16 April 2026 FOODWAYS THE STORY OF TOM ANGIERS CHALLENGES OF A LABRADOR FARMER – PART TWO ARTICLE BY DAN RUBIN PHOTOS COURTESY OF TOM ANGIERS Tom Angiers is a ninth-generation Canadian farmer who has been growing food in Central Labrador for almost thirty years. Last year at this time Small Farm Canada published our first story about Angiers, we discussed how he arrived in Goose Bay and explored some of the challenges he has faced since setting out to grow for local. He started out growing in Labrador on Crown Land directly across from 5 Wing, the Canadian Forces Base at Goose Bay. In the first season, on the first day of harvesting thousands of pounds of potatoes, Angiers learned from a CBC reporter that the land he was farming was contaminated by heavy metals. He and several other affected farmers in the area reached a settlement due to a class action suit that took more than five years to resolve. At a new location, Angiers is now farming two parcels under Crown lease. He has built accommodation for his family and farm workers and erected a warehouse and a 2800 -square-foot cold storage that also serves as a community market. A 20-by-40-foot greenhouse has also been added to the farm for additional summer production and to start seeds. Tom Angiers’ goal is to connect all the elements required for a vital foodway. Angiers also imports only high-quality vegetables and fruit through a buyer in Montreal. He combines high-quality imports with local crops and makes deliveries by truck on a weekly schedule to outlets along the Central and Southern Labrador coast. He has also created a ‘community market’ as mentioned at his farm to serve as an additional outlet for this produce. In Labrador, much of the food that arrives by truck is ‘stale dated’ and sold at high cost in local stores, many of which may sit with empty shelves at times. Truck transport can also be dicey. It is often interrupted by weather or ice on the Strait of Belle Isle. Although it is sometimes a challenge to juggle schedules and weather, Angiers’ high-quality food deliveries have become a lifeline for residents and a way to restore community health. Finding capital to fund transport for both locally grown and procured fresh food that Angiers is distributing resulted in a 25-tonne dual refrigeration truck. A crowning achievement of the Provincial Food Network, a project developed by the non-profit group, Food Producers Forum. It truly does take a community network to write funding applications, do PR, gain support from many levels of government and connect people to the project to get it done. Tom Angiers’ journey toward supplying good quality local food has been challenging. Over the past three decades he has faced, and still faces, a series of situations that would test anyone’s ability to supply good food to local communities and help address food insecurity. One challenge he encountered relates to the difference between a Crown lease in Newfoundland and Labrador and the rest of Canada. In NL, leases for up to 50 years are available, if approval granted. The process is not simple, quick or easy and can take as long as five or six years. In other provinces, a farmer can obtain granted title to Crown land once they fulfill requirements for farm development. It seems unfair that in Newfoundland and Labrador the farmer will never own the land into which he pours so much work, money and resources. For this reason, Angiers says, he knows of dozens of others who have found this so discouraging that, once they realize they will never own the land, they turn away from farming in Labrador.
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