Story by: Kate Petrusa
I thought I must be lost for sure. I was driving down 128th Street in Surrey, passing by several large rental halls with neon signs, interspersed with industrial truck yards lined with dusty dump trucks and popular fast food chains. I turned on the next street. On my left was a forested area with a substantial collection of mossy, rusted cars dispersed throughout; on my right, sat a medium-sized brown house with a two car garage and a sloped driveway. The address I had scribbled on notepaper told me this was the place. I walked up to the door, still unsure how an urban farm could possibly be located here. I knocked. No answer. I rang the doorbell. I rang again. Beginning to get nervous about being lost again, I turned to head back to the car, when Doug, the urban farmer strode around the corner of the house and greeted me with a handshake and a warm smile.
Unique Access to Urban Farmland
Doug's 1949 Farmall Cub parked in his 1/4 acre market garden. Photo: Doug Zaklan
Doug Zaklan is a 2011 graduate of the UBC Farm Practicum, and an urban farmer heading into his second season of growing food in Surrey, BC. Doug’s extended family owns a large tract of land. They have owned the land since before Surrey was a city. A portion of the land is rented for commercial purposes, but the rest of the property is a 9-acre pasture with a ¼ acre garden and a modest home, tucked to one side, where Doug’s uncle and aunt reside. The pasture has a small creek running though the north end, and is grazed by a neighbour’s cattle each year.
“The landscape you see is very different from what it used to be”, Doug says. “When my great-grandparents first came here in 1928, it was raw land, forested with salmon spawned creeks, and sparse dirt roads. They were called stump farmers because they cleared the area by blowing the stumps out with dynamite making it into arable land.”
Doug’s Great grandmother Marta, left Yugoslavia on a ship with a one-year old child in her arms, via Norway to Eastern Canada and then by train across the country to Vancouver. There, she met his great grandfather, also from Yugoslavia originally, who ran a pool hall in Vancouver. Although his great-grandfather enjoyed the excitement and glamour of early Vancouver, Marta convinced him to move to the “boonies”. They bought raw land and grew raspberries and strawberries.
“There’s some dollar signs on this land now. This used to be an old Yugoslavian community and most of them gave into the dollar sign, but I guess there has been something better than that here. I’m fortunate that the older generation has been that dedicated to keeping the land. I’d just be another young guy trying to farm on land that I don’t have…I definitely feel grateful for my situation.”
First-Year Farming
Doug's automated irrigation system. Photo: Doug Zaklan
In March 2011, Doug asked his uncle if he could grow food on his existing ¼ acre garden at the back of his home. He was surprised when his uncle gladly offered “as much land as you can handle”. When Doug took on the ¼ acre garden last year, parts of the garden had existing beds, but about a third of the area was sod. Doug and a group of devoted friends turned in the sod with shovels and tilled with a rototiller in order to create 11 new beds. Doug produced enough food to attend four markets at Surrey Central Farmer’s Market that summer, a 10-minute drive from the farm.
Starting and managing a ¼ acre market garden and small flock of 23 chickens in Surrey and fulfilling his 22 hour per week responsibilities at UBC Farm in Vancouver, meant that he was not home as often as he needed to be. However, his busy schedule helped Doug hone the secret to his success: “just charge it”. In other words, “you just gotta do it.” It also meant that he had to build two automated systems on his farm: one for irrigating the garden and another opening the chicken coop door.
Doug was really excited about his irrigation system, and rightfully so. “Everything has been coming in line at the right time. I came into possession of a bunch of plumbing and irrigation stuff for free… so I built the whole automated irrigation system. It was a great learning experience…Because of the nature of the source of the water, it goes through three buildings before it gets to my feed. The system then has a very low PSI, so having a computer control enabled me to water all 6 zones remotely. It allows you to adjust how long and when watering happens.” He also built an automated chicken coop door, so that his chickens could access their run at sunrise and close the coop down after sundown, without human supervision.
Just Charge It
When I visited Doug, he was in the middle of sawing and hammering away on his newly constructed Harvest Hut, a structure for washing produce and shielding it from the elements. With the help of family and friends, Doug built the Harvest Hut frame within 3 weeks: “we had ‘Work Wednesdays’. My uncle Dan was here, as was Kristoff, Adam, and I. Just having all that help, really got the structure up quickly.”
