Mat Redsell

Matthew Redsell (1948 -2024)

Mat as born in northern Ontario in Kirkland lake. The family moved to Sudbury where mat started his piano lessons and started his mechanical tinkering. Deciding to go to university to study music he arrived at the university of Toronto where he spent about 5 years and not really getting anywhere. After realizing that he had a good knack of working in wood and his love of music he decided to start building harpsichords. In a few years he had a workshop and was producing harpsichords fashioned after historical examples in museums. This blossomed and one of the things that he enjoyed was tuning harpsichords in historical turnings. During this time Mat founded a magazine called Continuo which had a readership across north America. It also started selling books and recordings on the internet with software developed by mat.

After a number of years he became distracted by hang gliding and decided to pursue his magazine and mail order business in the states by one of the best hang gliding sites. And after a few more years decided to join Jim Marske to develop flying wing gliders in Ohio. And after a number of years enjoying flying and building gliders he returned to Canada to pursue sustainable living which has occupied his time ever since. He got enamoured by the idea of being self sufficient so built an off grid residence with a windmill, solar cells and evacuated hot water tubes. Mat was also very interested in the alternative fuels so started down the road of pressing sunflower oil for fuel This lead to producing sunflower oil for human consumption.

Not being satisfied with things he ventured in to farming by renting land and starting to grow sunflowers seeds which lead to acquiring farm machinery and eventually using horses for farming.

In about 2015 mat and Dorothee joined forces to purchase a farm where the oil pressing, flour milling and the growing of many of the crops used in the the production of oil and flour has flourished. And once into farming mat became very interested in soil health.

Unfortunately just after getting Married to Dorothee Mat was diagnosed with leukemia. After about 8 months in hospital and a stem cell transplant he has recovered and is back on the farm enjoying life to the fullest.

Dorothee Astbury

Dorothee was a pharmacist before she became a Farm assist. She takes care of the chickens making sure they have the best of ingredients. Gardening is also her specialty and provide all our vegetables for the year. Making bread every day or providing tortillas as part of the meals is something she is very good at.

Dorothee does love to cross country ski!

Will Arlow

Know as the guy who can fix anything, Will has been around here for many years and finally purchased a property in Nova Scotia where he intends to spend more of his time. I especially appreciate Wills ability to cut down our trees for firewood. He equally at home in the garage fixing his daughter or friends car.

Will has made it possible for us to press oils by constructing most of the press machines.

Colpas Numfor

Colpas joined us back in April of 2023. He has been a hard worker in the press room and in the fields. He enjoyed raising ducks in Ghana before coming to Canada. His love of ducks has created some problems for us. I allowed him to get started at ducks but he soon was incubating far too many for the area we had let him use so I asked him to remove the ducks which he did but now he must travel quite a distance to feed the ducks before starting work at our farm. I have asked Colpas to leave the farm since he intends to go full time into Duck farming in the spring.