The humble Chilliwack farm behind Botanist’s most beautiful plates

When Dan and Helen Oostenbrink started Local Harvest in 2013, they didn’t imagine their Chilliwack farm would one day be feeding guests at the Fairmont Pacific Rim. Back then, the couple were just trying to grow vegetables without chemicals—something Dan admits he thought was impossible.

“I told my agronomist to give me whatever fertilizers and sprays I needed to be a good farmer,” he recalled during a recent dinner at Botanist, one of only two restaurants Local Harvest now supplies (the other is Abbotsford’s Restaurant 62). “Then a guy I hired told me, ‘I’ll work for you—but only if you get rid of the chemicals, go smaller, and make it human-scale.’”

That experiment—one acre of soil, hand-worked and spray-free—yielded a single perfect cauliflower that changed everything. “My son came running with this cauliflower that had no bugs and no spray,” Dan said. “That one moment shifted how we thought about food and agriculture.”

Since then, Local Harvest has grown into a 37-acre regenerative farm and bustling market, supported by 20 local employees and the couple’s five children. Their focus is on what Dan calls “clean, nutritionally dense food”—grown for their neighbours first. “We’re 100 percent local,” he said. “No greenwashing, no imports. Just local people growing food for local people.”

That ethos resonated deeply with Botanist executive chef Hector Laguna, who built an entire menu around the farm’s fall bounty. The Botanist × Local Harvest dinner on October 8 opened with compressed vegetable roots and citrus, a nod to the farm’s commitment to simple, honest ingredients. Dishes like the scallop crudo with black apple and celery and the grilled Burgundy snails with foraged mushrooms and garlic scapes highlighted the kitchen’s ability to translate humble produce into refined, city-side expressions.

Later courses layered in richness without losing that through-line of grounded simplicity: steamed sablefish with squash compote and salsa macha, roasted wagyu zabuton with onion tart and bordelaise, and a final “sweet remedy” of pear and squash verrine with candy-cap mushroom ice cream. Each plate balanced Laguna’s modern polish with the kind of purity that defines Local Harvest’s philosophy.

For Dan, seeing his vegetables treated with that kind of reverence is a full-circle moment. “What I love about Hector and the team here is that they present the food in its beauty,” he said. “It’s not always glamorous—sometimes it’s just a simple carrot or radish on the plate—but it’s honest and it’s real.”

A decade on, Local Harvest remains rooted in its mission to restore soil health and feed its community. The partnership with Botanist shows just how far that vision can travel—without losing touch with the land it came from.