Nestled in Downsview Park is a green space that is not like the rest of the recreation area.
At the corner of Keele Street and Sheppard Avenue is a farm right in the heart of Toronto. It is run by the Toronto Black Farmers and Growers Collective (TBF), who grow food there.
But they are not limited to north Toronto. About an hour’s drive west is Milton’s Country Heritage Park (CHP) where the collective does much of the same thing.
In partnership with CHP, it grows food on three plots of land on the park grounds. These serve a myriad of purposes, but a major component of that is providing a lifeline to low-income people.
“Good food here is in a very rigid class structure. If your neighbourhood isn’t well-to-do, you don’t have access to good food,” TBF co-founder Jacqueline Dwyer said.
“If you live in the poorer neighbourhoods, you pay more for the garbage they’re giving you. That’s why we do what we do,” she added.
The farms, whether in Milton or Toronto, push back against systemic food inaccessibility through “education, training and self-reliance and empowerment.”
If the group's ethos can be summed up concisely, one needs to look to co-founder Noel Livingston’s query that encompasses everything they do: “How are we going to feed ourselves?”
This is a question they are always asking and answering.
“We can sit and theorize all we want, but there's a time when we have to be practical. Application leads to be a part of that theory and it embodies that theory,” said Livington.
The group was founded in 2013 to meet to help those facing food insecurity. TBF expanded into Milton in 2107, bringing with them the goal of filling bellies and growing minds.
One of the barriers to learning agriculture skills, Dwyer laments, is the loss of interest in techniques that bring food from farm to table. “Many people have strayed away from [farming] because they don’t want their hands to get in the dirt,” she said.
Someone who farms, she said, doesn't “have to depend on anyone to feed you.”
“Our work came out of systemic anti-black racism in the general food system and food oppression in communities and spaces where we live,” noted Dwyer.
In an increasingly food insecure world in the post-COVID, post-inflation world, several pieces of academic and government literature are raising the alarm on the difficulty of attaining proper nourishment.
Traditionally low-income people in Canadian society, including black people, are some of the hardest hit. Using data from the 2021 census, a StatsCan report from late 2023 found that 38 per cent of families in the group reported difficulties acquiring and maintaining sustenance.
That number jumps 56 per cent when describing such families who are below the poverty line.
The inability to access quality and affordable food doesn’t just create physical health issues, but also neurological ones. Poor nutrition, like iron deficiency, in the first five years of childhood can cause difficulties in language comprehension.
Such cognitive impairment can also cause hyperactivity and inattention, adding to school-life woes.
When TBF first arrived at CHP, Dwyer estimates growing “over a thousand pounds of food.”
“We donated to local food banks and shelters [in Milton], and then brought it back to Toronto and did the same thing,” Dwyer recalled. Kale, peppers, cabbages, tomatoes, eggplants, beets carrots, cucumbers and many more items are grown on farms run by the collective.
The group is hoping to expand their operations by purchasing two trailers, one will be a commercial kitchen and the other will be a freezer. Their mobility means that both sites will benefit from them. They are accepting donations through Country Heritage Park to make this happen.
Anyone interested in donating is asked to contact CHP.
More information about the Toronto Black Farmers and Growers Collective is on their website.