The University of British Columbia

Old UBC Farm Website: for nostalgia's sake?

If you happened to be a regular visitor to the UBC Farm’s website, you may have noticed something’s happened: the old site is no more. Besides occasional updates on the front page, not much had changed on the site since we first went online in 2001. This meant that as the UBC Farm grew and flourished, our presence on the internet lagged behind. A confluence of factors prompted the new change you’re now looking at. Our academic plan, “Cultivating Place,” the UBC Plan, “Place and Promise,” and UBC’s new brand, “A Place of Mind” all launched in 2009, and with this across-the-board renewal it seemed appropriate that we make ourselves a new place on the web. This proliferation of new place-based plans complemented a coming-of-age year for social media tools that are now used globally and didn’t even exist when our last site went live. This means that our new site is — finally — a collaborative effort, integrating posts, feeds, and tweets from many different voices. If we can now send a tweet or write a post from anywhere on-farm or off-farm with an internet connection, there’s a chance that the new site can keep pace with the projects in the field.

The site is intended to be partly a guide for the UBC community wanting to know about the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems, what it does, and how to get involved with its programs. It’s also a place for the existing UBC Farm community to document a story as it unfolds, recording successes, challenges, and the progression of dynamic place. Most importantly, though, we hope that our story will be of use to communities around the region and around the world looking for new ways to bring together land, food, and community, looking to bridge the rural and the urban, and asking questions about how to feed our growing cities in the future.