Express into the heart of Vancouver to continue their full-time careers in the mining sector.

After high school, Raena, the tomboy farm girl who was horrified by the pink boots her parents tried to give her at age six, thought she was done with Maple Ridge — the rural municipality between the Fraser River and Golden Ears mountains where she was raised.

She moved downtown and finished university, leaving her parents’ lamb and chicken farm in the childhood rearview.

Rob, 36, was a South Cambie boy who grew up across from Queen Elizabeth Park. He spent much of his youth outdoors, striding in the footsteps of his geologist father.

And while that didn’t stop him from a career cultivating “soft accountant hands” in corporate finance, he says he, like Raena, always hoped for a homestead to stretch his legs.

The property, located just across the street from her parents’ house, had sat idle for two years before they bought it. In its heyday, the farm was kept golf-course-green-clean by the sheep and cattle it supported; up for sale, however, weeds were going rogue and the Band-Aid coloured 1960s rancher (“sponsored by Johnson & Johnson,” jokes Rob) was crying out for an update.

They initially disregarded it, thinking they’d purchase in Langley when the time was right. But then they realized Maple Ridge is one of the few areas of the Lower Mainland where you can own farmland and still come into the city every day by public transit. Suddenly, they could see past the land clearing and home renovations straight to the potential.

The newly named Ashlar Farm now has horses and chickens, and a lush garden next to a commercial-scale honeybee operation.

As you pull around the winding gravel drive, a fence line — so new the wood is still pink — guides the eye along the salmon river that torrents through the front fifth of the property. Over by the hedges, Rob is tossing bone meal into a freshly dug blueberry patch while a five-months-pregnant Raena looks on.

“Raena loves giving tours,” Rob quips, more than slightly out of breath as I walk up.

“Shut up,” she bandies back playfully. “I’ve been working, too.” She turns to me and whispers, “Yesterday we did dick-all because it was raining.”

Raena Blusson

She laughs, relaxed, while leading me around the house to the back eight, where a monolithic covered bridge spans the aforementioned river (the North Alouette to be precise) and a cathedral grove of spruce and cedar keeps the peace.

Here she plans to graze cattle and lay a test plot for the 30 hop rhizomes being delivered next week. (There’s a craft beer industry brewing in BC, after all.)

“The idea just came to me a couple of months ago. I kept hearing about these microbreweries going crazy in Vancouver, and I started reading about hops,” the 29-year-old explains. “In the ‘40s, the Fraser Valley was the biggest hops producer in the Commonwealth. It’s a prime place, but they grow on 20-foot trellises so we’ve got a lot of infrastructure to put in!”

Which is what they spend every evening and weekend doing, learning as they go.

“It really sucks in the winter when we get up and it’s pitch black and we’re feeding animals and it’s pouring rain, and we go to work and we come back and it’s pitch black and we’re feeding animals and it’s pouring rain. But as soon as it gets lighter, we come home and we’re out until it’s dark just puttering,” she says, her glow infusing more than just her words.

According to Smart Growth BC, 38 per cent of farmers in BC are over the age of 55. Opportunities to get into the industry are available to the next generation largely because arable land, always so close to the beauty developers pay top dollar to frame, has been protected since 1973 by the Agricultural Land Reserve — a province-wide zoning classification in which farming is prioritized and non-agricultural uses are controlled.

Approximately 3,814 hectares or 13 per cent of Maple Ridge’s land is in the ALR, compared to 279 hectares, or 2 per cent, in Vancouver.

“Raena’s got all sorts of ideas about the crops she’d like to have or the types of animals she’d like to have out here, and I’m 100 per cent open to them,” says Rob, who, according to his wife, has made the adjustment from city boy to farm whisperer like a natural. “But had you asked me even five years ago about the ALR, I would have probably asked if it was a fancy car.”

Rob sees any lifestyle sacrifices not only as an investment in his family’s food supply, but in his community.

“I’m starting to understand the requirement of protecting these sorts of lands so that we can maintain a good source of local food. More than anything, I look at this as an opportunity for our family to have food. But, taking it to a broader sense, I’d love to have something sustainable to provide food to our local neighbourhood here.”

High-intensity urban farming systems can yield as much as $50,000 per half-acre, but Raena is a realist:

“It’s easy to grow a lot of food, but making a livelihood from urban farming? I don’t know how people do that. To be classified as a farm you have to make $2,500 in revenue a year — and we make that — but it’s a ton of work just to make $2,500. This is a lifestyle for us and we’d love to keep building businesses, but we have no intention of quitting our jobs.”

She points to her beekeeping as an example of the risk farmers take on. Despite producing exquisite wildflower honey that sells out every year, her hives are regularly gutted by colony collapse.

“Farming is a hard way to make a living. It has been glamorized a lot lately — I read those magazines and get all dreamy-eyed, too — but the weather, disease, death… There are so many variables. It could all go to shit in a day. I don’t know if I’d want the stress of having our livelihoods depend on a farm like this. We don’t have 200 acres in Alberta where we’re producing mass crops. This is a small, diverse farm.”

A farm which waits for no one.

“The honey harvest is about two weeks before my due date, so, unless Rob suddenly becomes a beekeeper, I have every intention to keep going,” she says with a smile. “I might be in for a wake up call, though.”

For someone so matter-of-fact, it’s fitting that she says the highlight of taking up farming so far has simply been “getting projects done.”

“I would have thought you’d say marrying the love of your life on this property,” counters Rob.

Raena rolls her eyes.

“She’s not a sentimental one...” he concludes with a grin.