|  This post is courtesy of fellow blogger and farm and food aficionado Tiffany Mayer. She writes in the Niagara Region – check out her blog, Eating Niagara or follow her on Twitter.
Len Troup has been doing something unusual this past week. The Jordan Station tender fruit grower has been farming. It’s a drastic change of pace from the previous weeks, when Troup, chair of the Ontario Tender Fruit Producers Marketing Board was spending more time in the political arena than his orchard. Continue reading Saving Ontario’s fruit farms  An innovative residue extraction process for Ontario ginseng is poised to open up new market opportunities for the high value crop.
The new method allows for the removal of crop protection residues without affecting the structure and quality of the ginseng, a pilot project has shown.
Continue reading New markets for Ontario ginseng  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 professor from Georgia, a Brant County dairy farmer and 12 Holstein cows. But they’ve come together in a unique social media project that looks at the way humans interact with animals and has the cows posting their daily activities on Twitter. Continue reading Teats and tweets This is a longer version of a post I put up last week – and this article is also printed in the Ontario Farmer this week.
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 An episode of Oprah. A film called Food Inc. A hard-hitting Time magazine cover story. A series in the Toronto Star. The last year was not a good one for agriculture on the public relations front, but a Guelph agri-food consultant still believes the industry is on the right track. And he offered some tips to help address the growing public perception issue as he spoke to a meeting of the Guelph Partnership for Innovation last week. Continue reading Farmers get some PR pointers An episode of Oprah, a hard-hitting Time magazine cover story, a film called Food Inc. – farming is under increased, often one-sided scrutiny leaving many people to wonder whether modern agriculture is on the right track. Rob Hannam, President of Synthesis Agri-Food Consulting, believes it encourages everyone to do more to address public perceptions of farming, he told a meeting of the Guelph Partnership for Innovation I attended last week. Continue reading Is farming on the right track? Normally, when I go grocery shopping, I approach the whole experience a bit like a military mission – with focus, list in hand and plan in mind to get in and out as quickly and painlessly as possible. Several weeks ago, I was a bit less rushed than usual at the supermarket, so I had a bit of time to slow down and observe what was going on around me. What I noticed intrigued me and stuck in my mind over the next few visits. Continue reading Pondering fresh meat’s future  We all eat but most of us likely give it little thought beyond worrying about calories or fat content. We certainly aren’t likely to spend a lot of time thinking about who grew that food and the work that someone somewhere put into producing it.
But that’s the goal of the 2010 Faces of Farming calendar – getting us to know our food by knowing the farmers who grow it. It features Ontario farmers and farm families from across the province in starkly beautiful black and white photography. Continue reading Putting a face to farming | |
