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Farmer Dan

Sit down for a meal with Dan Wiens, and he’s bound to start a conversation about what’s on your plate.

Do you know where and how it was grown? Do you know the farmers who grew it or what their lives are like?

Today many of us live in cities and suburbs. Our days are more about concrete and grass than tending gardens and fields. And food comes from the grocery store.

Wiens, known as Farmer Dan, has spent the last 15 years of his life devoted to a simple belief.

If urban Canadian and U.S. residents can more closely connect to farmers and farming, they will also better understand both the risks of farming and the reality of life for the millions of small farmers here and across the globe.

To him, it’s a critical piece of understanding world hunger: Some 70 percent of people in the world who face chronic hunger work in agriculture.

Wiens, MCC’s water and food security coordinator, spent three years working with MCC in Swaziland in Africa and four years in Haiti. From 1999 to 2007, he worked for the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, designing initiatives to educate people about world hunger. On land outside Winnipeg, Manitoba, he established Wiens Shared Farm a Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) farm, where urban or suburban residents buy shares in his farming operation and receive weekly deliveries of whatever is harvested. He is known as a leader in Canada’s CSA movement.