About Us

The Centre for Sustainable Food Systems

We seek to create resilient, thriving, and socially just food systems for all.

The Centre for Sustainable Food Systems (CSFS) aims to help address some of the most challenging issues facing our food system today through research, teaching and community engagement at the UBC Farm and beyond. The CSFS connects researchers and educators across the UBC campus and grounds their work at an operational farm designed to demonstrate, develop and model food system solutions. The CSFS is committed to developing partnerships across UBC campus, as well as across B.C., Canada, and around the globe. CSFS associate members work to develop innovations in agroecosystem management for food security and ecosystem services, while honouring, respecting, and protecting diverse ecosystems and knowledge pathways within Indigenous and agrarian food systems.

The CSFS is responsible for managing the UBC Farm’s food cultivation and stewardship of the surrounding forest and the delivery of a wide range of programs. Learn more about our strategic plan.

About UBC Farm

Our living laboratory is committed to finding solutions to local and global challenges facing food systems sustainability.

UBC Farm is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam). It is a place where research, learning, and community come together and thrive.

Two centres operate on the UBC Farm site: the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems (CSFS), and xʷc̓ic̓əsəm: Indigenous Health Research and Education Garden, which runs Indigenous initiatives with community partners. The UBC Farm features cultivated annual crop fields, perennial hedgerows and orchards, beehives, Indigenous-led gardens, and forest stands. Produce from the farm is certified organic through the Canadian Organic Standards and Regulations, and includes more than 200 varieties of fruits, vegetables, and herbs.

Situated within a 90-year-old coastal hemlock forest, the 24-hectare UBC Farm was started by students in 2001 and since then our integrated organic farm and forest ecosystem has become a key part of UBC’s agroecology research and education, as well as an important Vancouver food hub. UBC’s Faculty of Land and Food Systems oversees the operations of UBC Farm.