Reid Allaway is known as the handyman at the Ferme Tourne-Sol cooperative in Les Cedres.
The organic market garden is small but busy, with 20 employees working to build resilience into its 15 acres of land for over 20 years. The farm runs on a direct-to-consumer model, primarily through the delivery of community supported weekly vegetable baskets, as well as their own line of seeds.
“By having these relationships with local families, we are protecting ourselves from market fluctuations to a degree. But in a year like this, we’re also significantly protecting them because we set our pricing for this year’s vegetables and seeds six or more months ago,” said Allaway. “So, when prices for commodities or grocery store prices for vegetables or seeds go up, they typically aren’t reflected in our prices,” he explained.
Another aspect that is shielding the farm somewhat from the high price of oil and gas this spring is a concerted effort to move away from fossil fuels. According to Allaway, this grew out of personal interest and improved performance targets rather than a strict desire to diminish their oil consumption.
Allaway said that while an oil furnace is still used in their seedling greenhouse, they have worked to organize their planting schedules, build insulated germination chambers, and optimize their heating schedule to use the least amount of energy possible in the spring. “The amount of heating oil consumed for the 700 odd families that we feed out of that greenhouse is quite trivial,” he said, noting it would not make sense to change their heating source.
A change that did make sense was with their delivery van. The farm switched to an electric vehicle, now affectionately referred to as “the elec-truck,” three seasons ago. “It basically halved our carbon footprint for the farm,” said Allaway, who suggests their previous vehicle consumed more fuel than their four diesel tractors and seedling greenhouse combined.
He acknowledged that the van, which was purchased in part by crowdfunding, doesn’t quite pencil out fiscally because they prefer to keep their delivery routes short and direct. “We don’t particularly like driving. We prefer farming,” he said, noting the same could be said for a lot of the people who helped fund their purchase.
Since then, Allaway began to explore more electric conversion projects, and switched most of the small internal-combustion machines on the farm to battery electric. He is also now working part-time for Thiessen Tillage Equipment which manufactures electric weeding and other tools for small farms.
“There is not a single converted machine on our farm that we could go back to using a combustion engine, because every single one of them has been so dramatically improved that from a performance standpoint, no one on our farm would tolerate it,” he said, with a laugh.