Food and Farming Canada

Apple grower featured in Faces of Farming calendar

Lilian — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 20:03:43 +0000

She was the winner of the Golden Apple Award for industry service and leadership at the 2011 OFVGA annual meeting. Now, in 2012, Cathy McKay will also be a calendar model.

She is the first-ever apple grower to be featured in the popular Faces of Farming calendar, produced annually to promote awareness of food and farming in [...]

World’s farm journalists come to Canada

Lilian — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 13:00:38 +0000

It’s finally here.

The International Federation of Agriculture Journalists (IFAJ) 2011 congress is now underway with several pre-congress events taking place in Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.

Together with my colleague Owen Roberts (@theurbancowboy), I’m co-chairing this gathering of about 260 farm journalists from 30 countries around the world, which is taking place in Ontario this week.

The last [...]

New crops in local soils raising high hopes

Lilian — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 13:06:56 +0000

Ontario lavender bunches

Lavender, hazelnuts and sweet potatoes are not crops we commonly associate with this province.

Yet they’re starting to emerge in Ontario’s south coast area, the fertile sand plains in Norfolk, Brant, Elgin, Middlesex and Oxford counties where tobacco used to reign supreme.

As the decline of the tobacco industry continued [...]

Local food made easy

Lilian — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 18:00:42 +0000

New food service marketing program expands markets for Ontario foods

If you build it, they will come.

That’s the thinking behind a new marketing program being used by Gordon Food Service (GFS), Ontario’s largest family-owned food service distributor – expanding and promoting their offering of Ontario food products by making it easy for their customers to identify and [...]

Bringing local farmers and food buyers together

Lilian — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 12:57:01 +0000

Growing mesclun mix

As an unabashed advocate for local food and farming, I was thrilled to see that here in Guelph we have an officially recognized local food champion in our midst.

Leslie Carson, of St. Joseph’s Health Centre, was honoured in the 2011 Local Food Champions Report, part of a series of initiatives by the Friends [...]

Keeping tabs on where the cows are

Lilian — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 13:12:45 +0000

RFID tags are placed in an animal's ear

Many modern-day pet owners microchip their four-legged companions.

This is to help identify them should they become lost, injured or otherwise harmed in some way.

Farmers are doing a similar thing with their beef cattle.

They’re using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to keep track of their animals as they move [...]

The farm labour side of local food

Lilian — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:46:30 +0000

Ontario Conservative Leader Tim Hudak announced this spring that, if elected, he’d make convicted provincial prisoners work to clean up Ontario’s highways.

According to a story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a variation on this theme was recently launched in Georgia, where teams of probationers are working on fruit and vegetable farms.

Many farm workers there don’t have legal [...]

Apples – organic or conventional?

Lilian — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 12:55:22 +0000

The debate over organic versus conventional agriculture is an ongoing one in the world of food production.

For one Ontario apple grower, though, that debate ended a decade ago after some firsthand research into the issue.

But first, a little bit of background.

If you’ve eaten apples from any of Ontario’s major supermarkets, chances are you’ve eaten a Martin’s [...]

Monforte’s local cheese renaissance

Lilian — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:10:17 +0000

Montforte cheese sampler

The story of Ruth Klahsen and her dairy are well-known in Ontario’s local food world.

Montforte Dairy has a loyal – and growing – following of fans devoted to the agricultural values it espouses and the cheeses it produces.

So devoted, in fact, that they have raised about half a million dollars as members of [...]

Where potato chips are grown

Lilian — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 12:55:50 +0000

Mmm, there’s nothing quite like cracking open a bag of fresh, crunchy potato chips.

I confess to consuming more than my fair share of the salty snacks over the years and love seeing what new flavours will be coming out next.

But one thing I’ve certainly never really thought too much about was how the contents of that [...]