Most tourists visiting Costa Rica flock to the beaches. But after we landed in San Jose, we found ourselves weaving dangerously up narrow roads through jungles and finally landing in a quaint, red-roofed farming village sixteen hundred meters above sea level.

I wasn’t supposed to be able to grow cauliflower without pesticides. Experienced farmers told me that any brassica crop in the valley would be overrun with caterpillars and infested with aphids if you didn’t zap them every ten days with an insecticide.

It was always an adventure for us kids when Opa pulled his station wagon into the yard because we never knew what would emerge from the back of his car.

I was lugging a crate of freshly picked beets to the market last Saturday when a customer holding a bag of salad mix in her hand

A few years after we started farming, my old man told me to get off the farm, put on some nice clothes, and start reaching out to restaurants to sell the abundance of food we were growing.

A few years ago, I was dropping potatoes into long furrows when a rusty pickup ground to a stop on the side of the road.

Every summer an old Italian would come to our market to sell us figs. Scarcely acknowledging my presence, he’d emerge slowly from his VW Golf, open the back, and reveal his prized fruit. Then he’d look up at me proudly

A few weeks ago, I flew over the Fraser Valley and with my face pressed against the cold windowpane, I gazed down at the green cover crops that carpeted the land.

Our market garden is planted beside the Trans Canada Highway next to a bustling intersection. As we go about our work transplanting cabbages, harvesting carrots and hilling potatoes we’re surrounded by the constant drone of cars, the honking of horns and the roar of trucks.

If you ever join us on a farm tour, I’ll ask you to meet at the front of the barn. Then I’ll take you and your friends past the overflowing bins of squash, onions, and potatoes to the fields where the crops are grown.

Harvesting for the market becomes more difficult as we approach the winter solstice. On dark, rainy mornings a solemn reluctance spreads like a grey fog across the faces of the farmers as they pull on their raingear, gloves, and boots.

Modern agriculture has tried to convince us that chemical sprays and artificial fertilizers are indispensable to agriculture. Some imagine that farming without the use of these ‘technological tools’ is like building a home without a hammer.

Since the early part of the last century there has been an exodus from the food-producing countryside to the cities of concrete, fumes, and noise. Industrial agriculture, fueled by cheap credit and cheaper oil, steadily replaced diversified family farms with monoculture corporations. Farmers were told to go big or go home.