Peter McQueen (1975-1984)

Peter, an elementary school teacher, has degrees in business and education. COG’s founder has been a small-scale organic gardener and vegetarian in the Toronto area for over 20 years.

As a teenager I became concerned about the degradation of the environment. I volunteered with environmental groups protesting and lobbying for change. Also I undertook personal actions, such as recycling (long before the advent of the blue box), turning off unused lights at home and using public transit, in order to lessen my impact on the environment. At the same time I became interested in eating more natural foods and began moving toward a vegetarian diet.

My interests and concerns started to merge in organic growing. I realized that the practices of gardening and farming organically were powerful environmental actions which also produced healthier foods. Therefore I grew my first garden – organically, of course.

I sought to join an organic gardening club but quickly discovered that none existed in my area. (For that matter, I wasn’t aware of any in all of Canada.) I also wanted to support organic farming. It seemed to me that there should be a strong national organization of organic gardeners, organic farmers and other interested people – an organization which would have local chapters and national projects. Being young and rather naïve, when I discovered no such group existed, I decided to start one myself, expecting in short order that others far more experienced in organic growing and in the running of an organization would take over. Although more experienced people did join me, no one wished to take on leadership responsibilities, so I ended up remaining president for nine years. In time I overcame shyness and fear of public speaking, learned how to work with people far older than me, made many mistakes, applied my business administration studies to COG and developed my own leadership style. In some ways, COG and I matured together. I started COG because I perceived it was needed and because I didn’t know I couldn’t.

Ken McMullen (1984-1986)

A teacher of organic farming and gardening for many years, Ken was very active with COG and Organic Foods Production Association of North America (OFPANA) before becoming an organic grower at Spring Arbour Farm in south-western Ontario.

Congratulations, COG, on your first 20 years. I knew you when you were still a two-chapter organization. Before running for president, I had served for several years on the national executive, so I knew that Peter McQueen, as the first president, had built well. We were getting membership applications and chapter formation inquiries from all across the country.

My greatest satisfaction came through the development of the Heritage Seed Program. The founding seeds conference and seed exchange brought public awareness to many important issues about genetic preservation. More importantly, it positioned COG as an organization that helped to resolve problems in agriculture and not just the opposition to the agrichemical industry.

COG was instrumental in the founding of OFPANA. The organic food trade recognized that producer-controlled production standards were essential if the word organic was to remain credible in the marketplace. COG helped to develop the first set of standards, wrote the bylaws and sponsored the second congress.

Everyone wanted to know about organic farming and gardening. There were conferences in Spain, New Brunswick, New York, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C. Radio and television networks ran programs on organic gardening. Agriculture Canada commissioned a study of organic farming in Canada.

My term as president of COG taught me that diversity is essential to the sustainability of agriculture, that the opposite of organic agriculture is monocropping, not chemical agriculture. After leaving COG, I spent five years looking for a farm that could become a model of diverse agriculture. The last five years have been spent building Spring Arbour Farm.

Thank you, Canadian Organic Growers, for the opportunity to serve and to learn. It was an awesome experience to touch such a vibrant living spirit.

Alex Caron (1987-1988)

Alex, a biologist, did the research for his MSc in the high arctic, scuba-diving under the ice. He lives with his family on their 93-acre farm in King Township, north of Toronto. He has a keen interest in growing heritage vegetables and maintains about 180 potato varieties that are no longer commercially available.

My earliest recollection of COG is an announcement of a COG meeting on the CBC. Since I had been an organic gardener and farmer for many years, the announcement caught my attention and I went to that first meeting in late 1977.

In a very short time I found myself on the executive committee, attending meetings in the recreation room at Peter McQueen’s home. I recall there were only four of us on the executive committee, with the total membership at around 200. I soon became vice-president, a position I held for about eight years.

