This is the time of year when extra assistance is needed on many Grey Bruce farms. And so we welcome dozens of farm workers from the Caribbean and Mexico to help with the harvest.
Sydney Dykstra operates Dykstra Orchards near Clarksburg. Three different groups of workers help him and his family through the season by pruning trees and picking strawberries and apples.
Sydney says the agricultural workers have a “tactile feel” for farming and understand the process of quality control.
“They are filling a need and the need is that farmers must have a guaranteed work force. You have to know that come harvest time workers are available, and that’s what you get with these workers,” offers Dykstra
Appletop Farm run by Patrick and Helena Johnston near Heathcote also relies on a group of offshore workers to harvest their organic apples. Their employees, like all seasonal workers, are a diverse group of people, from all walks of life, with a myriad of skills.
Bonifacio Gonsalez, for example, comes from the town of Miahuatlan in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. He has a small farm where he grows corn, beans and chickpeas, but he also works in construction building homes. He says that both jobs have been severely affected during the last few years due to heavy rains and flooding in Oaxaca, so work in Ontario has been necessary to keep his family afloat.
Marcelo Perez Saldivar, another of the men picking apples with the Johnstons, lives twenty minutes north of the city of Vera Cruz on Mexico’s east coast. Marcelo is a cheese maker, buying milk from local dairies and producing, on average, 40 kilograms of cheese per day. The extra income earned by Marcelo here in Canada has allowed him to send his children to university. His son, aged 29, is a computer engineer and his daughter, aged 24, works in business administration.
All the men explain that other family members have to take on extra work to keep the family businesses running while they work the jobs in Ontario.
Most farm workers in Grey Bruce come from the Caribbean and Mexico through Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services (F.A.R.M.S.) The program offers workers a higher income than would normally be available in their home countries and a chance to improve the quality of life for themselves and their families.
In 2010 Grey and Bruce counties combined hosted 743 workers from the Caribbean and Mexico to work primarily in fruit and vegetable production.
The province of Ontario as a whole hosted more than 17,000 agricultural workers through F.A.R.M.S in 2010 to work in many sectors including apiaries, nurseries and the production of fruit, vegetables, flowers, ginseng, sod and tobacco.
For more information about local farms and agriculture in Grey Bruce visit foodlinkgreybruce.com
