© the other press ¢ Features

October 1, 2003

Fall Fair a Growing Success

Thomas Fairley OP Contributor

On most weekends in September, downtown Ganges is like Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, but with faster drivers. Ganges, a bustling commercial centre by day, turns wild and quirky at dark-fall, with whooping rowdie-types who gather in the parking lots of the town centre and Centennial Park. In the geographical heart of Salt Spring Island, a 35- minute ferry ride from Swartz Bay harbour on the Saanich Peninsula, Ganges is the place to be with friends if board games, movies, or quiet conversation are out of the question.

But on the second weekend of September, things are different.

A short walk west of the harbour, past the gas station, the elementary school, and Gulf Islands Secondary, at 351 Rainbow Road, is the Salt Spring Island Farmers’ Institute (IFI)— home of the Fall Fair, now in its 107th year. Keeping the Fair going has been a struggle at times, according to IFI member Margarete Lee, one of eight Directors coordinating this year’s fair.

The IFI stopped running the Fall Fair in the late 50s due to a lull in agricultural production, Lee explains. The fair didn’t run again until 1976, at which point the annual event took place at Salt Spring Elementary School. Exhibitions were held in classrooms that had to be cleared out before they could be used for the Fair, and tidied up on Sunday nights in preparation for Monday morning classes. The livestock shows and fair rides were on the sports field. And the IFI had the help of just a handful of volunteers, Lee says.

Today, ten acres of land make up the fairgrounds. The acreage provides plenty of room for a grazing pas- ture, sheep pen, livestock yard, parking lot, mid-way with rides, generous space for food vendors and local businesses, a well-sized band stage, two modernized barns, and the Salt Spring Island Museum.

It was Lee who bought the land on behalf of the IFI. When a local farm went on the market in 1981, Lee and her husband at the time fronted a down payment on the property before seeking out help from the community in the form of debentures. The IFI received plenty of financial assistance from Islanders who wanted to see the annual fair held on private land.

Lee remembers well the evening in 1987 when the last debenture was paid back; the land was hers. “I think it was a set-up, though,” she says, smiling.

The Fall Fair as it exists today could not take place without the help of 400 volunteers. “It’s that kind of community spirit that is just indispensable,” Lee says. Among those volunteering their time at the Fair this year are the Salt Spring Island Slugs (the Island’s over- 30 hockey team), cooking up hundreds of “Slug Burgers;” the women who run the Salt Spring Island Co-op Preschool, making salmon and oyster burgers; students from Gulf Islands Secondary, fundraising for their “safe grad;” and the Bahd’{ “and friends,” who wash dishes.

“When we first started doing this, about four years

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Schmah 1s hopeful that agriculture on Salt Spring Island will remain as strong an institution as it has always been, but at the same time, he is concerned

with the amount of agricul-

tural land being sold off to homemakers and public building projects

ago, the fair was producing 75 industrial-sized bags of garbage,” says Carol Evans of the Salt Spring Baha’i community. She and her acquaintances from a local environmental group got together to take action. “When we broke down the garbage, we discovered that half of it was paper plates,” Evans says, point- ing out that recycling companies. will not accept used paper plates.

After the purchase of a very large set of plates in two sizes, the Baha’{ community’s dish- washing service became a part of the Fair’s tradi- tion. In the first year of dishwashing, the total number of garbage bags left after the gates closed on Sunday evening was 24. Fair-goers learned to deposit their plates into bins that were picked up by runners and taken back to a brightly painted portable dish-pit. “It was a significant change,” says Evans.

Founded by the IFI in 1896, the Salt Spring Island Fall Fair is one of the oldest fairs in BC. IFI President Chris Schmah is trying to keep the fair as traditional as possible. “Attendance [in 2002] was close to 10,000,” he says. With this many visitors every year, it’s hard for Schmah and fellow IFI members to keep the focus of the fair on agriculture and not on tourism. Schmah does, however, have the support of the farmers he works so closely with—farmers who are proud of their farming roots.

