LAND ACCESS STORIES: Make Do Acres – Burnaby, BC

Posted by Kat Roger on May 01, 2024

ABOUT MAKE DO ACRES

Make Do Acres is an ecological micro-farm and creative gathering space located on unceded Sto:lo territory in Burnaby, B.C. Leasing farmer Jesse Orr was matched to 0.25 acres of land at Big Bend Urban Farm through the B.C. Land Matching Program for the 2023 season and is now entering her fourth farming season and her second season on the land.

Make Do Acres grows mixed vegetables, flowers and medicinal herbs for veggie-lovers, herbalists and restaurants throughout Metro Vancouver. Farmer Jesse specializes in unique intercropping experiments and niche climate-resilient varieties. Jesse also creates installation plant-art exhibitions, hosts seasonal gatherings and designs bouquets and other creative artworks using plant materials.

HOW MAKE DO ACRES CAME TO BE

An artist by trade, Jesse started farming when she was living and working on a former dairy farm while volunteering at Bread & Puppet Theater in Vermont. One of the oldest nonprofit theatre companies in the U.S., Life at Bread & Puppet is rooted in a ceremonial and festival culture that follows seasonal shifts in the landscape. While participating in this land-based community, Jesse’s penchant for experimental theatre expanded into an interest in experimenting on the land through farming. She started helping out on farms in the area and loved working outside, immersing herself in the dynamic nature of growing food from year to year.

Having fallen in love with farming and hoping to make it a career, Jesse worked her way through a horticulture degree in Montreal from 2016-2017 and moved to BC shortly after in 2018. With the intention of growing food that contributes to climate resilience, Jesse started imagining what it would look like to have her own farm. As a prospective farmer with no access to land and no farmers in her family, Jesse realized that she would have to start from where she was, to “make do” with the knowledge and resources she had as an artist-turned-farmer. Jesse describes that she was in a “magical thinking” time of her life, where she allowed herself to trust that anything was possible and let her dreams grow big and beautiful.

During this time, friends in the farming community told Jesse about Young Agrarians, and she found her way to the B.C. Land Matching Program (BCLMP). Jesse got in contact with the Metro Vancouver Land Matcher, who helped her build out the vision for her farm, from the logistics of first year start-up to big sky thinking far into the future. Despite her uncertainty and nervousness about such a life-changing undertaking, Jesse registered for the BCLMP and took things one step at a time, developing her business plan and preparing her profile as a potential lessee. When she came across a post for a BCLMP land opportunity in Abbotsford, Jesse says she practically had heart palpitations, but she knew it was the miracle she needed to get her farming dreams off the ground. Once she expressed her interest in the land, Jesse says the opportunity just about “fell in her lap” because of the work of the land matching team. In early 2021, Jesse was matched to 2400 square feet of land in Abbotsford and started getting crops in the ground just a few months later. With established irrigation, electricity and a polytunnel, the site was a great opportunity for Jesse to practice managing her own farm for the first time.

Make Do Acres spent two years on the plot in Abbotsford, but the process of ground-truthing her crop plan made Jesse realize that the land was too small, too shady and too far away from home for her business. In 2023, Jesse was introduced to a new land opportunity for 0.25 acres at Big Bend Urban Farm, a 2.9 acre property in Burnaby that is shared by 8 different leasing farm projects, many of whom were matched by the BCLMP! Jesse knew she could fully realize her business plan on a quarter acre with community connections, and moved to make it happen. The BCLMP supported a new lease agreement for her next farm season and she started crop planning for a new year on new land. Make Do Acres has made its home at Big Bend ever since, where Jesse farms alongside other veggie, flower, bee and seed growers who share infrastructure, some responsibilities and a lot of laughter and encouragement.

CULTIVATING MAGIC: WHY JESSE FARMS

Jesse says Make Do Acres all started with about 1,000 sweet potato slips. Interested in sourcing and testing climate-resilient crop varieties, Jesse started exploring niche north-moving sweet potatoes and came across a special climate-smart variety developed by the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre in Ontario. Keen on growing the variety herself, and with the vision of marketing her business as a climate-forward farm, Jesse let her enthusiasm run free. Without any secure access to land or prospect of how or when to start her farm season, Jesse started making what she describes as “absurd” calls: she reached out to a large-scale farm in Ontario and convinced them to add an extra box of sweet potato slips to their order from Vineland. Then, she asked a UPS driver in Ontario to drive out to that farm, pick up the potato slips, and mail them out to Jesse in B.C., where they arrived at her doorstep and forced her to look her aspirations straight in the eyes.

