The Ontario FangZheng Agriculture Enterprise has harvested its crop of medium-grain rice
The Ontario FangZheng Agriculture Enterprise celebrated a milestone Friday, with producers harvesting the farm's first crop of medium-grain sticky rice.
Farm manager Wendy Zhang said the experiment was a success, describing the harvested rice as "perfect."
"We didn't get any disease or pest problem this year," she said. "The yield should be good — not excellent — because we still do not apply too much
fertilizer."FangZheng relied on equipment supplied in part by Tri-Hark Farms to harvest the rice crop.
Jim Hawkins, co-owner of Tri-Hawk Farms, said the rice crop looks promising.
Despite the farm's successful harvest, John Zandstra, a professor of fruit and vegetable cropping systems at the University of Guelph's Ridgetown campus, explained that there's still quite a bit of work ahead for the initiative.
New rice varieties, different planting methods, as well as different crop management strategies are all part of FangZheng's plans for future experiments.
"We have to get an idea of pest pressure as well," said Zandstra, referring to potential concerns about pest control. "We did not notice anything this year, not to say it won't happen."
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