Jean-Martin Fortier

In 2004 Jean-Martin Fortier and his wife Maude-Hélène Desroches started Les Jardins de la Grelinette at Saint-Armand in Québec, a certified organic market garden of roughly 1.5 acres that supplies more than 200 families through a community supported agriculture scheme and seasonal market stands. Fortier, who read environmental studies at McGill, set out the biointensive, largely hand-tool method in Le Jardinier-maraîcher, issued by Écosociété in 2012; Scott Irving's English translation reached New Society Publishers in 2014 as The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower's Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming. His institute puts the book at over 255,000 copies in ten languages. From 2015 he designed and ran la Ferme des Quatre-Temps at Hemmingford as a training farm and has mentored more than a hundred apprentices, while Desroches has kept la Grelinette going on her own. The Governor General awarded Fortier the Meritorious Service Medal in 2020 for his pioneering work in organic micro-farming; the investiture followed in 2024.