Canadians react to food inflation and grow their own gardens, seek food bargains

Oct 14, 2022

Retail food has increased by 11 per cent in one year, according to Statistics Canada.

What are some Canadians doing about it? 15.5 per cent of Canadians have started growing their own food, just in the last year.

Canadians have been trying to cope with higher food and menu prices in many ways.

Ontario saw the highest percentage of people who started to grow their own food, at 17.4 %. While a total of 6.2 % of Canadians use hydroponics at home to grow food, 4.5 % claim they have livestock at home now, and didn’t 12 months ago. The figures from a study conducted by the Dalhousie University Agri-Food Analytics Lab, investigated how Canadian consumers are dealing with higher food prices in the last year.

Others are just trying to navigate through by using new options. The most popular grocery shopping habit change we measured was that many Canadians have used loyalty program points. A total of 33.7% have been using loyalty program points to pay for groceries in the last 12 months. The second option is weekly flyers (32.1 %), followed by coupons (23.9 %).

While 19.1 % of Canadians have visited discount stores in the last 12 months, 11.5% of Canadians have visited dollar stores more often to purchase food. A total of 8 % are visiting farmers markets more often, and 7.1 % of consumers visited roadside stands to buy directly from farmers in the last year.

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Video: A chain harrow is a game changer

Utilizing a rotational grazing method on our farmstead with our sheep helps to let the pasture/paddocks rest. We also just invested in a chain harrow to allow us to drag the paddocks our sheep just left to break up and spread their manure around, dethatch thicker grass areas, and to rough up bare dirt areas to all for a better seed to soil contact if we overseed that paddock. This was our first time really using the chain harrow besides initially testing it out. We are very impressed with the work it did and how and area that was majority dirt, could be roughed up before reseeding.

Did you know we also operate a small business on the homestead. We make homemade, handcrafted soaps, shampoo bars, hair and beard products in addition to offering our pasture raised pork, lamb, and 100% raw honey. You can find out more about our products and ingredients by visiting our website at www.mimiandpoppysplace.com. There you can shop our products and sign up for our monthly newsletter that highlights a soap or ingredient, gives monthly updates about the homestead, and also lists the markets, festivals, and events we’ll be attending that month.