Whitehorse, Yukon (Rural Roots Canada) – Just beyond the city limits of Whitehorse lies the Ibex Valley, stretching along the Alaska Highway where the sounds of traffic give way to big skies, rugged terrain, and open woodland.
It’s also where you’ll find a small family farm that’s doing something no one else is doing in the Yukon: bottling fresh milk.
Sunnyside Farm is the Yukon’s only dairy in the territory, a modest family farm operation with 30 head of cattle, nine of which are for milking. It manages to produce enough fresh milk to supply a handful of local retailers and the public at large at the weekly Fireweed Community Market in Whitehorse on Thursday afternoons.
Kat Roske has helped her parents run the farm for almost four years. She says the reality of running a dairy farm in the Yukon isn’t easy, especially during the long, cold winters of the North, which require the Roske family to have a healthy dose of tenacity.
“You have to take into account heavy amounts of snow load with everything that you do,” Kat says. “Also, in the winter, because we have to calve year-round and not all of our facilities are heated, our cows live outside year-round. That can make calving very difficult. You have to get them right when they hit the ground when it’s 40 below or you miss them.”
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In Canada’s northernmost communities, nearly all goods, including dairy, arrive by the Alaska Highway. It’s the single road link in and out. Weather, wildfires, rock and landslides, or a supply chain disruption can grind all shipments to a halt, and you can’t feed cattle or a community when the road is closed and the supplies dry up. Kat is quick to point out that Sunnyside Farm takes food security seriously.
“We opened our dairy for food security, basically,” she says. “Because everything, including all the milk you find in the stores, aside from our dairy, comes up from the south. So, if that highway is closed, we’re the milk here.”
It’s why visiting the market is vital to their business, giving the family the chance to interact with their customers on a more personal level and helping them understand that they’re here to help. In just three days of milking, the farm can produce well over 100 bottles, a small number by southern standards, but in the Yukon, it can mean the difference between fresh and none.
Kat also points out the financial burden of running a farming operation here, and it’s not just about the cost of building supplies and other necessities.
“Funding is difficult,” Kat says. “Most of the places that support agriculture are looking at ag on a scale similar to what you see in the south, and don’t understand how to input it into the Yukon in a way that’s going to last a long time.”
It’s a telling statement, one that reveals a broader gap between national agricultural policy and the realities of farming in Canada’s North.
Despite the obstacles, a deep-rooted, family commitment allows Sunnyside Farm to survive and thrive. Kat and her family run the farm, supported only by a part-time herdsperson and a relief milker twice a week. From feeding to milking to bottling, it falls on them. It’s hard work in a hard place for the right reasons, making it a potential model for what localized agriculture can look like in remote communities.
Rural Roots Canada is on the ground in the Yukon for Nuffield Canada’s 75th anniversary.
