Sign up for Email Updates

Live Weather @ FortWhyte

Since 2003, the award-winning FortWhyte Farms program has been working with marginalized youth, using the practice of sustainable urban agriculture to build confidence and leadership skills, provide employment training, while instilling values of individual and community self-reliance. FortWhyte Farms is a social enterprise – a business whose purpose goes beyond a purely financial ‘bottom line’ to see profit in the far reaching social and economic benefits that extend into the lives of individuals, families and communities.

Read on to find out more about this ground breaking program.

Weekly Newsletters - 2009

Keep up to date with FortWhyte Farms.  Click the link below to receive regular updates throughout the growing season on what is available for sale at FortWhyte Farms.

 Sign up for Email Updates

 

Summers at FortWhyte Farms

Summer brings a literal buzz of activity to FortWhyte Farms, but not just from the bee hives!  Young people who have been working on FortWhyte Farms projects throughout the winter and spring are employed full-time as part of our Farm “internship” program. These interns receive in-depth training in all our areas of production, assist in operating our on-site and urban market stands and develop leadership and employment skills. As participants continue to progress through the program and build their skills, they will become mentors for newer participants. Eventually the FortWhyte Farms participants will receive assistance in bridging from our program into higher education or further employment opportunities.

 

FortWhyte Farms Photo Gallery

 

Background on FortWhyte Farms

FortWhyte has always believed that healthy, sustainable communities are built on three essential and interdependent cornerstones: a healthy natural environment; a healthy, vibrant economic environment, and a healthy and just social environment.

Established over three decades ago, FortWhyte has long promoted the interdependence between the first two cornerstones. It has only been in the last few years, since its major expansion of land and facilities, that FortWhyte has developed the capacity and resources to add social responsibility/justice to its mandate. FortWhyte Farms is a program that fulfills this mandate using urban agriculture as a catalyst in the creation of sustainable communities.

Working with a network of partners that includes the Sister MacNamara and Freight House Boys and Girls Clubs, Gordon Bell and R.B. Russell High Schools and Marymound, FortWhyte Farms engages at-risk youth and provides them with the skills to increase their economic and personal self-reliance using hands-on training in innovative sustainable urban agriculture techniques. Participants learn these skills by assisting in the production and sale of products harvested from renewable sources on FortWhyte’s 640-acre site.

The long-term goal of this program is to serve as a catalytic, transformative force in the lives of at-risk youth and their families by providing hands-on training in sustainable urban-based agriculture, thus providing them with a sense of hope, purpose and place, new and improved sources of income, and enhanced access to high quality, locally produced food.

 

Beekeeping

FortWhyte Farms participants assist in the management of 30 bee hives on site at FortWhyte with the capacity of producing 4000 pounds of honey per year. The FortWhyte Farms headquarters houses a complete honey extracting and bottling facility, allowing participants to be a part of the entire cycle of honey production.

Horticulture

A 1/2 acre garden plot is used to provide horticultural training and to grow produce for sale at an on-site market and in urban farmers markets.  An additional 150-acres of cultivated land exist on the property for potential future program use. Since 2007,  over 14,000 pounds of vegetables have been produced on in this space! 

  

Pastured Poultry

Since Spring 2008, the inner-city youth who participate in the FortWhyte Farms program at FortWhyte Alive, have received hands-on training in raising Pastured Poultry. The youth are involved with caring for the chicks as they brood indoors, daily feeding and pen moving, pen construction, crating chickens to be sent for processing and selling (and eating!) the final product.

Raising chickens on pasture is a method that combines the advantages of birds raised indoors in confinement with the advantages of free-range poultry. The birds are brooded indoors from 1 day of age to about 4 weeks, when they are moved outside onto pasture, and housed in movable pens. The birds are fed a mixed feed that provides their minimum nutritional requirements, but, because the are able to forage on grasses, plants and insects, their diet has much greater variety than birds raised on feed alone, and the result is a more nutrient-dense, tastier meat. Each day, the pen is moved to fresh grass. As the birds are moved around the pasture, they enrich the soil through their grazing, manure and scratching. The pens help protect them from the elements and predators.

 

Tribute Orchard

The first 300 trees of our fruit orchard were planted in May 2008.  The prairie hardy apples, pears and plums are joined by raspberry, saskatoon, honeyberry and sour cherries.  To find out how you can pay tribute to someone in your life through the sponsorship of a tree in the orchard, click here.


Passing on the Gift

Heifer International, one of FortWhyte Farms’ major supporters, employs a strategy of “Passing on the Gift” whereby people and groups who receive support from Heifer, commit to share their livestock, knowledge, resources, and skills to form an expanding network of individual and community self-reliance. Passing on the Gift is a key program component for FortWhyte Farms participants who have benefited from Heifer support.

 

Donate Now

FortWhyte Farms contact information: