Bowen Agricultural Alliance

The Bowen Agricultural Alliance is pleased to be the recipient of an Advancing Urban Agriculture grant sponsored by Vancouver Coastal Health. The $2,000 grant will be applied to a number of projects aimed at encouraging youth and community learning around local food and agriculture topics. These projects include:

• Initiation of a youth agriculture development / mentorship program. While the BICS school garden and in-class food and nutrition programs will continue to provide broad-spectrum awareness for Bowen school children, BAA would like to encourage a handful of motivated students to pursue more in depth food and agriculture projects. A likely conduit for this would be a 4-H program that would team youth participants with community resources. Example projects that would be feasible on Bowen would include beekeeping, sheep, poultry, and horticulture. With no existing 4-H legacy on Bowen, this initiative will require program setup facilitation and leadership training.

• Provide experienced mentorship to Bowen’s beekeeping community. Beekeeping has received significant attention on the island in the past three years. Through two successive intro courses (2008 and 2009) and the efforts of a volunteer organization (Bees on Bowen), the number of beekeepers has grown from one or two to now over a dozen people. In spite of these positive developments Bowen — like other parts of the province — has witnessed significant (and expensive) hive losses this winter. Without some in-the-field guidance and support from an experienced beekeeper, we risk losing new beekeepers to attrition. Contacts at the BC provincial apiculture program have identified a North Shore mentor for Bowen and we would like to encourage this relationship by offsetting travel costs and providing an honorarium for this resource to the island.

• Youth Beekeeping Bursary. As a tie-in to our primary goal of engaging youth, we would also like to offer a beekeeping bursary to a 12 – 25 year old on the island to offset introductory course costs and/or the capital costs of equipment and livestock. (More information here).

• Ongoing community agricultural learning and information exchange. Two Open Space workshops held in Fall 2009 resulted in a huge amount of community initiative development and knowledge sharing between neophyte food enthusiasts and experienced growers/farmers. Participants commented in particular on the value of having off-island resources to provide insight and guidance from their work in food policy strategy and community food network development. Over the next year, BAA would like to host at least two Open Space workshops with the aim of developing the local food and agriculture network that has begun to emerge through ideas sharing and practical skills sharing.

If you’d like more information about these initiatives, or would like to get involved, leave a comment or contact BAA via email.