Home

Community Harvest Kingston operates under Loving Spoonful’s Urban Agriculture umbrella. We grow vegetables locally at various urban farm locations and work to enhance access to this fresh, agro-ecologically grown food for marginalized communities in Kingston.

Values

• CHK values food sovereignty and self-determination as a foundation for community and individual health.
• CHK grows food in ways that consider and adhere to natural ecosystem processes in the management of sustainable agricultural ecosystems.
• CHK aims to benefit, complement, leverage and/or expand on, rather than duplicate, minimize, or create unnecessary work around the efforts of Kingston communities, initiatives, organizations and the municipal government.
• CHK commits to conducting our work in an anti-oppressive framework. We are accountable to marginalized communities & economically exploited communities, and will make all reasonable efforts to ensure that our work supports the needs of these communities.

Food Sovereignty

is a continuous process “of strengthening community, livelihoods and social and environmental sustainability in the production, consumption and distribution of nutritious and culturally appropriate food” (Desmarais and Wittman 2014).

Community Harvest’s food sovereignty focus is on supporting and celebrating biodiversity and agro-ecological garden/farm management practices (see below), as well as social-based practices with direct relationships with eaters.

We aim to contribute to transforming the food system so that it is more socially just by connecting with organizations who serve marginalized communities, to survey those individuals about what food insecurity they are facing, what crops/produce they have trouble accessing, and to help fill in those gaps. We also engage with eaters by designing days that community members can help in the gardens with hands-on work; we make efforts to create no-cost and low-cost food access to make healthy, fresh food accessible to food insecure households.

Agro-Ecology 

CHK works to grow food reliably while protecting biodiversity, water, soil and beneficial microbes, with specific strategies including seed and crop diversity, crop rotations, cover cropping, attracting beneficial insects, soil amendments, mulching and more.

Agro-ecology is not new- small farms all over the world have supported families and communities for centuries using these types of practices, developing robustness and resilience by necessity as they continue to adjust to and manage changes in pests, diseases, and climates.