Ontario's fruits and vegetable farms are labour intensive and highly dependent on seasonal agricultural workers. COVID-19 has interrupted regular flows of worker travel and has resulted in some gaps in labour availability. COVID-19 outbreaks at a few large horticulture businesses has put further pressure on labour availability. The labour shortage could mean some crops go... Read More
Category: Fruit and Vegetables
Billing itself as a company ready to transform Canada's food industry, Local Leaf Farms has opened a vertical farm in Barrie, Ont., with plans to launch 20 locations across the country by the end of 2025. Vertical farming is "always presented as the future, and I'll state right off the top I don't see it... Read More
Announced changes to how Ontario carrot and tomato growers and processors negotiate price are being blasted by the Ontario Processing Vegetable Growers (OPVG). Provincial Agriculture Minister, Ernie Hardeman recently announced that the tomato industry will move to a direct marketing system: Every producer will have a written "associated producer agreement" with their processor for a... Read More
Farmers across Canada will have five new fungicides in their disease management toolbox in 2020. This week, Syngenta Canada rolled out Miravis, a new fungicide umbrella brand that will offer five new products growers can use to fight disease in a range of crops. In this video, Eric Phillips, Syngenta Canada's fungicides and insecticides product... Read More
The Ontario government announced $1.3 million in funding through the Ontario Agri-Food Innovation Alliance, a funding partnership with the University of Guelph. The research projects at the University of Guelph will focus on increasing production and decreasing economic losses caused by crop diseases and pests on Ontario farms, including: Surveillance for blight management decisions in... Read More
The first week of June is a chance for people across Ontario to celebrate the fresh, grown-close-to-home food produced by the province's farmers. It's also a chance for farmers to share on social media about what goes on behind the scenes to bring Ontarians' their food. Dubbed Local Food Week, June 3 to 9, 2019,... Read More
For those who handle the grocery shopping in the household, you might be surprised to hear that recent run ups in grocery store prices are somewhat of an anomaly. As Kevin Grier, with KG Market Analysis and Consulting explains, price inflation of grocery items has actually been low to negative in the past few years,... Read More
Ontario’s processing vegetable growers are expressing their disappointment over a recent provincial ruling concerning contracts for the 2020 processing tomato crop. The provincial agriculture department announced recently its intent to overhaul the regulated marketing system and move to a direct contracting model versus the current negotiation model between growers and processors. The Ontario Processing Vegetable... Read More
The Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Association (OFVGA) held its 160th annual general meeting last month and with it came the election of its new chair and vice chair. Bill George Jr., a grape grower in the Niagara region, will take over the position from Jan VanderHout, a greenhouse grower who has served as chair... Read More
Agriculture as a whole struggles with finding enough workers — from dairy barns, to grain fields, and, perhaps most acutely, in the fruit and vegetable sector. Automation and robotics can most easily solve repetitive tasks, but designing and developing automation for high-value, highly perishable product is also highly complex — and expensive. Part of the... Read More