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What a border blockade taught me about the fragility of our food supply — and why local farms are not a luxury.
In February 2022, trucks stopped moving across the Ambassador Bridge. The blockade lasted less than a week. But within days, researchers were already flagging what anyone in the food business already knew: Toronto's grocery stores carry roughly three days of fresh produce inventory. After that, shelves empty.
I was farming at Downsview Park when this happened. People began calling, asking about shares, asking about what we had available. The interest in local food spikes during every crisis — COVID, extreme weather, trade disruptions — and then fades again when the shelves refill. My hope is that one day, it doesn't have to take a crisis for people to understand what's actually at stake.
The Numbers Behind the Vulnerability
Toronto is a city of nearly 2.8 million people. To feed itself, it needs roughly 1,000 tonnes of fresh produce every single day. About 61% of Ontario's fruit and vegetable supply comes from outside Canada. The United States accounts for approximately 67% of Canada's imported vegetables. Put simply: the majority of what Toronto eats on any given day crossed a border to get here.
The Ontario Food Terminal, which handles the vast majority of wholesale produce for this city, is deeply tied to that one crossing point. Studies estimate that 40 to 50 percent of all produce crossing the Ambassador Bridge is destined for the Terminal. When that bridge was blocked, the ripple effect was immediate.
We have built a food system optimised for efficiency and cost, not for resilience. The Ambassador Bridge blockade was a short stress test. We should take it seriously as a preview.
What Local Farms Actually Provide
I want to be clear about something: no single local farm, including Zawadi, can feed a city. That is not the argument for local agriculture. The argument is that a network of local farms, supported by policy and by consumer choice, provides a meaningful buffer that a purely import-dependent system cannot.
Shorter supply chains are more adaptable. When a local growing season is strong, excess can be preserved, cellared, frozen. Local farms don't depend on cross-continental trucking. They can shift crop focus in response to community need more quickly than a multinational supply chain can. They provide employment, ecological benefits, and a direct relationship between grower and eater that has value beyond the transaction.
At Zawadi, we grow regeneratively — cover crops, composting, attention to soil health over time. Our beds improve with every season. That is the opposite of extraction. It's a long-term investment in the land's capacity to feed people here, for years to come.
What We Need to Build
The research is clear on what a more resilient system looks like: expanded greenhouse capacity for year-round production, cooperative distribution hubs that aggregate supply from multiple small farms, cold storage infrastructure that extends seasonal availability, and procurement policies that create stable demand for local growers within public institutions.
These are not radical ideas. They are the logical next steps for a city that takes its food security seriously. Toronto has a school food program. It has community nutrition priorities. The question is whether those priorities are backed by sourcing decisions that actually support the farms producing local food.
The Window Is Now
Climate change is destabilising growing regions that Canada relies on for imports. Trade relationships are more volatile than they have been in decades. The system that we have spent fifty years optimising for cheapness is showing its fragility.
Local farms are not a niche. They are infrastructure. And like all infrastructure, they need investment before the crisis, not during it.
At Zawadi Farm, we are growing. More beds, more programming, more partnerships with schools and institutions. We are trying to demonstrate, one season at a time, what an urban food system that feeds and educates and gathers a community can actually look like.
Three days is not enough buffer for a city of 2.8 million people. Let's build something better than that together.
Much love and light — Jessey Njau, Founder of Zawadi Farm
