foodsources
all about the soil
For Blue Lagoon Organics,
quality comes from the ground up.
On a rainy Saturday in early summer, the St.
Norbert Farmers’ Market is bustling as usual,
with shoppers delightedly perusing produce
piles for the perfect specimen at farmers’ stalls,
umbrellas held high.
Stefan Regnier, one of the farmers behind the
family-run Blue Lagoon Organics, stands at his
stall, happily placing vibrant stalks of Swiss chard,
crunchy cucumbers and frilly heads of lettuce
directly into his customers’ hands.
Many of them greet him with familiar ease.
“Need any eggs?” he asks. His customer exclaims
that it’s her lucky day. Blue Lagoon’s eggs are her
family’s favourite, she says. What makes them
so good? “I don’t even know! They’ve got such
flavourful, orange yolks!”
Organic produce lends itself well to that old
truism: you are what you eat. A healthy chicken
on a diet including grass and grubs produces
a beautiful, flavourful egg, while a caged bird
pecking on soy and corn does not.
This is the key to Blue Lagoon Organics’ success.
It comes from the ground up.
Lori Ann Regnier, a schoolteacher, and her
husband Rene, who was in the soil and gravel
business, decided to make a career change around
1998, when they took over the family farm outside
St. François Xavier from Lori Ann’s mother.
Lori Ann took a prairie horticulture course to
get a crash course on growing. Stefan remembers
his mother’s surprise to discover it was largely
instruction on when to apply different synthetic
fertilizers. “She never realized how much intensive
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ciao! / oct/nov / two thousand nineteen
chemicals go into producing food. So she was like,
‘There must be a better way of doing this.’”
This was the beginning of the Regniers adopting
organic farming practices. Today, their land is
fertilized naturally by running chickens over it
and rotating in crops like alfalfa—a legume which
naturally fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere and
roots deep to bring up nutrients from the soil,
effectively cleansing it.
These are not new ideas. The farming industry,
once made up of many small farms each feeding a
few consumers, industrialized over decades to fewer
operations that feed the masses, breaking the farm
down to its composite parts for mass production:
cows over here, corn over there.
Mixed-use farming, where animals fertilize
the crop fields, removes the need for synthetic
fertilizers, which run off into the water system,
causing algae problems in rivers and lakes.
This is why, for Stefan, organic farming is all
about the soil. “That’s my mantra,” he says.
In his pursuit of regenerative agriculture, Stefan
presents as a blend of pioneer and mad scientist,
mixing centuries-old traditional techniques with
high-tech upgrades. This summer he experimented
with autonomous chicken tractors that roam with
the birds. The machine is solar powered, GPS-
programmed and moves on its own (the Regniers
were already using chicken tractors that had to be
physically moved). It even has cameras on board that
link to a smartphone, like a chicken nanny-cam.
For consumers, intricacies of agricultural
practice are often hidden behind a label—
By Joelle Kidd