[getsmart-l] Horses, buggies and bidders- more buyers willing to pay for fresh, local produce

[John O'Gorman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Discover Local Food 
To: Discover Local Food 
Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 6:45 AM
Subject: [Discover Local Food] Horses, buggies and bidders


http://www.thestar.com/article/279653

 

Horses, buggies and bidders

Nov 25, 2007 04:30 AM 

Catherine Porter/Toronto Star



One glimmer of hope for southern Ontario farmers resides in a warehouse on the outskirts of Elmira every Friday morning. You know you've reached the Elmira Produce Auction by the horses hitched to black wagons and carts outside. 

Inside the building in the small town north of Waterloo, buyers huddle around dollies laden with the last fall crops ― cauliflower, carrots, butternut squash. Nearby, Mennonite farm couples in black, fedora-like hats or white bonnets listen intently to the auctioneer. 

"The first year I was here, I made a number of mistakes ― I couldn't get the drift," chuckles Mary Ann Stemmler, who owns a grocery store in nearby Heidelberg and has been coming since the auction started three years ago. 

It was formed by a number of local Mennonites who, hard hit by mad cow disease's effect on their beef and dairy farms a few years ago, were looking for a way to stay on the land. Modelled after similar auctions run by their brethren in Pennsylvania, it invites farmers from within a 75-kilometre radius to bring their produce ― three times a week at the peak of the harvest and once a week thereafter ― and sell it off, mainly to local store and market-stall owners.

Some days the farmers get a good price; others, it's a buyer's market. But they have customers, which is more than many farmers can say these days. And they can sidestep the giant grocery stores, which control 82 per cent of the market and have been known to cancel orders at the last minute. 

Earlier this summer, Stuart Horst's fat beefsteak tomatoes, which he grows in a newly expanded greenhouse just up the road, sold for a pitiful $2 a flat. Today, he reaps $20 for them, which is more than what they were selling for at the Ontario Food Terminal.

The hope is that in time, with more buyers willing to pay for fresh, local produce, the prices will always top the open market. That's what's happened at the Leola Produce Auction in Pennsylvania, the group's model, where there are 3,000 sellers. 

Early signs are promising. The biggest sale in the summer spilled out into the parking lot and continued for almost five hours. The auction's sales have tripled, breaking $1.2 million this summer. 

Statistics Canada cites it as one reason the Waterloo region has seen an astonishing 129-per-cent increase in fruit and vegetable farms since 2001 ― the number has dropped by almost 9 per cent across the province.

Greenhouses like Horst's are popping up all over now, says Peter Katona, executive director of Foodlink, a non-profit promoting local food in the Waterloo area. "It's completely transformed agriculture in a few townships here. This is the shining star of food localism in Canada."

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