My Watermark is the North Saskatchewan River, Alberta.

I'm an urban farmer in Edmonton. We are at our Bonnie Dunes site. Reclaim Urban Farm is a multi-location urban farm in the city of Edmonton. We focus on growing high-value crops in an intensive manner so that we can get lots of vegetables for the people who live in this area. We have 16 locations, some of them are vacant lots, some of them are small front years or backyards, and we also grow indoors year-round micro-greens, chutes, and sprouts.

This city, not to mention our farm, wouldn't even exist if it were not for the North Saskatchewan River. All of the water that we use for irrigation, that we can't capture from rain, we end up getting from city water sources, which all comes from the North Saskatchewan River. Watersheds have a huge importance because they are one of the foundational cornerstones to our ecosystems and our environment, but also our way of life. Without a clean watershed, we end up falling into disrepair because of lack of clean drink water, harmed biodiversity, and those sort of things.

Our farm finds the watershed a crucial aspect of what we're doing. Not only because we draw out of it, but our philosophy is to be as low impact as possible on our environment around us, and even be regenerative in how we conduct ourselves so we can grow food with little harm to the environment but also help to heal it as much as possible. Part of that means we don't use synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, or pesticides, which can leak easily into a watershed through runoff caused by erosion from rain or other forms of erosion. Instead we try to build soil so that it captures those nutrients in a longterm process and find ways to keep our watershed clean. Not only is it beneficial for us to draw out of it, but we're trying to intentionally be aware of what goes back into it.