Northern Grown is documentary produced for the Food Security Research Network at Lakehead University. It is meant to give consumers the opportunity to meet a collection of local producers in Thunder Bay and hear their thoughts on the state of the region’s food system.

In the Thunder Bay region, where agricultural land is framed by the jutting fingers of the rocky Canadian Shield and where farms were carved out of the Boreal Forest by turn-of-the-20th-Century pioneers, farming is not an obvious career choice for young people to make. Unlike the established patterns of the Canadian Prairies or the Niagara region, producing food in Northwestern Ontario requires a special kind of farmer. As part of our research The Food Security Research Network interviewed five local producers of basic foods in an effort to better understand the challenges they face.