Enduring stewardship, contributing to maintaining and promoting a healthy landscape with abundant biodiversity resulting in resilient ecosystems.”
In 1983, Don and Marie Ruzicka returned to Don’s family farm to live and raise their three children.
By the mid 1990s, they moved to a regenerative model of farming that allowed them to make a livelihood while nurturing the land. The Ruzickas began to manage Sunrise Farm holistically and gained organic certification. Over time, they also began to understand the integral connection between their farm and the surrounding ecosystem. They worked to restore riparian area health, which in turn nourished the ecosystem for biodiversity and recharged groundwater. Don and Marie also promoted the benefits of native prairie landscapes, which sequester carbon and mimic natural grazing patterns. Sunrise Farm has a solar powered, gravity-fed, water system to support livestock, and over 100,000 trees make up its wildlife habitat plantings, eco-buffers and shelterbelts.
The Ruzickas have opened their door and their hearts to a diverse community.
They’ve welcomed researchers and scientists, writers, hunters, birders, berry pickers, children and university students to their kitchen table and their cabin. The Ruzickas have received many awards for their work, including the Canadian Farmer-Rancher Pollinator Award, the Alberta Emerald Award for “Individual Commitment,” the L.B. Thomson Award for soil and water conservation, the Environmental Stewardship: Growing Alberta Leadership Award, the Countryside Canada National Stewardship Award, the Excellence In Grazing Management Award, and the “Farm Family” Award for County of Flagstaff. All the while, they provided healthy, local food, that honours the gifts of nature.
In the words of Don Ruzicka:
“The land has a ‘spirit.’ It took us a while to figure this out. Once we did, we found that this ‘spirit,’ if you care for and respect the land, can continually provide you with hope, strength, passion and contentment.”
Don and Marie have been a part of the Sunrise Cooperative community from the outset.
The work that they have done has in fact created a social and ecological landscape for such a movement to exist. They have shown us what is possible when we, as Aldo Leopold said, “see the land as community to which we belong.”
