Ontario grown on the menu

Thursday, June 13, 2013

by SUSAN MANN

The caterers preparing the food for the Breakfast on the Farm event in New Dundee next week will have get cracking early as more than 1,600 people have already signed up to attend.

The partners organizing the event are: Farm & Food Care Ontario, Egg Farmers of Ontario, Foodland Ontario and Heritage Hill Farms near New Dundee where the breakfast is being served staring at 9 a.m. and wrapping up at 1 p.m. on June 22. The dairy farm, owned by the Johnston and Dore families, is located at 967192 Oxford Waterloo Road, New Dundee and parking for the event will be available at the New Dundee Community Centre at 1028 Queen Street. Continual bus service will be provided from the parking area to the farm.

Kelly Daynard, communications manager with Farm & Food Care, says the free breakfast will feature an all-Ontario menu of eggs, bacon, pancakes, apples, blueberries, apple juice, maple syrup, honey and milk. They’re prepared to feed up to 2,000 people.

She says they’ve hired a professional caterer to cook the food “because obviously that’s not our area of expertise.”

The idea of the event is to just “open the barn door” for Ontarians who otherwise would never have had an opportunity to visit a farm, she notes.

This is the first time a breakfast on the farm event is being held in Ontario. Farm & Food Care got the idea from Michigan, which had six different on-farm breakfast events last year, Daynard says. “Our team went down to two of the breakfasts last year and were just absolutely amazed with the whole day.”

Daynard says the breakfast is free but visitors are asked to reserve their complimentary ticket at: www.farmfoodcare.org. There’s also a YouTube video on the farmers that people can see on the Farm & Food Care channel on YouTube.

After eating breakfast, visitors are invited to tour the farm, meet the farm families, interact with young calves and cows, have a photo taken with a cow, learn about the farm’s environmental initiatives, see the milking equipment and listen to talks by veterinarians and animal nutritionists about their roles in farming. There will be live exhibits of chickens, pigs, tractors and other farm equipment. More than two dozen regional, provincial, and national farm organizations and agri businesses are supporting the breakfast.

“It’s going to be a really interesting event,” she says. “We’ve never done anything of this size.” BF