The Shuswap boasts more than 600 farms and while it’s impossible to visit them all, a collaboration between Shuswap Tourism and the Central Shuswap Regional District has attempted to make it easier to support local farmers.
The Shuswap Farmstand Tour helps residents and tourists find local eggs, produce, meat and more through an interactive map.
“We noticed that through some of these areas, we had a large cluster of all these really lovely farmstands and we wanted to highlight what was naturally happening in our community,” said Morgen Matheson, Shuswap Tourism manager.
The project is in its infancy and currently has highlighted eight farmstands on the Shuswap Grown website.
“It’s important for our local farming community,” Matheson said.
“It’s important to highlight these passionate individuals that do so much work for us, that put so much work into bringing food from their farm to our table.”
One of the featured stands is Harvest in the Valley Acres on Salmon River Road, which is stocked year-round.
“It’s basically a homegrown farm and we do vegetables, we do eggs, we do lamb cut and wrapped and beef cut and wrapped,” Esther Webster of Harvest in the Valley Acres said.
“But the big kind of thing that we do here is the muffins and my baking.”
Then from the farm, the tour takes drivers along Yankee Flats Road to Bee Yours.
“We started six years ago here, I come from a family of beekeepers in Argentina,” said María Daniela Dambros of Bee Yours.
“We started with 300 beehives and now we are close to 900 beehives.”
Along the trail, there are signs to mark official stops that feature a QR code that takes you to a website where you can learn all about the farm and the people who run it.
The Shuswap Farmstand Trail is now fully stocked and ready to serve up locally sourced food products.