“I’ve learned hat I have to exert myself a lot, like tire myself out to be happy. If I didn’t have support from family and friends, I don’t think I could do it. You can only weed so much by yourself. I really want this to become a community thing and have a lot of people learning.”
Building the Harvest Hut. Photo: Brittany Buchanan
Since last season, Doug has already built a walk-in cooler and dry office space out of an old portable. He used an abandoned portable was a remnant left behind by a truck driver on the neighbouring Zaklan family commercial lot. “I was thinking about getting a shipping container, but then realized, ‘hey, there’s a portable sitting over [at the adjacent property]’. This portable was just as good and the price was right! I just had to make sure it would clear the power lines when lifting and transporting it with a crane”. In disbelief, I asked if a family connection had helped with the crane too. In a matter-of-fact tone, Doug replied, “No, you just make the connections.” Doug framed the walk-in cooler, insulated it and enlisted help from his dad to install the 120V and 220V electrical system.
“It’s all about nature; I was inspired by nature to start farming. I wanted to do some practical schooling, which brought me to the UBC Farm. From here I’m trying to better understand nature and live a system that is less detrimental to our planet, via the farm.”
Down the Road
For the 2012 season, Doug hopes to have his Harvest Hut up and running, a new greenhouse completed, and a crop rotation plan underway. Even more ambitious, is Doug’s goal to till in another acre of the existing fallow land surrounding the original garden and expand his growing space to an acre and a quarter. He already tried to dig up the sod on the new land with his tractor he purchased from friends at the Farmer’s Market, but the 1949 Farmall Cub “wasn’t the right tool for the job”. “I’m going to hire someone to plow it, and I know I can get somebody to rototill. I want to try and plow first so I reduce grass in the field. I’ve dug some holes out there and the soil looks really nice…it will be interesting to see how the grass turns over and assess the results of a soil test.”
Doug would like to use a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model on his farm, in which his customers purchase a share at the start of the year and are promised a weekly box of fresh produce through the summer and early fall. He has already received a lot of interest in his CSA from family and friends. “I made a CSA booklet and gave it to one person who took it to work. Now seven people want to be part of it…I’d like to do a CSA because I’d like to have a little more connection with my customers and get their feedback. I’m shooting for 15 shares.”
When I asked if he would like to have the entire property under cultivation, he replied, “I’ve got lots of plans, but we will see what happens. We will see if I can make it work, financially and otherwise. I don’t have any experience doing any of this, so it’s all a bit of a pipe dream right now. Even getting to this point was a pipe dream, but it came true. I would definitely like to be doing more annual veggie production and I’d like to do more animal husbandry, but I think it wise to expand growing space as I feel I can handle it. Right now, I feel like I’ve spread myself pretty far. I’m having trouble taking a Sunday off!”
A view of a bit of the land Doug is working with. Photo: Doug Zaklan
“I think we are super detached from knowing where our food comes from…I think I’m contributing to fighting that detachment in a very small way if I’m doing a 15-person CSA – that’s only 15 people in the Lower Mainland for whom I’m providing a part of their diet. But I hope to do a good job of it, and I hope that I teach a thing or two, and that I inspire somebody else to do it. And I hope to build it every year and do a better job every year… to do a tiny slice of what needs to be done. That’s where it has to start. It’s a little bit bold, but I don’t know what’s more naïve, doing a little bit, or just saying, ‘there’s no hope’.”
“There’s always an opportunity out there, and as you get positive feedback and you feel like you are getting somewhere, you gain momentum. The hardest part is just to start. But you have to have faith that this is what you should be doing and you can do it, and without a doubt, there is some space of land that you can be growing on.”
As I drove home from my visit with Doug, through traffic lights and the yellow hue of streetlights in suburban Vancouver, I was tremendously inspired by the tenacity and enthusiasm that Doug and his friends showed for their new farming endeavour. I saw with renewed freshness the challenge many new farmers are taking on: making lasting, positive changes to our current food system. May everyone face this task head-on and find the motivation to ‘just charge it’!
