c1. Elk Root Conservation

An Innovative Approach to Sustainability

Located at the confluence of the Little Slocan and Slocan Rivers in Vallican, B.C., the Elk Root Conservation Farm Society (ERC) is a not-for-profit organization committed to promoting ecological stewardship, alleviating food insecurity, and supporting Indigenous food sovereignty. Central to ERC’s vision is the recognition that healthy ecosystems and healthy communities are deeply interconnected.

The Society emerged from the personal efforts of its founders, whose passion quickly extended outwards to inspire the larger community. As Kate explains, “Elk Root Conservation was born out of some of the work that originally my partner and I were working on in the sense of what we were doing for ourselves… the community when they saw what we were doing, were absolutely inspired… and wanted to be part of it.” Reflecting on their beginnings, Kate shares, “we moved to the Valley and had a wide breadth of life experience, and a vision of what we thought as human beings’ would help the overall environment.”

This vision quickly came to life, as their early efforts began to draw the community’s attention. “Someone said to us, you know, you can get grants for that to help the community,” Kate recalls. “We initially got a couple of grants, small grants as individuals, and then someone said, you should incorporate a society and do this.” What began as a personal project soon evolved into something much larger, “way beyond what we intended,” as Kate describes. Ultimately, the decision to expand their work well beyond their original vision came from a simple motivation, “we saw a need, and I think that’s the bottom line,” as Kate put it.

Since these early beginnings, Kate and the rest of the ERC team have worked hard towards their goal of supporting healthy communities and ecosystems, leading a range of innovative research and community-based projects. “We have grown from our first $5,000 grant to being quite an extensive organization,” Kate shares.

The ERC sustains a diverse range of projects, including its native plant nursery and seed library, community food box program, and riparian zoneMoist, biodiverse areas situated between dry habitats and bodies of water or wetlands. They serve key functions in ecosystems such as trapping carbon, maintaining water temperature, filtering nutrients and supporting stream banks. restoration initiatives. The ERC is also home to educational demonstration gardens that provide hands-on learning opportunities for community members of all ages, on topics ranging from native plants, pollinator protection and environmental conservation, to organic regenerative agricultural practices. When responding to the interconnected challenges of climate change adaptation, the ERC has placed particular emphasis on the protection of pollinators, due to their essential role in ecosystem health.

demo garden

A path along one of the ERC’s demonstration gardens.

We rely on pollinators to support global biodiversity and to sustain the vast majority of the world’s flowering plants and leading food crops. Despite their importance, pollinator populations are in rapid decline.1 A recent report identified that one in five native North American pollinator species is at an elevated risk of extinction.2 Habitat loss and degradation, driven by climate change, urbanization, agricultural use, invasive plant species, and wildfires, pose some of the greatest threats to pollinator survival.

“Our mission is feeding body, mind, and spirit.”

Kate Mizenka, Founder & Habitat Restoration, Farm & Apiary Director

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Test Plots (Phase I)
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Local Ecotype Plants (Nursery)
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Year Pilot Initiative

The Pollinator Highway Project

In 2024, the ERC launched the Pollinator Highway Project (PHP), a three-year pilot initiative aimed at increasing habitat availability and connectivity for local pollinators across the Slocan Valley. The ERC Farm has become a hub for native pollinators, and now the ERC is working towards expanding these successes across the larger Slocan Valley region through the PHP. The plan involves transforming disturbed roadside plots into pollinator-friendly environments by planting native species and removing invasive ones, which cause ecosystem harm by competing with native plants and disrupting pollinator lifecycles. These restored plots serve as pollinator hubs, providing essential resources and conditions to support native pollinator species. As the project expands throughout the Valley, these hubs will create a connected network of habitats that enhance pollinator movement, genetic diversity, and overall ecosystem resilience.

As Kate describes, “the Pollinator Highway Project is an extension of the Sustainable Apiary Model,” which integrates scientific and holistic beekeeping practices to support the health, resilience, and productivity of bees and native pollinators. The project also draws on ERC’s horticultural demonstration gardens and its native plant nursery and seed bank. We have over 200 local ecotype plants, pollinator plants, as well as host plants, keystone plants,” Kate explains. “It’s a very exciting thing.” The ERC’s local efforts are already yielding great results. “We have hundreds of thousands of native pollinators here… and the next step was to take that mass population and start to create connectivity from the gardens to the Pollinator Highway project,” Kate shares.

PHP Phase 1: Proof of Concept

The first year of Phase I functioned as a ‘proof-of-concept’ and focused on identifying the most effective strategies for restoring roadside habitats. During this phase, ERC and partners established five test plots and one control plot to evaluate various treatments for invasive species removal and soil enhancement. As Kate elaborated, “what I mean by treatment is they may have wood mulch, they may have mycorrhizal, they may have leaf litter, they may have topographical additions to it to try to deal with sun, shade, water of small plants.” This initial year involved choosing and treating test sites, as well as planting native species sourced from the ERC’s native plant nursery and seed garden. Ongoing monitoring of the success of native species growth will provide research to inform how this project may be expanded over a larger landscape. “Essentially, the idea is then to pick out the best mix of prescriptions so that we can provide it through an educational package and literally physical tools to attract landowners, land stewards, along our path, our highway… in order to expand this into a community effort,” Kate explains.

The project is currently in its second year of Phase I and is already looking ahead to the next stage of expansion. “We have funding now for something called the Pollinator Highway Stewardship Program, and it was always part of our plan to not have this be a restoration project and then you leave it,” Kate explains. “With the drought conditions and the climate change that we’re dealing with these days, that’s really not an adequate restoration approach anymore.” Instead, the ERC is taking a long-term and community-focused approach, managing the project for multiple years while also laying the groundwork for sustained community involvement. As Kate notes, “when Phase 2 goes the community can be part of that ecosystem scale project.”

The Sustainable Apiary Model

The ERC has many exciting developments underway. Not only is the Pollinator Highway Project expanding its reach, but as Kate shares, “there’s a lot of really great things we’re just on that cusp of.” Among these initiatives is the ERC’s Sustainable Apiary Model, which the organization is now looking to share more widely. “We’re actually speaking with a couple of universities right now about writing the textbook and getting that equipment out,” Kate shares. Another significant project underway is the development of the ERC’s Biodiversity Catchment Pond. As Kate describes, “we’ve basically developed a plastic-free catchment pond system that we spent about 4 years engineering.”

Providing background on this project, Kate explains, “because most catchment ponds on farms… use a ground fabric plastic to create a pond, we’ve created a system where it’s all natural, no plastic, and it’s operating like a wetland.” So far, the Biodiversity Catchment Pond is showing great results. “We had our biologist come in…to show him just the success of what’s happening… and the level of biodiversity in less than a year that’s come in, he said it’s like looking at year five of a project,” Kate explains. These results offer promising implications, not only for the ERC Farm but for sustainable farming practices more broadly. The Biodiversity Catchment Pond shows promise for how farms could develop wetland-style catchment ponds that eliminate microplastics while serving as backup water sources.