Perhaps some of you have heard of the app called Farmville. In this game, players start their own animal farm from the ground up. As you build your farm, you decide what livestock to raise, what crops to grow, how many farmhands you need, etc., and you earn “points” to scale your business and deal with any obstacles and natural disasters that come your way.
Little did Cynthia and Mike Beretta know they would be playing a real-life version of Farmville when they decided to start their organic cattle farming business nearly 31 years ago.
“Neither one of us comes from a family farming background,” Cynthia says during our video call in late March. Her broad smile and kind eyes speak almost before she does, and I immediately sense her positive energy through my screen.
As the eldest daughter of Italian immigrants (her husband of nearly 32 years, Mike, grew up in South America and came to Canada in his early 20s), Cynthia was raised by parents who cared about the quality of food they served in their home. “My mother was a flower child,” she says affectionately, adding they are just 20 years apart in age. “Not only did we have a big garden at home, but she also started a food co-op in our neighbourhood. She was into alternative food and medicine; we had a homeopathic doctor. This was the early 1980s when nobody was doing these things.” It’s not surprising, then, that Cynthia credits her mother for her awareness and passion for organics, though it’s a praise her mother does not accept. “I was born on
