We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dayna Donald a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Dayna, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

Passionate about sustainability, working with nature in a regenerative way and helping to feed and educate our community about where their food comes from and how it is grown!

Dayna, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We are Dayna and Gabriel Donald (husband and wife) and two young boys Noah (3.5) and Finn (5.5). We live and farm in Owen Sound, ON where Gabe grew up on his family farm helping tend to livestock, growing gardens and learning to keep bees at a very young age. I (Dayna)grew up in Ottawa and moved to Toronto to do some.schooling where I met and was good friends and roommates with Gabriel’s sister. I came up to the farm for a few visits and the rest is history! When we first met I was attending business/marketing at George Brown, Gabriel was working for a local commerical beekeeper and was managing 50 hives on his own. We had similar passions, interests, work ethic and decided to start Donald’s Honey. We now manage around two hundred hives, market garden 3acres and have a large mixed permaculture orchard. We run a community supported agriculture (CSA) for our vegetables,fruits, medicinal and culinary herbs and we are at The Owen Sound farmers market weekly with fresh produce during the growing season. We sell a line of raw, unpasteurized, infused and creamed honeys, beeswax candles ,healing lotion made with our honey and beeswax, bee pollen,honeycomb as well as offer pollination services to orchards in our area, we sell NUCS (starter colonies for new beekeepers). Most of our honey is sold through retailers, used in local kitchens and we work with other food minded producers and small businesses. We live in an area filled with so many incredible farmers, producers, makers and small businesses that it is easy to get inspired! We have a small flock of laying hens as well as breed Australian shepherds. We love being able to have a diverse work environment and always changing depending on the season! We feel very grateful to be able to involve our two boys into every aspect of the business and have them work by our sides. Whether it is helping to start seeds,plant and harvest crops or labeling honey than bringing it to and selling at markets! Giving our boys such a deep appreciation of nature(and respecting it) and showing them where their food comes from give us so much joy. Our son Finn is on the autism spectrum and although he still has a hard time communicating verbally we can just see the joy and calm that animals(especially the chickens), the gardens and being surrounded by nature brings him. Knowing how therapeutic it is for him and that we are able to slow down and take it all in with him makes us love our jobs even more. All of our practices in our bee yards and gardens are done without the use of chemicals and is all organically grown and raised. We are very passionate about soil health, beneficial insects and wildlife. We try to work with nature as much as we can and really learn from it. I am super proud of the fact that every penny we have spent building our business has come from our farming income and lots of hard work haha. We feel so grateful to have such an incredible.community of customers, retailers and restaurants we work with, friends and family. We are so thankful everyday to be able to live our passions and do what we love everyday, together!

How’d you meet your business partner?

I touched on it briefly in the last question. But here we go..

Gabriel and I met nearly ten years ago. I was going to school and living in Toronto and his sister was a good friend of mine and my roommate! His sister and I went up to visit the family farm in Owen Sound a few times and the rest is history haha. We spent the first year in different cities and after that first year I moved up to the family farm where Gabe was living and we slowly expanded the number of hives we kept, the amount of land we gardened and tended to, our knowledge, experience and passion for what we do and the business we are so lucky to run!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I feel like if you want to work with nature especially organically you have no choice but to be resilient. There are so many factors beyond our control. With keeping livestock (bees) that can fly a five km radius we are at the complete whim of what our neighboring farms grow and how they manage their land. With more and more land being intensively managed in our area we have shifted to keeping our hives near conservation land along the Niagara escarpment which is still filled with lots of wild spaces, diverse plants and unmanaged land which gives our bees such a rich variety of nectar and pollen sources. With placing our bee yards strategically like this it is our hopes that our bees have a consistent food source with their always being something in bloom. As far as the gardening side of our business we are always finding ways of combating pests and diseases organically. Every situation, season and crop presents new challenges which keeps us on our toes and always learning!

For us right now not living on farm has been our biggest challenge. The price of farmland is just not affordable with a farming income which seems so backwards! For the first time we are renting land on a second property to market garden as we are attempting to scale up our production and the amount of people in our community we can feed. Over the past few years we have been slowly scaling up the veggie production side of our business and the response and support has been incredible. It’s a frustrating thing when you know you could sell what you could produce you just need more land to do it on!

I am having a hard time wording this one lol let me know what if there anything you would like me to expand on :)

Contact Info:

• Website: donaldshoney.ca
• Instagram: donaldshoney
• Facebook: Donald’s honey