Dwarf Apple

On the 320 acre Keloka Orchards, near Kelowna in the Okanagan Valley of southern British Columbia, apples are picked and forwarded to the Kelowna Growers Exchange for packing, cold storage and shipping throughout the world. Immigrants from countries in Europe and Asia work together to ensure a successful harvest on Canada's largest apple orchard, owned by George Porter.

This short 1944 documentary offers a portrait of ranching in the foothills of southern Alberta. Exciting scenes of great herds being rounded up and moved to summer feeding grounds suggest the large scale on which this business is run, while segments on spraying, feeding and shipping illustrate some of the less dramatic jobs involved in bringing Canadian beef to the world's tables.

Viewer Advisory: This film contains scenes of animal slaughter..

This feature documentary tells the story of a young couple’s year-long experiment in raising their own meat. On the abandoned farm property they just bought, they decide that if they’re going to eat meat, they should raise it themselves. Over 4 seasons, they get to know the animals, discover their personalities, treat them with respect and eventually slaughter them. Animals takes us deep into the heart of the animal-human relationship, with all its contradictions.

Filmed at the Wing Fong Farm in Ontario, this documentary follows the tilling, planting and harvesting of Asian vegetables destined for Chinese markets and restaurants. On 80 acres of land, Lau King-Fai, her son and a half-dozen migrant Mexican workers care for the plants. For Yeung Kwan, her son, the farm represents personal and financial independence. For his mother, it is an oasis of peace. For the Mexican workers, it provides jobs that help support their children back home.

Here is a graphic picture of the tobacco harvest in southwestern Ontario. At the end of July, transient field workers move in for a brief bonanza when the plant is ripe. The tobacco harvesters call it "the back-breaking leaf."

This short documentary profiles a community engaged in developing sustainable living methods, including food production and small-scale solar and wind technology, on a farm in Massachusetts in the 1970s. Well before sustainability was a mainstream concern, these prescient innovators attempted to create a vision of a greener, kinder world. "Think small," say the New Alchemists. "Look what thinking big has done."

This short documentary introduces a new breed of cowboy: one with a Master's degree in Business Administration. Although this new cowboy is gradually phasing out the old romantic image, in British Columbia's beautiful Nicola Valley a few cowpunchers still remember the good old days and, when they can, relive them. This is a look at the cowboy's life in transition as the demands of the marketplace streamline the cattle industry.

This short documentary illustrates rural French Canadian life in the early 1940s. The film follows Alexis Tremblay and his family through the busy autumn days as they bring in the harvest and help with bread baking and soap making. Winter sees the children revelling in outdoor sports while the women are busy with their weaving, and, with the coming of spring young and old alike repair to the fields once more to plough the earth in preparation for another season of varied crops. One of the first NFB films to be produced, directed, written and shot by women.

Here is a film showing how each spring, prairie farmers renew their gamble with wind, frost, drought, rust and hail to begin again the cycle that may bring a good, or a lean, year. This story of big-scale wheat farming is told by a farm woman whose sons represent the fourth generation to operate a Saskatchewan farm.

This documentary from Min Sook Lee (Tiger Spirit) follows a poverty-stricken father from Central Mexico, along with several of his countrymen, as they make their annual migration to southern Ontario to pick tomatoes. For 8 months a year, the town's population absorbs 4,000 migrant workers who toil under conditions, and for wages, that no local would accept. Yet despite a fear of repercussions, the workers voice their desire for dignity and respect.

This short documentary depicts the harvesting of a large crop of potatoes in the St. John Valley, New Brunswick. The film documents the motor-driven machines that lay bare the rows of tubers, the crews of potato pickers at work in the fields as well as the sorting and grading of potatoes at a large Grand Falls warehouse.