Sean Smith, lead compost farmer and brewer at Crooked Farmz, is originally from Kingston, Ont. but has been growing vegetables in the East York area for the past 20 years.

His interest in backyard farming and developing a local CSA for composting and compost tea brewing emerges from deeper underlying concerns about soil health, microbial life, food security, climate change, and our relationships with land and water. This is the project that became Crooked Farmz in 2018.

In 2019 Sean won first place in the DIY Innovation category in the Best in GrowTO urban gardening competition for improvements to an urban composting method, and he repeated in 2020 in the Professional Innovation category with an inexpensive design for a scalable compost tea brewer. In 2021 Crooked Farmz won for the third time with an open source schematic for producing quality biodiverse composts in a limited footprint.

In Spring 2020 Crooked Farmz won a Landscape Ontario Horticultural Trades Association bursary to develop compost tea workshop resources in the Greater Toronto Area, and in Spring 2023 was awarded a bursary from the National Farmers Union’s Organic Education Fund to support research and education in the areas of soil health and natural farming.

We’re entering our 6th season serving fresh compost teas to the East York area, across the GTA, and into the Greenbelt. Our farm is a member of the Ecological Farmers’ Association of Ontario (EFAO), National Farmers’ Union (NFU-O), Toronto Farmers’ Network (TFN), and the Compost Toronto working group. We’re proud to consider ourselves among like-minded others across the province who are committed to building resilient ecological farms and growing a strong knowledge-sharing community.