Sunday, August 23, 2015

Sunday, August 16 was a great day !  Pugeni ( who many of you have met ) now lives in Winnipeg and works for MCC in Manitoba.  The Mennonite Central Committee has many CFGB tradional growing projects connected to it ... At a boring Blue Bomber game 2 years ago Pugeni stressed the need for MCC to have something like Kernels going to touch people connected through MCC who would like to help in raising crops.  I knew the perfect farmer for this and with a perfect location within 20 miles of the MCC offices... After some preliminary contacts in the spring Pugeni and I visited Grant Dyck of Artel Farms and after 2 minutes he said... (Just like Dragons Den)  I'm in !   MCC worked on their website and systems to accommodate and this year they launched the program... It is a clone of Kernels and has captured the imagination and Crop Input dollars of a lot of people in Winnipeg.  They are now connected with 6 churches and as of Sunday had 192 acres sponsored for this crop year.  They call it Grow Hope.  They also were pleased to get a prominent Virtual Farmer named Cindy Klassen to be a spokeman for the project.  She is an Olympian with many medals and she does things right!   She was so happy to help others in this way.   Some people have called Pugeni and I clones ( in our personalities at least ) and we were both super excited to see us become contagious and spreading this method of farming to a whole new denomination !  Grant is the other person pictured below.