Jesse took a leap of faith when she ordered 1,000 special variety potato slips without having grown potatoes commercially or knowing where she could plant them. That leap of faith heralded what would become the core ethos of Make Do Acres: start from where you are, accept what you have (which might be more than you realize) and make do with it. Jesse says that she needed to be already hands in the dirt and boots on the ground to make her farm happen. An experimentalist at heart, Jesse brings the wisdom and footloose creativity of experimental devised theatre to her farm. Devised theatre is a form of theatrical production that creates from nothing: no script and no assigned roles, but rather a collection of ideas, people, props and space. Stories develop over time based on the idiosyncrasies of each theatre artist and each rehearsal, and overlapping dialogues eventually knit together to create a whole. Creating devised theatre requires trust, transformation and ultimately, the belief in magic. 

Jesse’s training in devised theatre lends her a natural capacity to farm with a whole-systems approach, listening to and observing the “role” of each plant in her farm’s ecosystem and then making production decisions to suit that plant’s characteristics. Rather than crop planning with the intention of making plants do what she wants them to do, Jesse makes educated guesses about how different crop varieties might thrive, and then learns iteratively from the ground-truthing of those guesses. Unsurprisingly, Jesse is passionate about intercropping and integrated pest management, both agroecological strategies to farm relationships rather than individual species. In that way, Make Do Acres works as a theatre full of interacting roles and stories – helpful nitrogen-fixing legumes, protective pest-repellant herbs, bold and mischievous field mice, soft and delicate lettuces and perennial native hedgerow plants that homestead for rockstar pollinators. Over the seasons, the “rehearsals” of each year’s crop experiments, Jesse will discover which roles, relationships and stories work, and which don’t – what Jesse describes as determining “which” biodiversity her farm will steward.

Jesse’s attunement to creative relationships is not limited to plant and animal ecology on her farm. She is also passionate about stewarding human relationships, bringing people together through art, food and the natural world. When Jesse first received 1,000 potato slips in the mail at the beginning of Make Do Acres, she immediately turned around and passed a few hundred slips out to farmer friends in her community. Jesse says she benefitted from a lot of community generosity during the early days of Make Do Acres, and she hopes to continue sharing that generosity back as Make Do Acres grows and stabilizes. Active in a number of different community spaces, Jesse has created living art works through mobile garden box installations, built personal relationships with herbalist and chef clients at the farmers market and continues to create beautiful botanical art pieces to share the bounty of her farm with others.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR MAKE DO ACRES?

Jesse believes in farming and food as a way of connecting people to each other, and sees those food-based relationships as a means of building the social fabric of climate resilience. Moving forward, Jesse looks forward to inviting more people onto the farm for harvest gatherings, seasonal festivities and collaborative art-making. She wants to continue creating art-plant installation work, connecting with community partner organizations throughout the Lower Mainland and using her farm as a tool for creative education.

On the production side, Jesse hopes to continue fostering biodiversity, incorporating more perennials (especially perennial herbs) and slowing down the experimentation this year to be more responsive to the lessons of the land. Jesse is very excited about a couple of new developments this spring that will help her achieve her sustainability goals: Big Bend has just installed a barn owl box for biodiversity and pest control, and all the Big Bend farmers are patiently waiting for a barn owl to move in. Jesse is also increasing her native plants hedgerow with Environmental Youth Alliance plants this year to continue building on-farm biodiversity. Finally, Make Do’s two biggest supporters have recently gifted Jesse with a scythe, which will be a major help on the farm during harvest.

In the marketing realm, Jesse would love to continue building relationships with herbalists and hopes to move towards providing specialty fresh cut bulk herbs directly to her clients without the added task of dehydrating product on the farm. This year, Jesse will offer a bounty of fabulous culinary, medicinal and magical herbs for sale, including meadowsweet, blue vervain, mugwort, stinging nettle, skullcap, gotu kola and sweet woodruff.

CONNECT WITH MAKE DO ACRES:

You can find Make Do Acres products at the Mount Pleasant Farmers Market and the UBC Farm Farmers Market between August 16 and October 13 this year. For inquiries about purchasing bulk fresh herbs, you can contact Jesse directly at hello@makedoacres.com to get connected to her mailing list. For volunteer opportunities and work parties at Make Do Acres and Big Bend Urban Farm this season, send Jesse an email with the subject line “volunteer”.

Facebook: Make Do Acres

Instagram: @makedoacres

Website: makedoacres.com

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Got Land? Want Land?

Through the B.C. Land Matching Program, Young Agrarians offers support to farmers looking for land for their farm business, and landholders looking for farmers to farm their land. We’ve made more than 328 matches on over 12,173 acres to date! To learn about available land opportunities, and to learn about the B.C. Land Matching program in Metro Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, please visit youngagrarians.org/land or contact the Metro Vancouver Land Matcher, Ve-Jane Duong, at vejane@youngagrarians.org.