Our Story
It’s Giving Farm is a farm owned and operated by Fianna Dirks and Ekow Stone. The two farmers met as co-workers in the summer of 2020 at an urban farm project in Etobicoke ON. In the years spent working together co-managing a 3 acre urban farm site, they became a rock solid duo, growing beautiful produce with an amazing team for the surrounding community. While thoroughly enjoying their role as urban farmers, educators, and community workers, Fianna and Ekow longed for a farm to call their own.
In the spring of 2022, a Request For Proposal to live and farm in Toronto’s Rouge National Urban Park began circulating our networks. We decided to seize on the opportunity and apply with the support from our friend and colleague. After many months of anticipation, we were offered a long-term lease for a beautiful home, and 7 acres in the northern tip of the park in Altona ON. Having received the keys to the house in February of 2023, our journey has only just begun!
Who We Are
Fianna Dirks
Fianna Dirks has been working as a farmer for the last 13 years focusing on organic growing, on-farm compost production, and beneficial insect habitat creation. She is extremely passionate about literally almost everything and gets immense joy from sharing this abundance of excitement with anyone around her. When not ogling over the micro universes of soil microbes and insects, they are usually reading Sci-Fi, elbow-deep in a sourdough starter, or on the hunt for a sequin outfit.
Ekow Stone
Ekow Stone has been working as a farmer and educator for the last 4 years focusing on youth engagement, cut flower production, and seed saving. He’s an artist working in the mediums of ink + pyrography, and has exhibited in a number of galleries across Southern Ontario. He enjoys passing the time watching anime, learning about ancient history and flower gazing.
Gratitude and Reciprocity is an ethic that was brought into our awareness by the Botanist and Indigenous Scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants”. In it, Kimmerer shares a great deal of insight from Indigenous teachings and the life sciences on how to be in right relationship with land and communities of human and non-human persons. We give thanks for this wisdom and use it as a guide in how to operate our farm and lead our lives as newcomers and settlers on Turtle Island.
We farm and live on land that is covered by the Williams Treaties and is the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe peoples, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee confederacy. Like many treaties across Canada, the Williams Treaties of 1923 barred Indigenous communities from freely accessing their lands and leading their traditional ways of life. Through decades of work from First Nations, both federal and provincial government have made small steps to make amends by making formal apologies and financial settlements, but much work still lies ahead towards restitution.
We uplift the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt treaty that the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples have been upholding for centuries. The treaty uses the metaphor of the dish as the land and all the resources that reside within it, and one spoon, representing all the peoples who call these lands home who are called to peacefully and sustainably cooperate.
