Amy, Tim, and Rowan are farming in Salmon River, Nova Scotia.

Tim Morcom, raised in South Africa, the UK, and New Brunswick, made Nova Scotia his home in 2014 when he moved here to study agriculture. He learned how to farm and ran a student-led market garden on campus, helping teach other students how to grow their own food. He is now farming part-time and doing a part-time masters’s degree at Dalhousie, where he is researching how to make agriculture more sustainable. His project uses crab shells— fishing industry waste—to create a biochar, which he then enriches with dairy industry waste. This results in an ‘enriched biochar fertilizer’ that is carbon negative, reduces fishing and dairy industry pollution, and provides farmers with an effective slow release fertilizer that does not leach or pollute like current fertilizers do.

Amy Donovan is an author, artist and anthropologist originally from Cape Breton. Trained in classical oil painting, she uses oil paints to create large canvases that are rich and deeply textured, with the natural world as inspiration. Amy has published fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry in a variety of anthologies and journals, and is currently completing her doctorate in cultural anthropology at McGill University, where her research centres on whales and the ways humans know them.

Rowan is the newest addition to our family. He is currently staunchly opposed to being confined by descriptors—three months old and engaging with the world more and more. We can’t wait to introduce him to the farm.