By The Bushel Community Food Co-Operative, Peterborough, ON

The BtB Co-op is committed to producing and selling ecologically-responsible food. This means working with producers to expand our local production capacity and help more farmers achieve a strict set of sustainable food production standards. Some producers will have Canadian organic certification; other producers will be using co-op resources to work towards that goal.
Nurturing and protecting our local food supply - Losing farmers from our community also means losing farmland to urban expansion. Currently it is very cheap to buy food from abroad. This is due to lower wages, subsidized fuel costs and industrial sized farms controlled by agri-business. This is not sustainable and one day food from abroad may be very expensive if available at all. Many regions that grow much of our food are deserts that rely on ground water, not rain, for irrigation. Water tables are depleting quicker than they are replenished. Heavy watering also leads to salinization of the soil as sodium leaches up toward the surface. It is the salinization of cropland that has resulted in the collapse of civilizations before us and is responsible for the 200% increase in sodium levels of tomatoes.