In Kentville, I picked up the December issue of Rural Delivery; a publication started by Dirk van Loon in Liverpool, Nova Scotia.
It contained two articles of particular interest to me: an interview with Owen Bridge, Annapolis Seeds, Nictaux (p.10-11) and second, a review of the historical research by Josh MacFadyen at UPEI (p.38-41).
‘Annapolis Seeds is one of just a handful of 100% regional seed companies. His goal is to help maintain and further cultivate the largest possible diversity of seeds for the Maritime bio-region’.
‘All the seed he offers are grown in Nova Scotia. Because they are grown here, they are going to be well adapted for here’.
Zack Metcalfe describes the research of Josh MacFadyen at UPEI. Josh holds a Research Chair dedicated to the study of ‘geospatial humanities’. This involves historical maps of the land use. He has mapped the land use of PEI under the Back50 Project, using aerial photographs since 1969.
‘It is pretty important to understand, at a bare minimum, a 50-year history of how land use has changed. I think a better view of the past will help us plan more resilient agriculture and communities in PEI and other parts of Atlantic Canada’. p.41.
Meanwhile, in the Guardian Weekly (Nov 29, 2019) Samanth Subramanian provides a long article on ‘The Empire of the Box’ or ‘what does getting everything delivered to our homes mean for how we live’. This is the world of online retail.
‘The great trick of online retail has been to get us to do more shopping while thinking less about it – thinking less, in particular, about how our purchase reach our homes’.
‘While we buy our purchases with mere movement of our thumbs, they are busy rearranging the physical world’.
At the local level in rural Nova Scotia, have you noticed the increase in courier trucks on Highway 101 or 201? This is the new definition of ‘rural delivery’.
Acknowledgements
To Dirk van Loon for his commitment to the magazine, Rural Delivery. To Edward Wedler for his online graphic skills.
References
Rural Delivery. December 2019. Volume 44 #6
What’s the deal with heirloom varieties by Emily Leeson p.10-11.
Where we are, where we’ve been. UPEI researcher provides a historical perspective on land use. by Zack Metcalfe p.38-41.
The Guardian Weekly November 29,2019. Vol 201 #25.
The Empire of the Box. What does getting everything delivered to our homes mean for how we live? by Samanth Subramanian
Ernest Blair Experiment 
An interesting study at UPEI on land-use change using historical airphotos reminds me of work carried out by the former director of the Ministry of Natural Resources’ Ontario Centre for Remote Sensing (Victor Zsilinsky). Once every year, he commissioned his air photo aircraft to fly the same route from Toronto to Ottawa thereby capturing changes in land use; minuscule, small and large. I am unsure of the details of this study but was intrigued by the concept. With citizen science, crowdsourcing or AI Computer Vision these days such repetitive and historical images would be a gold mine of information.
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