An Aurora STEM education facility has partnered with a King farm to “empower” the next generation of farmers.
STEM Minds hosted a free community night at Boreal Farms in King on Aug. 21, bringing in a guest speaker from Mushroom Meadows, a mushroom-growing operation in Claremont, to teach participants how to farm their own fungi.
Brandon Hebor, who owns Boreal Farms, has partnered with Anu Bidani, founder of Aurora-based Stem Minds, to run monthly free, community nights since March. There have also been a dozen workshop sessions for children and a free, agriculture-themed summer camp for youth aged 15 and up.
Sarah O’Neill, programming co-ordinator at Stem Minds, said the camps and community nights have offered a chance for learning and for “building a community.”
“The community nights have been really good," she said. "There are certain people who will come to one and gain more of an interest and come to more. So it feels like we’re building a community that way.”
Hebor describes his farm, located on Weston Road in King, as a “living lab.”
“It’s a platform for youth to engage in agriculture in many different ways, except our agriculture programming is quite different then anybody else in the country,” he said.
On his farm, Hebor has run workshops where participants drive robots to assess the health of vegetable plants, fly drones over fields to map them, and experiment with machine learning.
“We’re trying to empower with knowledge, engage and equip the next generation of farmers," he said. "Whether or not that’s a home, hobby farmer, whether or not that it’s somebody who wants to start up something like this, or somebody who’s interested in looking at the new technologies that could be used on their farm."
The programming is funded in part by $293,800 from the province, to help youth up-skill and go on to work in agri-tech.
Training youth in agri-tech related fields is important, according to Hebor, who pointed to the rising age of farmers in the province. The average age of farm operators increased to 57 years old in 2021, from 55 years old at the time of the last Census in 2016, according to Statistics Canada.
“We’re trying to bring people together to share as much knowledge as possible to say, ‘We need the next generation of farmers,” he said.
More information about future community nights can be found online.