George Laundry, IFI member and another coordi- nating Director at the Fair, keeps the Laundry family farm working for his grandson, who will be the fifth generation to run it. Laundry practises “veganic farm- ing,” a process similar to horticulture that excludes any pesticides and fertilizers, even manure. The result is a purer crop of produce and animals.

Although few Islanders apply the techniques of veg- anic farming, Salt Spring is still known as the “organ- ic farming capital of Canada.” The word “organic” seems to be everywhere on the island—especially at the Fair. Most farmers on Salt Spring Island are adamant about preserving their own personal stan- dards, and reject products grown or raised off the island.

Schmah is hopeful that agriculture on Salt Spring Island will remain as strong an institution as it has always been, but at the same time, he is concerned with the amount of agricultural land being sold off to homemakers and public building projects. As if to remind him, a sign pitched in the ground of what used to be farmland, advertises the soon-to-be-con- structed Rainbow Road Recreation Centre—a project funded by the Salt Spring Parks, Arts, and Recreation Commission.

But not all Islanders are farmers, and conversely, not everyone is at the Fair to showcase products they've grown.

Gene Bellavance runs Bellavance Welding Ltd., a company specializing in custom fabrication and boat building in aluminium or steel. Bellevance sits proud- ly with his 1952 Cessna sea plane and 1941 Wyllis all-

terrain wagon. The plane, he picked up from a wild rice farmer in Manitoba. The old jeep, he found sit- ting outside a gas station on Dunbar Street in Vancouver with a “for sale” sign in the window; he bought it right away. Bellavance restored both vehicles himself, and the Wyllis wagon won the automotive prize for best engine restoration at the 2002 fair.

Brian Finnemore and his wife Janice represent the Ometepe-Gulf Islands Friendship Association (OGIFA), a charitable organization that maintains a private trade deal with coffee farmers of Ometepe Island, Nicaragua. “[OGIFA] was started 15 years ago by a couple of men who are no longer members, but who had visited Nicaragua—Ometepe in particular— recognized the poverty and the potential to render some aid by introducing organic agricultural prac- tices and marketing some of the products—coffee, honey, sesame,” says Finnemore. At the present time, OGIFA just markets Ometepe coffee.

Finnemore and fellow members of OGIFA sell the two blends of shade-grown organic coffee for a dollar per cup. Finnemore notes that a pound of Ometepe coffee would usually sell for 11 to 12 dollars depend- ing on who is selling it. Ometepe coffee is sold through OGIFA’s three divisional “sister” organiza- tions, as Finnemore puts it: one is in Courtney; one in Bainbridge Island, Washington; and the other in Vancouver run by Codevelopment Canada (CODEV). OGIFA’s profits go toward various devel- opment projects in Nicaragua, such as school con- struction, student scholarships, and water distribution systems.

In the Salt Spring Island Folk Club tent, Donn Tarris and his wife, Maddy, tell of the island’s folk music community. The Folk Club organizes a number of shows on Salt Spring every year. For the 2003/2004 season, the Club is hosting a line-up of local folk music acts at the Fulford Hall once a month begin- ning September 29 and running well into the spring.

The Tarrises, along with other Folk Club members, have wanted to start up a “Salt Spring Folk Festival” for some time now, an idea popular with everyone they mention it to.

A festival is exactly what Chris Schmah does not want the Fall Fair to become. Once the fair draws more than 10,000 people each year, it becomes a tourist attraction, like the autumn fair in Saanich, he says. Revenue gained from increasing the size and scale of a fair, means less money finds its way to the farmers. Money that should go straight to the farmers for their product would end up going toward sup- porting the extra crowds, through infrastructure and entertainment.

At the fair, though, all seem to enjoy themselves. The dog shows are very popular and the Zucchini-car Races, in which zucchinis-turned-push-cars cascade down the slope of a ramp contraption, draw masses of happily squealing youngsters. Schmah himself keeps busy selling bouquets of flowers from the vending stall of his company, Fox Glove Farm and Garden Supply. Judging by the sights and sounds on Saturday, September 13, the Fall Fair is once again, a great success.

Links: <www.gulfislands.net> <www.saltspringfolk club.ca>

<www.saltspring.com>