UFV’s Food and Agriculture Institute (FAI) is conducting a survey for Abbotsford and Chilliwack farmers to gain an understanding of farming challenges during COVID-19.
UFV English professor Dr. Michelle Superle said that Joshua Vanderheide, the owner of Field House Brewing Co. in Abbotsford, reached out to UFV in the spring with the idea of creating a survey. Over the summer semester, Superle and practicum student Meagan Pitcher became connected with the project to write the survey questions and web copy.
The survey, called Cultivate Connect, was released in November, but Superle confessed there were challenges prior to and after releasing it. “When you look at the website and you look at the survey and the questions, it looks very simple, but it’s quite astounding what has happened behind the scenes,” she said. After one research assistant took the survey questions to berry farming communities, the team modified the questions based on their feedback. UFV complies with the Canadian Research Standards, so Superle’s team had to receive ethics clearance with any changes they made to the questions prior to release.
Additionally, once they sent out the survey, there was very little response. “Perhaps what we didn’t account for is how burnt out everybody is with online stuff, with COVID-19,” Superle said. However, the survey began to take off after a UFV press release and the publication of articles in community newspapers. As of Dec. 3, Surpele estimated that the survey had received around 40 responses so far.
Other statistics websites might have broad-scale data, Superle said, but that data is usually a few years old. She hopes that Cultivate Connect, with its current and region-specific data, will be a first step toward “a much bigger and longer project.”
Dr. Cherie Enns, UFV geography professor and co-investigator for Cultivate Connect, also hopes for useful data from this project. “When we take those responses and we contextualize [them] with other data and information that’s available, we will be able to tell a story in the context of this pilot [project] about some of the challenges that farmers have faced during COVID-19,” Enns said.
With a variety of people working on the project, there are different visions and goals for the survey, but it is all in the hope of improving local food systems. “What I’d like to see come out of this eventually would be better support for local farmers to earn a living through getting paid fair wages for what they’re growing,” Superle said. “It’s about repurposing foodways [the eating practices of a region] in more ethical and productive ways. It’s about supporting farmers. It’s about increasing food security, both regionally and [in the] household.”
“I’m really interested in food justice and strategies for addressing food insecurity as well as a more sustainable food system,” Enns said. “I really think it’s critical that UFV has a voice as it relates to food systems, given our position within the Fraser Valley and the agricultural orientation of the Fraser Valley.”
Hayley Katan, a co-op student involved in setting up the Cultivate Connect website and putting the survey together, expressed her vision for the project: “Our goals are to better understand the agriculture industry locally, [and] on a recent level, how COVID-19 [has] affected it. Even the fact that we’re not getting many responses, and [the] responses we are getting [have] a lot of skipped questions, says a lot.”
The Cultivate Connect survey deadline is Dec. 10. Organizers encourage Abbotsford and Chilliwack farmers to take part in the survey.
(Markus Spiske/Unsplash)
Danaye studies English and procrastination at UFV and is very passionate about the Oxford comma. She spends her days walking to campus from the free parking zones, writing novels she'll never finish, and pretending to know how to pronounce abominable. Once she graduates, she plans to adopt a cat.
