On a warm September evening nearly 15 years ago, Katie Sardinha had her first real glimpse of what life as a farmer could be. It was harvesting season in Summerland, B.C., where she'd grown up on her parents' 10-acre apple orchard.
Though she'd spent her summers picking cherries on other Okanagan farms and had watched her parents pick apples and run the farm her whole life, they had never recruited her or her brother for the harvest. They didn't want to pressure them into farming. Sardinha had just finished her undergraduate degree and was preparing to pursue a career in academia.
"Back then, we had a lot more big trees on the orchards," she recalls. "We used wooden ladders with stakes on the end. With wooden ladders and stakes, you can do things on hills that you can't quite do with the metal ladders that are more standard now. You can angle them in just these insane ways. I remember I turned around and my parents were picking apples into their bags, and I thought, 'Wow, my parents are ladder acrobats!' I was so impressed. They were so nimble." Though it would be several more years before Sardinha decided to go into farming herself, she remembers that evening as pivotal.
Sardinha's reality as a farmer has been quite different from that of her parents. Though her love for the job remains, she's faced economic, climate and other challenges on a much greater scale than her parents did. She is farming in a new paradigm.
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