Luke Burkholder comes from a family that has been deeply involved in the mission of ending global hunger through partnership with Canadian Foodgrains Bank for not just two, but three generations. It all started with Luke’s grandfather Howard Burkholder, was continued by his father Chris Burkholder, and three decades later, Luke is still involved through his growing project and various advocacy activities.
In March 2023, he attended Hunger on the Hill Young Voices and continued to advocate throughout the year by speaking to friends, family, and the York Soil and Crop Improvement Association. And in February 2024, Luke deepened his understanding of global hunger by joining eight other participants on a Food Security Learning Tour to Nepal.
We talked to Luke about his involvement in our work, and some of the ways he’s been involved in this past year:
Q: Tell us about your family’s involvement in the Foodgrains Bank.
A: In our region of Ontario, my grandfather and a few other farmers from the area were the first to start the Foodgrains project in York. And now, we have about nine growing sites. There are a few smaller fields, like ours, and a few churches in the area donate a small field as well. We donate the seed, harvest our field, and donate all the labor and equipment. And then we also work with Reesor Seed and Grain – they donate the seed and the spraying on the field, and we donate the harvesting. There’s also a long-term lease on a 32-acre field at Rouge Urban National Park, and that’s one of the largest fields in our growing project.
Q: How does it feel to continue this family legacy of helping end hunger?
A: It feels good. Growing up I knew it was something we did, and when we drive past one of these farms on the road and I’d say, what’s this sign? I knew we donated this field to the Foodgrains Bank, but I didn’t fully understand what that meant. Over the past couple of years, I’ve really figured out the importance of why we do it. It’s not just another box we tick every year, or just another place we make our charitable donation. We get to see why we do it and the impact it has. I feel proud that we are able to contribute to this journey, seeing the impact it has and the real-life improvements it has on people in countries that are less fortunate. I feel very blessed to be involved with Foodgrains Bank.
Q: What was your experience like at Hunger on the Hill – Young Voices?
A: That was a really interesting experience. I enjoyed it and learned a lot about talking to politicians. I think the biggest takeaway I had from Hunger on the Hill is that across all political parties, there are members of parliament who are interested in the issues that Foodgrains Bank is helping resolve. Helping combat food insecurity is not a partisan issue.
Q: You also travelled to Nepal with us on the February 2024 learning tour. What motivated you to sign up for that experience?
A: My dad had gone on the learning tour back in 2015 to Ethiopia, so that was my biggest inspiration. He heavily encouraged me to come along. It was a life-changing experience for him and he got to see some things and experience life through eyes of people who aren’t nearly as privileged as we are, who have to struggle every day, and that was something that really pushed me to want to see that. I couldn’t attend the Malawi tour because of the timing for our farm, but the Nepal tour was a real learning experience for me because I came in with an almost completely blank slate about the country and what to expect, so it was intriguing to me.
Q: What stood out the most to you during that learning tour?
A: I wasn’t exactly sure how agricultural the country was. I knew about mountains, but my perception of mountains is that people don’t farm on mountains. In Nepal, the majority of the country’s population actually lives and farms on the mountains. Because of the latitude, there’s greenery up to the top, even up to 4,000 meters in the country because they have enough heat at that elevation. So they’re able to farm at pretty high elevations that we wouldn’t in North America. I guess you’d say the challenges we face here are completely different from what they face there. And it’s almost a hundred percent due to geography.
There’s a lot of people in these places, and they farm and somehow sell their excess produce, although it’s a challenge for them to do that because of the distance to the market, the terrain, and the time it takes to get there. They can’t really get much of a good price, and they only have one growing season as well – not due to heat, but due to rainfall. They’re very aware that they have a challenging environment, and I was really impressed with how open the people were to suggestions. We were in the most rural areas in the country, the most remote, but everyone we came across seemed to be willing to learn.
Q: Tell us more about the agriculture activities you saw there.
A: They all farm – other than in the south part of the country, which we didn’t see – on terraces, and the terraces get up to eight feet wide or less. Some of them are as wide as a tabletop. They’ll run for a long distance, hundreds of feet along the side of the mountain, but they’re very slim so for the thinnest ones I don’t even think they could get the oxen and a plow on there. Most of them, they just have two oxen in a single plow and that’s how they till the fields, so the practices they can implement are just entirely limited by the ground. We saw them growing banana trees, mangoes, coffee plants, rice – a little bit of everything.
The amount of labor it takes to farm there is astounding, because all the seeds that are put in the ground they have to place manually. There’s not a planting mechanism they can use to really speed up the process. And then everything that’s collected is picked by hand and pulled up the hill. We’d see farmers over the age of 60 and they’re sure-footed as can be, running down the mountain. It’s just making us look silly, because we’re worried about rolling an ankle or falling down. One of the members of our group said “we’re just human, and they’re superhuman.”
And then they had kitchen gardens, which had been promoted by partners there. Those seemed to be very successful. Most of the meals that were served to us in the villages for the trip had greens supplemented by these gardens, and it was good. I saw the logic behind what was being provided by partners on the ground. It made sense to me. We asked locals about the issues they were facing, and the help that was being provided to them matched up. What could possibly be done without major infrastructure is being done, which made me feel pretty good about things here.
Q: In what ways have you been able to share about your experiences after attending Hunger on the Hill and the Nepal learning tour?
A: After Hunger on the Hill, I spoke to my entire friend group about it and they were pretty interested in what I was doing in that regard, and all my family members heard about it. Clayton (fellow participant) and I spoke to the board members of the York Soil and Crop Improvement Association. We’re planning another presentation in January 2025 to around 200 people at the Association’s general meeting, and I also did an interview with Ontario Grain Farmer about my experience.
After Nepal, my first presentation when I got back was at Wyman Mennonite Church, where my friend permanently attends. I used to go there when I was a child. We’re also going to be presenting at Rouge Valley Mennonite Church closer to Markham, and then our biggest presentation will be at the York County Soil and Crop general meeting in January 2025. And then we’ll see what other opportunities there are for us to talk about this!
Applications are now open for our next learning tour to Zimbabwe and Mozambique March 14–30, 2025. Application deadline is September 30, 2024. Click here to learn more and apply today!