There’s an irony about haskaps that Andrew Rosychuk would love to change. At any local grocer you’ll find other — and arguably lesser — berries from far away: South African grapes, for example, Mexican raspberries and, though close for Canada, British Columbia blueberries.
But you’re not likely to find the fruits of Rosychuk’s labour from an orchard just minutes northwest of Edmonton. Every summer, the branches of his 26,000 haskap bushes gently bend under the weight of elongated, bluish-purple, sweet-tart berries.
Since planting his crop at Rosy Farms from 2016, Rosychuk has been driven by that produce-department discrepancy. “How do we make this an everyday berry?” he asks.
In one key way, it should be easy. Nutritionally, those far-flung competitors struggle to compete. Many species of haskaps are native to Alberta’s boreal forest, making them a homegrown super-food — a benefit Rosychuk is enhancing by making his haskap orchard the province’s first to be certified organic.
It’s an unusual crop being grown in an unusual way by an unusual farmer. Now in his late 30s, Rosychuk didn’t grow up on a farm (though his grandparents had one), but “plants have always been my love,” he says. As a kid, he’d scribble down notes from CBC’s Canadian Gardener for future reference.
But, out of practicality, Rosychuk initially turned to the trades: first welding (handy, he thought, for fixing farm machinery), then boiler making. (Now he moonlights in upper management in Alberta’s oil patch.) But he also studied horticulture at Olds College, where he gravitated toward organic practices.
“Oh, this is who I am,” he recalls. As an expression of that, Rosy Farms is an 80-acre exercise in regenerative agriculture, a method that creates the conditions for nature to do as much of the work as possible, and improve the land. Pest control, for example, falls to a squadron of barn swallows that shelter in a big, boxy birdhouse atop a fencepost. Instead of berries, they go for the bugs the bushes attract, snatching up about 850 a day. “They’re just little acrobats,” says Rosychuk.
Similarly, crop pollination is enhanced by native bees attracted to a surrounding shelterbelt Rosychuk planted, a mini-forest of 15 types of flowering trees and shrubs.
What’s going on below ground is just as important. Rosychuk doesn’t till the soil so as to not to disrupt the delicate network of wormholes, air pockets and a type of fungi that delivers nutrients to plant roots. The soil is further safeguarded by a dense groundcover including clovers and fescues (grasses). And deer are welcome among the haskaps; trimming and fertilizing by grazers promotes root growth.
For his efforts, Rosychuk can see as much as 70,000 pounds of fruit annually.
Some young agrarians see his approach as a better way forward for farming in general. “He’s running a business, but he still sticks to his guns on what he believes will be best for the environment,” says Sara Mah, a University of Alberta crop science student and recent Rosy Farms intern.
It’s not just a principled stance, she adds, it’s practical. “I think there is going to be a shift to working with what’s best for your soil.” With the rising cost of inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, says Mah, “it will have to happen because it will be just too expensive to be conventional at some point.”
Rosychuk would see any such additives as detracting from the health benefits of his product anyway. Those grapes, raspberries and blueberries are not unhealthy; the latter also qualifies as a “superfood.” But even a blueberry doesn’t compare to a haskap for levels of a particular nutrient that sets a high standard in healthiness. Antioxidants are superhero molecules that battle inflammation, fight for heart health and food-processing facility. That’s a fraction of the size of the modern large-scale plant to which he otherwise has to send berries, knowing that nutrition deteriorates over distance. But his will be big enough to clean, grade, freeze and pack what isn’t plucked by u-pick customers for sale within Alberta through wholesalers, retailers and farmers’ markets.
To help feed his tiny haskap factory, Rosychuk will plant another 8,000 to 9,600 bushes this summer, making Rosy Farms one of Alberta’s largest haskap orchards. But, just as it will take time for those new plants to reach full potential, it will take time to make their fruit a supermarket mainstay. Rosychuk won’t rush that at the expense of the Earth. Profit is a product of patience: like waiting for a groundcover to grow in, for deer to get the pruning done, for the barn swallows to return each spring.
In the meantime, he says, “you’re doing it because you love it.”
This article appears in the May 2024 issue of Edify
