Rethinking Lifestyle

Many people know that things could be better but they don’t do anything about it. Not so with Kalynn Spain. Kalynn grew up a city girl in Winnipeg and took an undergraduate degree at the University of Winnipeg.

Her parents, especially her mother had a major influence on her agricultural and food education. She remembers enjoying working in the garden, canning, freezing, drying vegetables and fruit and then planning meals from scratch under the passionate guidance of her mother. Kalynn participated with her family in the 100-mile Manitoba Diet in the fall of 2007. In the process of sourcing local foods she was introduced to local farms and farmers. This stimulated her interest in where her food came from, how it was produced and issues that direct-marketing farmers have to deal with.

She discovered the difficulty in accessing land and accessing the marketplace so she set about to improve the situation for small farmers in Manitoba.

Kalynn started attending local food conferences while working for Food Matters Manitoba as their School Outreach Coordinator. After her graduation from the University of Winnipeg in 2013 she had an audacious plan of visiting 80 small farms in Manitoba in order to gather stories, pictures and information to build a foundation for another dream goal she had: to develop a website that would become smallfarmsmanitoba.com, listing all the 80 farms plus more so that customers could link directly to the farms and find them on a map of Manitoba.

Not only did she provide a marketplace for small farmers, she knew that these small farmers longed for a connection to other similar farmers for mutual support and learning. Kalynn then organized the Small Farms Conference of Manitoba to achieve her two main goals: (1) Educate consumers about buying directly from local food and farm- products producers in Manitoba and (2) foster connections between these same farms and farm based business owners within Manitoba. The first Small Farms conference occurred in 2015, and another one took place in January of this year.

Today there are 155 farms listed at smallfarmsmanitoba.com You can buy beef, bison, chicken, duck, goat, goose, lamb, pork, rabbit, rainbow trout, turkey, innumerable vegetables, fruits, grains and legumes, dairy and eggs and a number of non-food products like fibres, personal care products, seeds, plants and trees even horse boarding, a jobs board and educational opportunities are available. This is an incredible marketplace offering an amazing diversity of products and services.

We need look no further than Kalynn Spain to find an inspiring story of how the influence of family and the passionate drive of an individual can change the world even a little bit. As the American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only that that ever has.”