Page 16 - ECF-LIA-Nov-DEC-2023-F2

LEGACY IN ACTION
16
When you visit RGE RD, the one
thing you can be certain of is an
expertly prepared meal made with
locally-sourced ingredients. With
over 30 suppliers all located within
northern and central Alberta, the
farm-to-table restaurant is committed
to using ingredients sourced no more
than a few hours outside the city
limits. That dedication to in-season
ingredients also means that what
exactly makes it onto the menu isn’t a
sure thing — you never know when a
favourite dish might have a fresh spin
or a new creation might make a guest
appearance.
“We have a saying around here
that the farm dictates the menu,” says
Chef Blair Lebsack, an Edmonton
Community Foundation donor who
started RGE RD with his partner
Caitlin Fulton in 2013. “If [the farms]
tell us that the corn is amazing for the
next three weeks, we quickly hop into
lots of dishes that have corn in them. If
they tell us that the fennel is amazing,
that’s where we go with it.”
A result of that dialogue is that the
farms growing and raising RGE RD’s
ingredients aren’t suppliers as much
as they are partners. Layered onto the
fact that RGE RD’s partners are mostly
small and family-owned farms, it
means that the restaurant is especially
sensitive to the impact of climate
change on farmers’ ability to produce
certain ingredients.
“We’ve definitely had bad years
where the farmers tell us that they
got half the harvest they thought they
were going to,” says Lebsack. “It used
to always be that farmers were trying
to get their crops off in the end of
September or early October, and now
you can see them getting their crops
off earlier because the weather is just
so different.”
The concerns shared with Lebsack
are indicative of a wider trend
regarding Alberta’s changing climate.
According to Environment and
Climate Change Canada, Alberta has
warmed by about 1.9 degrees since
the 1960s. And while the province
is known to cycle through all four
seasons in the space of an afternoon,
the growing unpredictability of
Alberta’s climate has become
increasingly worrisome. In 2019,
for example, the Edmonton area
experienced its driest ever summer
and wettest ever spring on record, all
in the space of the same year. That goes
without mentioning the impacts of
the warming climate on the province’s
intense wildfire seasons.
“It makes a huge difference,
because the window of when you
can plant and when you can harvest
is changing every year,” says Tam
Andersen, farmer and owner of Prairie
Gardens and Adventure Farm.
“Usually your wettest year is
followed by the driest year and then it
might be on a 10, 25, 50 or a 200-year
cycle. But those one-in-a-century
cycles are coming every five years now,
not every 100 years. So it’s making it a
gamble every time you buy seed.”
In light of those warming trends,
the federal government recently
redesignated the Edmonton area from
a Zone 3 to a Zone 4 plant hardiness
zone. Practically, that means the region
is now suitable for plants that couldn’t
typically withstand the coldest Alberta
winters.
For farmers accustomed to
growing single crops according to
predictable growing seasons, those
changes are a small but worrying shift
towards a more uncertain future. But
like her friends at RGE RD — Prairie
EDMONTON’S FARM-TO-TABLE scene is getting
creative in response to climate change
By TOM NDEKEZI
Photography ERIC BELIVEAU