I became interested in heritage seeds and joined the Seed Savers Exchange in the U.S. around the same time I joined COG. In 1978, I was approached by an acquaintance who asked if I would rent him some land on my farm to grow a 40-foot row of potatoes. Since I couldn’t figure out how much to charge for that little land, I suggested we just share the potatoes. They were unusual – a small Austrian variety which he said translated to "crescent" potatoes. I named them Austrian Crescent and they have been shipped by me all over North America. I now know the proper name for the variety is Kipfler. From this chance encounter with an acquaintance with an unusual potato came COG’s Heritage Seed Program. Whenever our HSP was written up in a magazine, inquiries and applications for membership flooded in.

Another thing that stands out in my mind is the contest for a design for our T-shirts and tote bags. "Growing Naturally – You Can’t Beat It", with a picture of a beet, was the winning entry. I still have my T-shirt!

The transformation of our newsletter from a few mimeographed pages with the name COGnition is another highlight of my association with COG.

In all, I spent over 10 years on the executive committee, including a term as president. I still follow with interest the growth and success of COG.

Mary Perlmutter (1988-1992)

Mary is well known as a speaker and writer on all aspects of organic gardening. A master gardener, she has been active with COG national and with the Toronto chapter for nearly 20 years.

In 1970, I bought a little magazine called Organic Gardening & Farming, published by Rodale Press. I read it from cover to cover, and from that moment I became an organic gardener. I’ve been learning and practising in my garden at Blythe School, our summer residence near Fenelon Falls, ever since.

A few years later, I heard a young man named Peter McQueen being interviewed on the CBC. He was talking about an organization called Canadian Organic Growers, and my interest was immediately awakened. I called him and was invited to a meeting where I met Gary and Judine Wilson and had the opportunity to visit their elegantly beautiful garden in Mississauga. Peter talked me into joining the COG executive where I was soon elected as librarian. As the executive grew, so did its enthusiasm, and there was a great feeling of camaraderie.

I was requested to speak to the Mississauga Horticultural Society on the topic of Basic Organic Gardening. Then I received a request to talk on the same topic to the Natural Hygiene Society. I realized that I had become the "how-to" speaker for COG and I have been very busy spreading the organic gospel ever since.

Seed saving was a great topic of discussion among the COG executive. We discussed the possibility of starting a project similar to the Seed Savers’ Exchange in the U.S., and the Heritage Seed Program was set up. It grew and flourished under Heather Apple’s very capable leadership.

1991 was a wonderful year for me because the COG executive established the Mary Perlmutter Scholarship Fund to give grants to graduate students in sustainable agriculture. I had the honor of presenting the first winner, Sandra Salmins, with her scholarship at Macdonald College in Ste-Anne de Bellevue, Quebec, in 1993.

Now we are all looking forward to the next twenty healthy years with COG!

In the early 70's, I was home-steading on 50 acres of rough pasture and bush in Québec's Eastern Townships where I discovered it was very easy to be largely self-sufficient in organic food. I decided that our land would be farmed organically the day I noticed the deteriorated soil quality in my neighbors' corn fields—structure-less slime, in my view, compared with the rich organic garden soils that I had grown up with in England. Good organic soil made it easy for us to be largely self-sufficient in organic food.

After working a few years in Toronto, I returned to the country in 1986. I felt out of touch with the organic world and called Stuart Hill for advice. He suggested COG so I attended the AGM in Toronto. Five years later I found myself president. We established the Mary Perlmutter Scholarship and watched the Heritage Seed Program expand like crazy. We continued our work with the annual conference at Guelph and gained ground with the academic community, finally securing sponsorship from the university. We received a donation of over a thousand copies of John Bede Harrison’s classic text Growing Food Organically which were distributed to schools and libraries across Canada in COG’s name. Looking back, I think the major achievement was the publication of the Organic Field Crop Handbook and video, which have been well received internationally.

Looking forward, there is an enormous amount of work to do if the Canadian organic movement is to catch up with much of Europe and the U.S., where organic growers are aided and encouraged by government and the business sector. I think COG must focus its limited resources if it is to continue to be effective in the future, and I know that whatever is achieved will be because of the efforts of individuals with ideas and energy working together. COG is a wonderfully unbureaucratic, bare-bones efficient environmental NGO. I hope that at least one or two people reading this will decide to contribute some time and thought to this critically important but small organization.