Premier's Award winners announced

Sunday, June 12, 2011

by SUSAN MANN

The Jennen family of Thamesville has found a way of getting into the fresh fruit and vegetable market early and staying later.

The Jennens, Ellen, her husband, Peter, and their children Rebecca, Emily and Mitchell, have covered seven acres of their crops in high tunnels. They’ll be putting five more acres under tunnels by next year, Ellen says. For irrigation, the Jennens use water from a three million gallon pond of recaptured rainwater. This year they’re growing peppers, tomatoes and strawberries.

The Jennens Family Farm Market business was among seven regional recipients of the Premier’s Award for Agri-Food Innovation Excellence. The winners came from Chatham-Kent, Essex and Lambton counties. The awards were handed out June 13 in Kingsville.

Ellen says their first cropping year with the high tunnel system was in 2008. “We’ve always had a farm market here and we’ve always been in fresh vegetables and we were looking for the edge of getting into the market earlier and staying in the market later and having very good quality.”

In 2009, the Jennens won their first award for the tunnel farming system – the Environment Award from the Chatham-Kent Chamber of Commerce.

Some of the six other regional winners in the Chatham-Kent, Essex and Lambton counties area include a farmer who developed a new system for getting the best possible concentration of fertilizer for vegetable transplants, a greenhouse grower who designed an air transfer system and another greenhouse grower who uses a perennial grass, miscanthus, to produce energy. The grass is cubed making it useful for fuel or fibre for packaging material, plastic injection moulding, building materials and animal bedding.

Another winner, Mike Buis of Chatham, says it’s hard to think of a farmer doing cattle ranching and vegetable production together. But “that’s exactly what I figured out how to do.”

Buis grows sweet corn, green beans, tomatoes and other high value crops for the processing market plus seed corn. After harvest, he’ll plant a cover crop of oats, rye or others he’s tried “and we’ll pasture 350 cows on that same ground usually from about early November until June 1.”

The cows graze on the cover crops and crop residues. In January, he’ll supplement their diet with vegetable byproducts or sweet corn silage. “Essentially we can grow enough on our ground to sustain the herd for the winter,” he explains.

The Premier’s Award for Agri-Food Innovation Excellence recognizes and rewards outstanding innovations developed by farmers, agri-food businesses and organizations. The recipients get $5,000 each.

There have been 55 winners each year including the Premier’s Award and the Minister’s Award recipients. Launched in 2007, the award program was initially scheduled to end after five years but it was made into a permanent program in November 2010. BF