Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Theme: Empathy

 

Today was a funny day. It feels like we’ve been working on this for months, but it’s only day two. I also wasn’t pumped with as much adrenaline (I think I used it all for day 1) so the day seemed longer.

 

Although it was a long day, it was a very great day! I’m very grateful that we were able to have such a positive meeting with Rod Olson, and that he was willing to meet with us on such short notice (and, he answered every question that we hit him with an honest and genuine answer)!

 

***

Earlier today, I called my Mem and Pep (my grandparents), who grew up in two completely different areas of Canada, living two very different lifestyles, but both grew up on farms. This summer I lived with Mem and Pep, and often times when I was asking them for stories about their childhood they would often start the story with, “Well, we were very poor, so…” which always struck me, but that was how farms were. Of course farming has changed right? Yes, but no.

 

Mem, grew up the oldest of 13 kids on a farm in the small community of Hearst Ontario. My first question to my grandma was what kind of crops they grew, oats, hay, wheat and barley. These were mainly to feed the livestock. The rest was used for the family, making flour and such. The thing with this farm is that they didn’t sell any of their crops, what they grew supported them. They did everything by hand and horse. Until the few times when they were able to afford new tools, such as a flour maker, and a tractor.

 

Pep on the other hand grew up on a farm in a small community in New Brunswick. I bet you can guess the only crop they grew. Yes, potatoes. On this farm however, they grew to sell, and didn’t make much of a profit, just enough to get by. They also worked lot by hand, but also had some machines and horses. The profit they made was by selling their potatoes at the market, I asked if larger farms had a negative impact on their profit, but he said that they had little competition because of where they lived.

 

The main similarity that I learnt these two farms shared was that neither kept track of crops bought, planted, harvested, etc.

 

As I said before, farming has changed a lot, but also very little.

 

“I’m a farmer.”

This was Rod’s response when I asked what he does. He is a farmer here in the city of Calgary (which is pretty darn exciting, because it’s quite baffling to see farms thrive in such an urban area).

 

As I said before, Rod answered all of our questions, which leaves us with a 46 minute long audio recording of really useful insight about not only small farming, but city farming, what resources are lacking/could be improved on, as well as what is needed in the small farming community (such as more research).

 

As we chatted, and asked a lot of questions, I asked Rod what his methods (if any) were for keeping track of everything. Rod also shared the similarity to my grandparents farms of ‘lack of data tracking’. He did however mention, that he wears all of the hats for his farms, he is the CEO, the manager, the financial guy, the training guy, the hands on farmer, etc. SO, data collection isn’t exactly super easy to keep track of. But! If there was a resource with a way of helping his small farm grow by using a digital tool, he would be very excited to use it. Of course, emphasizing the personalized and affordable aspects of this resource.

 

(I’m a little over 500 words…)

In conclusion, we were very lucky to get really useful perspectives in such short notice. I’m excited to see how they come into play with our solution brainstorms tomorrow.