Our Team
Robert Orland, Founder and Owner
Robert Orland has been in the land and water conservation field his entire career. He worked with a conservation authority in the Greater Toronto Area before taking a position with the Nature Conservancy of Canada, which brought him to Guelph. He is the President of two other Guelph based businesses: Orland Conservation an entity devoted to permanent land conservation; and Better Planet Investments, a real estate investment company using environmentally friendly upgrades to houses and helping people rent-to-own their own homes across Ontario. In his “spare time” Robert leads a team of people committed to creating a unique ecovillage fostering each family to be self-sustainable.
Thomas Armitage, Manager
Tom Armitage is the Manager for 2012, taking care of matters behind the scenes, providing presentations, creating and distributing information, organizing the CSA, orders and markets, and maintaining the website among other things. He was the CSA farmer for the 2011 Season and worked as an assistant farmer for Backyard Bounty in 2010. He is a student at the University of Guelph in the BSc Organic Agriculture Program, and had previously studied at the Nova Scotia Agricultural College acquiring a Certificate of Specialization in Organic Agriculture. In the 2009 growing season Tom worked in Windsor, Nova Scotia on a transition to organic market garden farm as an apprentice field manager. He is looking forward to applying all this experience towards another fantastic season with Backyard Bounty.
Lisa Conroy, Senior Farmer
Lisa Conroy will be the Backyard Bounty farmer for the Peri-urban farm in the South of Guelph in 2012. Lisa grew up on an organic hobby farm in BC and studied environmental biology and pest management at the University of Guelph. She loves to grow her own veggies and is experimenting with some forest gardening in her backyard. Lisa was an intern with Backyard Bounty in 2011 and is looking forward to the challenges of being a farmer in the coming season.
