The Six Nations Farmers Association (SNFA) has launched a task force to look for ways to contend with a lack of farming in the community.

During the June 5 general finance meeting, SNFA introduced the Six Nations Food Sustainability and Food Security Task Force. The task force outlined their plans to bring a food sustainability and food security program to the Six Nations community. The group was asking for a Band Council Resolution (BCR) for Six Nations Elected Council's (SNEC) principal support of the project and for them to work with the task force to further assist in the next steps of the program which include bringing both an Agricultural Resource Centre and a Community owned grocery store to Six Nations.

Ruby Jacobs, task force secretary, spoke on the lack of farming within the community.

"Everywhere farming is decreasing, even across the country. In our data that we've collected, individual farming is slowly decreasing, it's more of the corporate level farming that's happening," she said. "So their vision is try and revitalize safe and healthy farming in the community, looking at different strategies and trends and all the safe farming issues that need to be looked at."

The program was developed after SNFA completed two studies in the community; the first was held in 2019 and the group asked what the community's thoughts on agriculture were. At that time, the SNFA determined there was a concern about the longevity of farming on Six Nations with some of the farmers within SNFA aging.

The group then performed the second study again in 2021 to determine if it was a practical task to be able to re-stablish a food sustainable agriculture program in the community. Jacobs said the group looked at shopping habits and how much community members are spending in the surrounding areas, and the feasibility of operating a grocery store on Six Nations.

"It's millions of dollars in just food alone that leaves the community," she said. "If you consider 2,000 homes [in the community]. Say a family spends $400 which we have to these days and then times that by 52 [weeks]. It's a huge amount of money going out of the community and we don't have anything here to keep our system providing food to the community on a constant basis."

Currently, there is one privately owned grocery store on the reserve, but Jacobs said in this program, there are hopes of launching another retail grocery store; this store would be community owned and ran by Six Nations Farmers.

"The farmers idea is that this would be owned by the community and these people that came be on the food sustainability task force, they feel like they're representing the community in opinion and in the guidance of this whole program."

The other part of the presentation looked at an Agricultural Resource Centre that Jacobs said would help educate community members to be able to be successful in their agriculture adventures.

"An agricultural Resource Centre would be available to community members and agriculture business members to assist them with the production of food and to help people learn and be educated in terms of how to grow food and anything agriculture that anybody wants to know, so that they can be successful with their agricultural adventure."

SNEC approved a BCR to the task force and agreed to provide principal support to the project and to work with the task force to further assist in the next steps of the program during the June 5 general finance meeting.

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