Make Your Summer Strawberry Sweet

Jun 28, 2022

GUELPH, ON – It’s strawberry season!

The arrival of summer also means the arrival of Ontario’s fresh, sweet and juicy strawberries. Not only do they tickle your tastebuds, but strawberries are full of antioxidants. A fat-free, sodium-free delicious snack, the amount of recipes strawberries can be packed into is only limited by the imagination.

The Ontario Federation of Agriculture, the voice of more than 38,000 Ontario farm families, offers five recipes that will help you get the most out of these tasty berries while they are in season:

Cooking strawberries, in particular roasting them, is a fantastic way to add to their flavour! Using this muffin recipe can elevate anybody’s breakfast: Roasted Strawberry Oat Muffins.
Strawberry pie is a delicious treat; try this one cooled for a great addition to your summer dessert rotation. The secret to its overall deliciousness is in the retro strawberry-flavoured jelly: Glazed Strawberry Pie.
Savoury strawberry dishes are just as good, with a mixture of spiced Middle Eastern flavours and sweet strawberries, this recipe is perfectly balanced: Spiced Pork Tenderloin with Ginger Strawberry Sauce.
Kids love this sweet, simple frozen ice-cream treat. Make it together using these instructions: Frozen Strawberry Sundae Squares.
Nothing says summer like this tasty snack. It uses feta cheese and balsamic vinegar to bring out the sweetness of the berries, these appetizers will not last: Mini Cucumber Strawberry Boats.

Ontario farmers have been growing strawberries for more than 50 years, and during each harvest more than 15-million pounds of strawberries are grown. Farmers are proud to bring them to the tables of Ontarians across the province. These recipes will go over great with family and friends this summer. Find more recipes, or strawberry growers near you, at ontarioberries.com.

And did you know that Ontario is home to a number of greenhouses that also produce fresh Ontario berries which extends the ‘local strawberry season’ even longer. Year-round indoor production of Ontario strawberries means we have access to fresh, healthy and delicious Ontario strawberries year-round!

The OFA’s Home Grown project aims to raise awareness of the importance of preserving Ontario farmland for the production of food, fuel, flowers and fibre. It’s a key issue for the province; based on data from the last Census of Agriculture, Ontario is losing an average of 175 acres of productive farmland to urban development every day. This is a worrisome decline for what is arguably the province’s most essential natural resource — the arable land with which we feed people.

Source : OFA.Ca

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators