BY ANDREA PALFRAMAN

Salt Spring Island Farmland Trust

Salt Spring Island’s foodways have sustained people for thousands of years. Yet today, the majority of the food consumed on the island is imported. A new two-part public series hosted by the Salt Spring Island Farmland Trust (SSIFT) invites the community to explore how this shift occurred — and what the island’s agricultural past can teach us about building a more resilient food future.

Hosted as part of SSIFT’s Root to Bloom Centre, the series brings together leading researchers and local historians to examine the full arc of Salt Spring’s food systems, from Indigenous land stewardship to settler-era farming and beyond.

Both events take place at the Salt Spring Centre of Yoga, with the sessions also available via Zoom.

Part One: Indigenous Food Systems

Tuesday, Jan. 20, 6 to 8 p.m.  

The first event features Chris Arnett, historian, archaeologist and author, who will guide participants through the deep history of Indigenous food systems on Salt Spring Island and throughout the Gulf Islands.

Drawing on Coast Salish oral traditions (snuwuyulh), archaeology and collaboration with local nations’ knowledge keepers and elders, Arnett explores how Indigenous peoples thrived in this ecosystem for millennia. Topics include clam gardens, camas cultivation, controlled burning to support deer populations and plant growth, and the laws, teachings and stories that governed sustainable land use.

The presentation also examines how settlers later appropriated landscapes that had been carefully managed for generations, often without understanding the seasonal patterns and relationships that sustained families and communities. Using physical evidence such as shell middens, burial sites and rock art, Arnett brings familiar island places to life with layered stories of connection, conflict and continuity.

Arnett holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of British Columbia and is widely respected for his work on the Indigenous and colonial histories of the Gulf Islands. He is the author of The Terror of the Coast and Two Houses Half-Buried in Sand.

Part Two: Farming, Settlement and Agricultural Change

Tuesday, Jan. 27, 6 to 8 p.m.

The second event, A History of Farming on Salt Spring, shifts the focus to settler agriculture and the evolution of farming on the island. Led by Usha Rautenbach and Charles Kahn, this evening explores the food systems introduced by settlers — including Hawaiian, Japanese and Black farmers — and how their labour, skills and crops shaped Salt Spring’s agricultural landscape.

Drawing on archival research, lived experience and the foundational work Farms Farmers Farming 1859–1939 by agricultural historian Mort Stratton, the presentation traces Salt Spring’s transformation into a regional agricultural hub by the turn of the 20th century. During this period, the island earned a reputation as a breadbasket of the province, with orchardists shipping thousands of 40-pound boxes of apples annually.

Rautenbach played a key role in bringing Stratton’s manuscript to publication, meticulously indexing the work and providing essential historical context. She approaches agricultural history as living knowledge, illuminating both what was recorded and what was often left out.

Kahn, author of Salt Spring: The Story of an Island and former president of the Salt Spring Island Historical Society, brings decades of research and community involvement. His work situates farming within broader social, economic and environmental forces, helping connect historical land-use decisions to present-day challenges around food security and land access.

Together, these two events offer a rare opportunity to understand Salt Spring Island’s foodways as a continuum — from Indigenous stewardship practices that sustained life for thousands of years, through settler farming systems that reshaped the land, to the challenges facing local food systems today.

As Salt Spring Island grapples with food sovereignty, climate resilience and access to farmland, this series invites community members to reflect on the lessons of the past and consider how they might inform a more just and sustainable future.

Registration is through ssifarmlandtrust.org.

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If gentle meditations, “rainsong” on rooftops or whispered storytelling aren’t your thing for falling asleep to, a former national news anchor living on Salt Spring has a solution.

“I’m the opposite,” laughed Dallas Kachan, whose new sleep podcast might just be the prescription for what ails people’s busy brains today: pure, structural boredom.

Kachan’s “Deeply Unimportant” podcast series features a growing collection of recordings to combat sleeplessness, repurposing the veteran broadcaster’s gravitas-laden voice into a force to help listeners nod off. Kachan said the deliberately unengaging content functions as a “cognitive anchor,” perfect for that portion of listeners who find their own racing thoughts keep right on racing through other sorts of seemingly relaxing material.

“They don’t need a fairy tale,” said Kachan. “They need a structural metronome for their brain. They need to know that someone is in control so they don’t have to be.”

A sample track, titled “The 1972 International Convention for Safe Containers,” invites listeners to “achieve deep rest in the immutable strength of the standardized box, as we contemplate the steel corrugated wall and the structural laws that govern its construction.”

Structurally boring, indeed.

It’s all quite the pivot; before he was presenting the finer points of acceptable maritime standards to the sleep-deprived, Kachan wrote and anchored hourly newscasts carried live on hundreds of radio stations with Broadcast News, the broadcast division of the Canadian Press national news service. He voiced documentaries and audiobooks, including a 19-hour read of his own bestselling travel and adventure novel about a round-the-world flight in a futuristic airplane.

Away from broadcasting for more than two decades, Kachan said he moved with his family to Salt Spring near the beginning of the pandemic, and found he wanted to do something with his voice again. The market for sleep-related programming had been growing, and he saw a gap.

“There seemed to be nobody else with my sort of deep, authoritative sound and inclination for structure and order,” said Kachan. “There is a segment of the audience — specifically those with ADHD or high-stress careers — who find traditional ‘bedtime stories’ or ‘relaxing rain sounds’ either too juvenile or too repetitive.”

Kachan set up a little recording nook in his home office — no booth, no soundproofing, no engineers, just a boom stand, his three-decade-old favourite instrument microphone, and a voice for the ages.

“I can only record at night, when Harbour Air isn’t flying,” said Kachan. “And when it’s not raining.”

Deeply Unimportant’s first “sedations” include eight-hour readings of technical manuals, municipal codes and administrative data — the 1922 Western Softwood Lumber Grading Rules, NASA’s Man-Systems Integration Standards, a 1954 Singer Sewing Machine Manual — all presented through Kachan’s flat, professional delivery and available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever else podcasts are found. For listeners seeking uninterrupted, ad-free “all-night” episodes and other exclusive content, Kachan said a premium feed is available at deeplyunimportant.com.

“For years, my job was to make people lean in,” he said. “Now, my job is to make them drift off.”

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.