About a year ago, when I was riding my snowmobile, I came up with the idea for EarthCows. I was thinking about how it was absolutely ridiculous that ‘Veganuary’, a phenomenon that popped up a few years ago, was promoting eating a plant based diet in the middle of winter, while you would have to import the vegetables from South America. It would be much better for the environment to eat local meat and potatoes.
Having lived an hour north of Toronto for 5 years, and having tried myself to find local produce (because it’s fresher and better quality), I knew how hard it was for people to find their local produce. It took me hours and hours of research to find local farms, and most people, unfortunately, don’t have the time or dedication to do this much research to find one product. If I had trouble finding local farms and I was a farmer myself, I figured that most people would too.
In March 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden and many Western leaders announced that there would be food shortages. I’m 23 years old, I had never seen any bare shelves ever, in Canada. No one had since WW2. Food shortages are only happening since we import a huge amount of food into Canada. Which is absolutely insane, since we are the second largest country and have plenty of space to grow more than enough food to feed the Canadian population.
The grocery store oligopolies took advantage of the high inflation occurring in Canada to hike up prices of produce beyond belief. There is a way to break up the monopolies of grocery stores, while reducing our food emissions, creating food security for all and having an accessible way to buy local. That’s where EarthCows was born.
The name, creating off of a word play (because the media loves to blame cows for climate change), came from the phrase Cows For The Earth, a counter campaign to Veganuary. The principle idea behind it is to buy from local farms to reduce emissions and create a more sustainable food system.
The vision for EarthCows is to become a global marketplace for farmers to sell directly to consumers. If you are a farmer, and would like to start directly selling your produce to consumers, please sign up! If you are a consumer and would like to buy delicious produce and meats, put in your location and press search!