Food and Farming Canada » dairy

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 [...]

Cows of many colours

Lilian — Tue, 17 May 2011 02:11:43 +0000

Here’s another guest blog I wrote for Canadian Beef Blog recently:

A cow is a cow is a cow, right? Not exactly.

Yes, they’re all the same type of animal but there are many different breeds. For example, even though they’re both dogs, there aren’t a lot of similarities between a small white Bichon Frise and a large [...]

Fabulous farming fotos

Lilian — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:05:17 +0000

For anyone writing or blogging about farming, here’s a great resource for you.

One of my biggest struggles is always trying to find current, accurate and available photos to go along with articles or blog posts.

The Ontario agriculture photo library has a wide array of available photos depicting many of the different aspects of farming in our [...]

Dispelling dispair about the future of food and farming

Lilian — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:54:51 +0000

In Western Canada, student enrolment at various agricultural colleges is on the rise. And an increasing percentage of students flocking to programs in animal, food, life and environmental sciences are coming from urban areas, which spokespeople at these institutions attribute at least partly to the growing public interest in agriculture and food.

Guelph’s Ontario Agricultural College hasn’t [...]

Niagara’s golden cheese

Lilian — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 14:54:22 +0000

I am absolutely in love with cheese. Maybe even more so than with chocolate, although that can be debatable depending on the day.

So it was a good day this past Saturday when I discovered a little piece of cheese heaven – Upper Canada Cheese Company.

The tiny artisan creamery is located in the village of Jordan Station [...]

Tasty and delicious asparagus pork tenderloin

Lilian — Mon, 24 May 2010 23:56:14 +0000

I’ve already talked about my love for fresh Ontario asparagus in a post a couple of weeks ago…but it’s still in season and I’m still enjoying!

Tonight I combined it with another favourite – Ontario pork – and ended up with a delicious meal. It was surprisingly easy to make and great to grill on the barbecue, [...]

Plea from farmers: Save our farms

Lilian — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:54:50 +0000

Ontario’s farmers are using a town hall meeting in Stratford today to reach out to the public. The Save our Farms forum will focus on the beleaguered state of Ontario’s farming sector and on what the future of an Ontario without farming could look like down the road if nothing is done.

The past several years [...]

Teats and tweets

Lilian — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:38:36 +0000

A unique project brings daily activities of milking cows to new media tool Twitter.

This article appears in this month’s Ontario Dairy Farmer magazine and is the full length version of shorter blog article I posted here a couple of weeks ago.

They’re an unlikely team – a new media researcher in Waterloo, an English [...]

Cows that moo…and tweet!

Lilian — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:48:19 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to visit a dairy farm in Brant County, southwest of Toronto. It was a beautiful farm with a state of the art robotic milking system – which basically means, the cows decide for themselves when they’re ready to be milked and the machine takes care of it, [...]

Presenting modern agriculture

Lilian — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:29:31 +0000

Here’s a great blog post about modern agriculture and bridging the gap between farmers and consumers.

It’s written by Australian journalist Pip Courtney of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the Aussie equivalent of the CBC here in Canada), whom I had the opportunity to meet while attending the International Federation of Agriculture Journalists (IFAJ) congress in Texas [...]