Holland Marsh - Bradford Ontario

Rich in Nutrition Bold in Taste

In the News

January 22 2010
Holland Marsh Hoe Down

On Thrusday January 28 we will be celebrating along with the friends of the greenbelt on the Holland Marsh Growers Association at the Holland Marsh Hoedown.

Time 6pm to 9pm
location Waterstone estate and farms
17900 Dufferin st.
Newmarket Ontario

this is a free event of greenbelt food and drink and a lively square dance with an authentic caller. Bring the family

November 16 2009
Carron Farms Featured on Examiner.com!

Check out the article: Ontario farmers work to integrate ethnic produce alongside traditional Canadian crops

October 23 2009
Soup-a-licious

Come on down this weekend and let your tastebuds guide you to a wonderful array of soups. 18955 dufferin st Ansnorveldt On.
See you There!!

October 07 2009
PUMPKIN TIME

It is time to pick your perfect pumpkin.
Come on down to the farm and see the variety of pumpkins and gourds for your fall displays. Also COLOURED CARROTS, red, yellow, black, purple, orange, white -- BEETS red, golden, candy striped -- ONIONS yellow, red --PURPLE TOP TURNIPS -- PARSNIPS

Call the office 905 775 2432 for times.

August 21 2009
CARROTFEST BRADFORD AUGUST 21/2009

Come on down to bradford on Saturday to celebrate carrotfest. We will have our coloured carrots for sale to help raise money for the Santa Clause Parade. It will be a great day for the family.

July 20 2009
Holland Marsh Growers' Association!

Carron Farms is now a member of the Holland Marsh Growers' Association! Take a look at their site Here

July 20 2009
Carron Farms Sponsors at the Royal Winter Fair

It's summer but we're already booked into the Royal Agricultrual Winter Fair from November 6th - 15th. We are also a key sponsor of the event! Click here to purchase your ticket.

July 15 2009
Carron Farms Featured in the Toronto Star!

Check out this article!

June 15 2009
Carron Farms receives Local Food Plus Certification

We are honored to be LFP certified farmers!

June 01 2009
Farm Seeding is Complete!

Farm Seeding is Complete!

March 05 2009
Carron Farms Featured on www.greenbelt.ca!

Watch the video about Jason Verkaik and The Holland Marsh!

November 01 2008
Eat your (coloured) vegetables!

View this article which appeared in The Grower magazine.

October 17 2008
Carron Farms Appears in The National Post!

The Marsh harvest lies near at hand
A taste of how your vegetables come to table
Peter Kuitenbrouwer, National Post
Published: Saturday, October 18, 2008

On Wednesday, Jason Verkaik arose at 6 a. m. and soon took the wheel of his Nissan Endurance 4X4 pickup. It was coated with fine Holland Marsh dirt. He headed over to the carrot plant, greeted a half-dozen Punjabi contract workers with coloured turbans and long, grey beards, then switched on the washer/sorter, a sprawling green contraption straight out of a Dr. Seuss book.

He handed me green dish gloves and stuck me next to another worker. Freshwashed carrots, wet and shiny, zoomed by on a belt. We pulled out broken carrot bits and stray clumps of dirt. Stray pieces of carrot exploded with fresh sweetness in my mouth.

Farmers in the Holland Marsh, which stretches across 5,000 hectares, are too busy at harvest time (September to mid-November) to talk to reporters. So I arranged to work a day on Carron farm (a compression of "carrot" and "onion"), about 50 kilometres from downtown Toronto. (Those lush-green fields you see from Highway 400? That's it.) I worked a paltry seven hours sorting carrots and onions; labourers put in 12 hours. Still, my glimpse of this farm, owned by brothers Jack and Doug Verkaik (Jason's uncle and father respectively), taught me three things: the complexity and drudgery of getting in the harvest; the incredible bounty; and the lucrative returns.

The Holland Marsh, drained by a canal around its circumference, came on stream in 1928. (I'll confess to pride; blue-eyed farmers from the Netherlands, where my parents grew up, transformed swamps here into fields of black, fertile gold.)

Since free trade opened our borders to California produce, farmers here grow mainly onions, carrots and celery for export. At 7:15 a. m., a worker switched on the onion grading machine as the sky turned from black to grey. Jason Verkaik, 38, fired up his forklift, on which he bombs around like a kid on a skateboard, and dumped a 30-bushel wooden crate of yellow cooking onions into the machine, which tipped them into the grader.

Later, I took a spot beside another Punjabi worker. In the roar of the machine, we picked out any onions split open by the machinery, or by rocks or pieces of wood. The good onions took another belt into a hopper where workers put them in 50-pound bags, labelled "Harvest Gold." Then Mr. Verkaik used his forklift to load the onions into a 40-foot tractor-trailer bound for Florida. He gets about $10 per bag.

In 2005, the Ontario government put the Holland Marsh in the Greenbelt, which cast a spotlight on the region. The Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, which the province set up in 2005 with $25-million, recently gave $400,000 to a new Holland Marsh Growers' Association. Exchangerate fluctuations, consumers' hunger for local produce and concerns about the price of shipping food long distances are all playing into the effort to highlight the region's role in supplying the local market.

"Harvested in the morning, on your table at night," said Jamie Reaume, executive director of the growers association. "And five million people on the doorstep of some of the richest farmland in Canada." Farmers here will soon ship produce with a new logo: "Holland Marsh Gold."

A man pulled up, hauling a trailer, and Mr. Verkaik sold him 200 pounds of onions for $48 -- $2 more per bag than the export price. "I'd like to do more of that," Mr. Verkaik said.

...

Later in the day, he waxed poetic: "It's more than a carrot or an onion. We're giving you safe food, we're giving you fresh food, and it's right in your own back yard."

Yesterday, I swung by the cramped, bustling offices of the Greenbelt Foundation, on Scollard Street in Yorkville. Burkhart Mausberg, a towering man given to bouts of oratory, is its president. So far his foundation has spent $5-million a year promoting the Greenbelt, including one million Greenbelt Walks maps in LCBOs, 200,000 neck-hangers on bottles of Greenbelt wine and 80,000 copies of a book on shopping in the Greenbelt, distributed with Toronto Life's food issue. More than 1,500 people paid $30 each to pedal this fall in the inaugural Tour de Greenbelt; Mountain Equipment Co-op kicked in $100,000.

"At the Tour, we got hundreds of people who tasted Torrie Warner's fruit (he's a farmer I profiled two weeks ago), and whose families will now change their eating habits. TVO Kids' Enviro-Girl was there!

"We are working at rebuilding the relationship between urban and rural," Mr. Mausberg said. "We need to bring our kids out to the land, and to the pick-your-owns, and escape from the urban jungle, and [farmers] need us to buy their stuff."

September 22 2008
Carron Farms Sponsors The Royal Agricultural Winter Fair

The Royal Agricultural Winter Fair is a unique event that takes place every November in the City of Toronto.

Carron Farms is proud to announce out sponsorship of this event.

Please come and visit us November 7th-16th 2008 at the Direct Energy Centre, Toronto.

July 11 2008
Harvest Season coming Soon!

Onion Harvest season will be here in 30 days!

October 31 2007
Carron Farms Appears in Simcoe Life Magazine!

Check out the article on farming in the Holland Marsh.

June 27 2007
Carron Farms Featured on CBC News.

Farmers face crop losses. Read this article.