EDMONTON – With a little luck and a few more donations for freight, people in Ukraine will be eating the same kinds of Nantes carrots and Homesteader peas that Canadians reap from their gardens every year.
Tony Stoeckl, a grain farmer from Baldonnel, B.C., has arranged to ship 155,000 packages of Canadian garden seed worth $200,000 through a Catholic aid agency to families in Ukraine desperate for fresh vegetables.
“I see these people and they need help,” said Stoeckl, who has on his own arranged 11 previous humanitarian shipments as varied as medical supplies and shoes to Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. By working through Caritas, the Catholic aid agency, Stoeckl can offer charitable tax receipts.
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“They really need everything except chewed up fingernails,” said Stoeckl of the poverty that ordinary people have faced since the collapse of their communist governments.
On this day, Stoeckl has taken a day off from harvest to come to Edmonton to make final arrangements for the seed shipment, which will leave at the end of September for the Black Sea port of Odessa.
Stoeckl’s seed drive started when a friend in Fort St. John, B.C., organized a shipment of 4,000 pencils to orphans in Russia. There was space left in the box and Stoeckl thought a few packages of garden seed would fill it up. He approached Dunvegan Gardens, a large Peace River area garden centre, about donating seeds. The company agreed and suggested he talk to its supplier, Seed Centre of Edmonton.
With little convincing, the Seed Centre agreed to donate 155,000 packages of its old vegetable and herb seeds for Stoeckl’s project instead of throwing them in the garbage.
“We’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” said Kent Nattrass of the Seed Centre.
He said it always bothered him that perfectly good seeds that garden centres and grocery stores returned every June were destroyed instead of being donated to an aid agency.
However, donations are not as simple as giving them away.
Previously, the company had worked with World Vision, but politics kept the seed from people’s hands. When Stoeckl approached the Seed Centre, it was the match Nattrass was looking for. He finally found someone with the contacts and experience that could get the seeds to the people who needed them.
“We needed someone to partner with and get it in producers’ hands.”
The Seed Centre has agreed to send 139 varieties of vegetables and 23 herbs in the first shipment. The only vegetable not being sent is onions, which lose germination quickly, and Nattrass isn’t willing to send substandard seed.
Each year a team of workers at the Edmonton warehouse inspect thousands of seed packages returned by more than 1,000 prairie distribution centres. The packages are tossed in the garbage if there is fading on the packaging or if the seed is two years old.
“It’s all Canada No. 1 good seed. It just doesn’t meet our own quality standards,” Nattrass said.
“I’d like to get out of the business of destroying seed packets that are perfectly good.”
Next year Stoeckl hopes returned flower seeds could be added to the shipment. While flowers don’t add nutrition to a family, a grandmother on a pension can supplement her income by selling bouquets.
If five packages of vegetable seed are given to each family to supplement their regular garden seed supply, the shipment can help more than 30,000 families boost their garden produce.
“I have seen the poverty over there,” Stoeckl said.
It will cost almost $5,000 to ship the four tonnes of seeds, but because of freight logistics, it would cost the same to ship 10 tonnes. In the final few weeks Stoeckl is searching for more seed to fill the rest of the space.
“Somehow it will work out,” Stoeckl said.
