After visiting Daria Zovi at her Quarry Collective farm on a sunny last afternoon of 2025, I spent the rest of the day wishing I was 10 or 20 years younger and ready for a career change.
I was there to interview Zovi about the Neighbourhood Farm Program (NFP), with a farmer training session being one of the key components. It will see a small group of learners trained at her group’s farm — also the site of Chorus Frog Nursery — from April to September with curriculum developed in collaboration with the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU). Crop planning and delivery, soil and plant health will be covered, along with how to develop a neighbourhood farm program, which Zovi and others have recently done. Trainees would then begin growing food for a neighbourhood site the following year.
Hearing Zovi’s passion for the whole NFP and the farmer training program made me want to sign up right away.
Quarry Farm has been a pilot for the neighbourhood farm concept, which gives new potency to the term “locally grown” and is part of fostering resiliency in the face of climate change impacts. Last year members of the Stewart Road pod of Salt Spring’s emergency program were invited to become part of the Chorus Frog Neighbourhood Farm (CFNF), contributing funds, labour and ideas to the initiative based at the certified organic farm that was created from an old quarry site. It saw 30 neighbourhood households sign up and meet before the growing season to determine what they would like the farm to grow, contribute whatever amount of money they wanted to the venture and then drop by the farm to pick up produce as it was harvested or processed. Some people also volunteered or contributed in other ways. Residents with excess produce from their own gardens were invited to bring it to the farm. While each family was asked to write down items they took from the cooler, they didn’t have to tally the value, although those calculations were done by Zovi’s team to provide data to the program.
“The thing that was super interesting is I put in the cooler $20,000 worth of produce, and we got $20,000 worth in money and time and exchange — and it all went — but there is no formula for that. That is complete randomness.”
Funds covered costs such as the land lease, seeds, potting mix and fertilizers. While some people were concerned about Zovi being paid for her time, she said that was adequately covered by what the farm makes by selling produce to wholesale customers.
At their end-of-season meeting last fall, the consensus was that the program had worked so well that it should run the same way in 2026.
“It’s very emotional for me to see how people are so grateful and how appreciative they are,” she said about the collective’s participants. “Food is a very deep-seated emotional thing.”
Replicating the CFNF model in other Salt Spring pod areas is Zovi’s inspired vision, and she is willing to provide all kinds of support to make it happen. But flexibility is obviously needed to make a program work for those involved.
“Other neighbourhoods could set up something completely different. They could say, ‘Let’s do a veggie box program.’ That’s fine.”
Anyone wanting more information about any aspect of the NFP can visit ssiagalliance.org/nfp or contact Zovi at nfp.saltspring@gmail.com. In addition to people for the farmer training program, individuals who have land that could be farmed are needed, as are neighbourhoods interested in supporting a farm program. Registration deadline for the farmer training program is Jan. 31.
The whole NFP is a collaborative effort between Island Natural Growers, the Salt Spring Island Farmland Trust, KPU and the Quarry Collective. Other supporters include the Salt Spring Island Foundation, the Capital Regional District and the province of B.C.