Sean Smith, lead compost farmer and owner of Crooked Farmz, is originally from Kingston, Ontario, and has been growing vegetables in East York for over 20 years. His interest in backyard farming—and in developing a local CSA focused on composting and compost tea—emerged from deeper concerns about soil health, microbial life, food security, climate change, and our relationships with land and water.

This work became Crooked Farmz in 2018. Now entering our eighth season, the farm supplies fresh compost teas throughout East York, across the GTA, and into the Greenbelt.

Sean was one of the growers profiled in Jamie Day Fleck’s 2021 documentary on urban agriculture in Toronto, In My Backyard. He has also appeared in interviews with CBC Toronto and CP24, on Steven and Emma Biggs’ Food Garden Life podcast, and in long-form interview on Li Koo’s Tea With Li. Shout-outs have come on Mark and Ben Cullen’s Green File podcast and the Humans Who Grow Food web community.

Sean’s work has been recognized multiple times through the GrowTO Urban Agriculture Awards: first place in the DIY Innovation category in 2019 for improvements to urban composting methods; first place again in 2020 in the Professional Innovation category for an inexpensive, scalable compost tea brewer; and a third award in 2021 for an open-source schematic for producing high-quality, biodiverse composts in a limited footprint.

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

Crooked Farmz is a member of the Ecological Farmers’ Association of Ontario (EFAO), National Farmers Union–Ontario (NFU-O), Toronto Farmers’ Network (TFN), and the Compost Toronto working group. Sean serves as Vice-President of NFU-O Local 305 and as Vice-President of the Many Hands Urban Farm Collective, contributing to province-wide efforts to build resilient ecological farms and strong knowledge-sharing communities.