[getsmart-l] "I've seen it already; people are looking for local," Mr. Warner says. "That's huge for us."

[John O'Gorman]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070813.PEACHES13/TPStory/?query=agriculture
AGRICULTURE
In pursuit of the perfect peach
While the hot, dry weather has been a boon for fruit growers, corn farmers are feeling the burn
 ANTHONY REINHART 
  a.. E-mail Anthony Reinhart 
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August 13, 2007

BEAMSVILLE -- On a rare rainy day this summer, Jamie Warner's peach trees are rehydrating the old-fashioned way, for a change.

No matter that it's been otherwise dry; irrigation has ably made up for what the sky has failed to send down to the Niagara Peninsula this season, which is shaping up to be a sweet one for Mr. Warner, a fourth-generation farmer in the country's most prolific fruit belt.

"I can't remember a year with better flavour," says Mr. Warner, 35, outside his family's barn north of Beamsville, where 800 cases of fruit, at 11 kilograms each, are flying out the door daily.

While the hot, dry weather has blessed Niagara's growers with sweet and disease-free fruit, it has been a curse for field-crop farmers in other parts of Southern Ontario, whose larger farms and slimmer margins make irrigation unaffordable.

Just two hours west of where Mr. Warner's peach trees droop with fat, ripe fruit, Larry Cowan is looking at the driest summer he can remember in 32 years of farming near Mt. Brydges, southwest of London.

"I've never seen anything like this," says Mr. Cowan, who grows mostly corn and soybeans on 700 hectares. "We're looking at about half to 60 per cent of a normal crop, which is pretty devastating to us."

Until last Wednesday, Mr. Cowan had measured a scant 18 millimetres of rain on his farm since May 1. The recent rain will plump up the kernels - but on drastically fewer ears - of corn he was able to coax from his plants this year. It also revived his soybeans, but even with crop insurance that guarantees 80 per cent of his average yearly receipts, the farm stands to lose $170,000 this year, he says.

Mr. Cowan's plight in the midst of a banner year for others underscores the ever-fickle and weather-dependent nature of farming, the overall success of which, this year, has been difficult to gauge due to varying conditions.

"It's very sporadic," says Greg Stewart, a spokesman with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. "Even within a county, you'll have areas that have received some rainfall that other parts haven't, so it's difficult to draw any broad conclusions as to how farmers will suffer."

If a horizontal line could be drawn from Sarnia in the west to St. Catharines in the east, Mr. Stewart says, "the areas south of that line are, on average, fairly stressed due to a lack of moisture. To the north of that, it's not that we haven't been dry, but it's not as critical."

With several weeks remaining in the season for many field crops, it's too early to predict final results, but Mr. Stewart says Ontario will not see the record-breaking corn yields of the previous three years.

"It would be very difficult to think that we would be anything more than average to below average, in a broad sense," he says, "and there will be some specific areas that will be well below average."

Not so in the province's apple orchards, which expect to produce 200,036,503 kg of fruit, a whopping 24 per cent more than last year, and the biggest harvest since 2001, when 241,104,756 kg fell from the trees.

Back in Beamsville, Mr. Warner's 40 hectares, split among 13 separate sites, will kick out about 340,000 kg of fruit this season, most of it peaches, but also nectarines, pears, plums, cherries and apricots. Most of that will be sold in grocery stores, with many of the pears being shipped to processors.

His father, Jim Warner, who works alongside him, says the game has changed markedly.

"My dad was one of the first ones to bring in a pump for irrigation for strawberries," the elder Mr. Warner says. In the past five to seven years, however, it has become a near-necessity in Niagara.

While irrigation demands a lot of equipment and labour, it pays off immensely. The supplemental water ensures good-sized fruit, while the hot, dry weather boosts its sugar content and staves off moisture-related disease.

The results are readily apparent on a stroll through the Warners' orchards, where seasonal workers, flown in from Mexico every summer, are making their second pass through the peach trees, which get picked up to five times over 10 days.

"Buenas tardes," Jamie Warner says, bidding a good afternoon to Alejandro Flores, 37, who wears a yellow raincoat as he fills a basket.

"Working in the rain is always optional," Mr. Warner explains, though it's not allowed if there is lightning. "But it takes a lot to bring these guys in."

Mr. Flores, a married father of three who lives about an hour outside Mexico City, says the money he earns during his 3½ months here each summer enables him to buy feed and livestock for his own small farm back home.

"It's very important because I need to make money for my family," he says. "I like this work; it's easy."

Mr. Flores is among about 18,000 workers who make their way north from Mexico and the Caribbean to work each summer, under a seasonal agricultural workers program administered by the federal government and the consulates of the workers' home countries.

This year, the Warners are employing 16 Mexicans and an equal number of Canadians, mostly high-school students, to get them through the harvest.

Mr. Warner, who took a night-school course in Spanish a few years ago, admits he often relies on a form of "Spanglish" to converse with the workers, many of whom have acquired bits of English over the years.

The fruit the workers pick, however, need not travel nearly so far to find willing customers.

While a more sophisticated global market has plunked a wider variety of produce on store shelves in recent years, the burgeoning local-food movement will only benefit Niagara growers, close as they are to Toronto, and within a day's drive of Montreal. 

"I've seen it already; people are looking for local," Mr. Warner says. "That's huge for us."
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