Food and Farming Canada » economy

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 [...]

New cluster promotes Ontario food and farming

Lilian — Fri, 27 May 2011 12:53:51 +0000

Southwestern Ontario’s burgeoning agri-food sector received a boost earlier this month with the launch of the Ontario Food Cluster.

My alma mater, University of Guelph, along with the City of Guelph and others are partners in this new initiative designed to attract more foreign investment and creating more businesses in our agri-food sector.

In addition to being home [...]

Healthy Ontario farms will help us as supplies decline

Lilian — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 14:10:02 +0000

The crystal ball says we live in the best place in the world. Personally, I’ve long been convinced of it, having lived in this area for most of my life, but this is the opinion of a bio-economy expert who spoke at the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre recently.

His perspective was a bit different from mine, [...]

Local food movement needs local processing

Lilian — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:25:18 +0000

Ontario’s farmers and food processors suffered another setback recently when the J.M. Smucker Company announced it was moving its Bick’s pickling operations from the Ontario towns of Dunnville and Delhi to south of the border.

This is just the latest in a seemingly ongoing string of food processing plant closures in recent years. Not only do these [...]

Measuring agriculture’s economic footprint in Ontario

Lilian — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 12:34:47 +0000

Farming affects the daily lives of all Ontarians – what we eat, where we live and what we do to earn a living.

Now, a newly released report spells out in stark detail the economic impact of the agricultural sector as well as the punishing effects of long term farm income losses on the Ontario economy.

The results [...]

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 [...]

New Agri-Technology Commercialization Centre in Guelph

Lilian — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:10:27 +0000

Guelph’s Agri-Technology Commercialization Centre is the only one of its kind in the country – and it’s being watched closely by other jurisdictions interested in boosting their efforts in this area.

Although there are many research parks, the ATCC is the only one that houses organizations dedicated to market development and expansion and new company formation [...]

New bioproducts resource for soybeans

Lilian — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:40:53 +0000

Industrial Uses and Opportunities for Canadian Soybeans, a new brochure highlighting industrial market opportunities for Canadian soybeans, is now available. The goal of the 16-page resource, produced by Soy 20/20, is to generate awareness of the many new soy-based products and applications being developed, as well as those already commercially available.

“Bio-products are an emerging new [...]

Our agriculture industry is at a crisis point

Lilian — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:01:52 +0000

The word crisis is heard often at the moment. Unfortunately, it seems to be heard most often in conjunction with two other words: agriculture and farmers. In a country as wealthy and as entrenched in farming as ours, to me, there’s something fundamentally wrong with this picture.There’s the dire situation of Canada’s hog farmers. They’ve been [...]

A young farmer’s plea – support us by buying local food

Lilian — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:13:53 +0000

Those of us in the farming community have known for a while now that hog farmers are facing financial difficulties and need help. Thanks to the efforts of many, even mainstream media have picked up on the crisis in the pork sector.

But although many use facts and figures to try to illustrate the point, to me, [...]