Meet the podcaster filling the airwaves with N.L. farming and food wisdom
Ivan Emke has produced more than 70 episodes of his podcast Fit to Eat
From The Ground Up is a CBC series in collaboration with Food Producers Forum, looking at how small-scale growers are digging and dreaming agricultural innovations in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Despite the large pile of podcasts to his name, it turns out Ivan Emke is actually something of a reluctant radio host.
"I kept saying, 'Oh, somebody should do a radio show about Newfoundland and Labrador agriculture and so on,'" Emke, the man behind Fit To Eat: The N.L. Farm and Food Show, told CBC News in a recent interview.
"And the trouble with that is, people nod and nobody does anything. And finally, I just kind of took my tape recorder and went to some farmers sheepishly, and they talked to me."
They talked, and talked and talked — Emke has produced 78 episodes and counting of Fit To Eat, a project that began a few years ago in the wake of his retirement as a professor and administrator at Grenfell Campus in Corner Brook.
Emke's conversational spark is readily apparent; I know, as we swapped interviewing roles one October afternoon in a sort of meta-broadcasting meet-up in my backyard for both CBC and Fit to Eat that turned into a chat on all things agricultural and beyond.
Emke has a wealth of farming lore to share, having interviewed a who's who of provincial food growers and food lovers over his podcast's lifespan. His guest list has an omnivorous quality about it, from chefs to veteran farmers to people tinkering with backyard innovations, as long as they're all involved in what Emke called "this grand project of trying to feed ourselves a little bit more this year than we did last year."
His only distaste, it appears, is limiting the definition of Newfoundland and Labrador agriculture.
"I think it's really wrong-headed to think of agriculture only in a terms of a sector or an industry that is above a certain per cent. You know, you've got to have $30,000 worth of farm gate sales before we consider you a farmer," he said.
The 'gateway drug' of gardening
In his experience — Emke was born into a farming family in Ontario, and engaged with the local agricultural scene for decades alongside his university tenure — small-scale food growing efforts make a big difference in the sector.
That's particularly so in a province with such a tiny amount of what official bodies like Statistics Canada deem commercial farming operations. According to the latest Statistics Canada data, there were 407 farms in Newfoundland and Labrador, the fewest of any province.
The cost of entering farming is steep, and paycheques often years away. With that in mind, said Emke, it's important to discuss and elevate all provincial food-growing efforts.
"The more we can entice people in, like give them the little gateway drug of a backyard garden and a few chickens, and eventually they start becoming farmers, that's a good way to to get them in," he said.
"It would be such a shame, such a loss to this province, if we didn't take the energy and the excitement of so many young people who want to just do a bit in their backyard and grow some more, and we didn't somehow harness that so that they could grow not only for themselves, but for other people as well."
There's hope and empowerment in the small-scale, said Emke, particularly in the face of the well-worn narrative of the province's precarious food supply.
"With a big problem like food security in Newfoundland and Labrador, it's really hard for people to think of, 'Well, what's my part in this? How do I play a part in this?'" he said.
The future for N.L. farming
Beyond the backyard, Emke hopes to see more strides in the distribution side of the province's food-growing efforts.
"I'm really interested in new models of sales and marketing," he said, pointing to progress like the Western N.L. Food Hub pilot project in Corner Brook, or communal cold storage initiatives for produce popping up in rural areas.
"It would be nice to be able to explore more of those collaborative, cooperative opportunities to change the future for lots of people," he said.
His optimism is tempered with a hard reality. Creating arable land out of the Newfoundland and Labrador's rocky terrain is hard work, and Emke is now seeing some of his show's guests retire from their farms with no one to take over.
"That land will be in alders in 10 years. And so that I don't focus on very much on the show because that's sort of a more negative thing," he said.
"But that's always in the back of the mind, you know? This is not a given. The fact that we did increase food production in Newfoundland and Labrador is not a given."
While there's hard work ahead, Emke hopes Fit to Eat helps the momentum he sees in the sector, an area he sees as key to the future of so many communities across Newfoundland and Labrador.
"The real big promise of development in rural is agriculture. No question about it. Everything else is not sustainable over the long term," he said.
- Have a farming story to share? Email fromthegroundup@cbc.ca
Emke has no plans to end his podcast, even though he's retired to southern Ontario and returns to the province occasionally for both Fit to Eat research and leisure.
The podcast has become the place where he's able to "let [his] farmer out," he said, although he may air a few more repeats now and then to ease his broadcasting schedule and give a bit more planning time to an enterprise he never expected to take on in the first place.
"I'm just happy that it happened. And now it's like every other monster you create: how do you get off?"
