Maida Vale Meat & Potatoes

Maida Vale Farms, located 5 km south of Laura (70 km. south west of Saskatoon) is the family farm of Jim Robbins and Nettie Wiebe. We came to this place in 1980 to grow food, raise a family of four children, try to make a living, contribute to our community and the wider world and work to build a better, healthier, more beautiful world. We have committed countless hours to farm policy and advocacy work, taking leadership roles in OCIA International (Jim), National Farmers Union (Nettie) and many other organizations. The work is ongoing (and never ending!) The Robbins family has deep roots in this community. We celebrated the centenary of the farm in 2008. Although we had to build our own house and yard when we arrived, we inherited the ‘Maida Vale’ name, from the homesteader grandparents Charlotte and Norman Robbins. Although we started using conventional farming methods to grow crops, including chemical inputs, we began to diversify our production by adding cattle in the early 1990s. Within a decade we had built a lot of fences, corrals, dugouts and wells as well as including more hay and alfalfa in our field rotations. Over the same period we moved to convert our entire farm into a more integrated, ecologically sustainable operation. Organic certification began in 1998 and by 2003 Maida Vale farms was a certified organic farm in its entirety. The farm has approximately 1000 acres under cultivation. We grow organic grains (oats, barley, wheat), pulse crops (usually peas) and occasionally some flax if conditions are favourable. With some small-scale, on-site cleaning and milling machinery, we manage to screen much of the weed, cracked and thin seed out of the grain and pea shipments before they leave the yard. These screenings, milled and meted out with care, provide nutritious organic finishing feed for yearlings. Our cattle herd consists of 50 char-cross cows, their calves, a couple of Red Angus bulls and 40 yearlings. All the hay and straw used to feed and bed the herd is grown and baled here on this farm. And of course the manure generated over the winter is spread on cultivated land to enhance fertility. All bragging aside, Maida Vale Farms raises top quality, nutritious and delicious beef!