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NOTICE TO DOG OWNERS
IN THE MUNICIPALITY OF
MORRIS-TURNBERRY
2004 Dog Tags and licenses are now available:
(Monday to Friday 9 am to 5 pm)
at the Municipality of Morris-Turnberry Municipal Office,
41342 Morris Rd.
R.R. 4
Brussels, ON
NOG 1H0
***Tags can be picked up in person or ordered by telephone***
All dogs must be licensed in compliance with By-law No. 30-2001.
A copy of the complete By-law is available for review at the Municipal
Office.
All dogs must be identified by means of a tag and license, issued for
a (1) one year period by:
Friday, April 30, 2004
The fee schedule shall be as follows:
1/ All dogs - males, females, and spayed females $20.00 per dog
2/ Kennel License Fee $75.00
(for a kennel of dogs that are registered or
eligible for registration under the
Animal Pedigree Act)
3/ Late Payment Charge $20.00 per dog
(Shall be assessed in addition to the
license fee, if the license and/or tag is not
purchased by April 30th)
Excrement:
The By-law requires dog owners to forthwith remove excrement left by
a dog, from property other than the premises of the owner of the dog.
Any person contravening this provision is subject to a $50.00 fee.
For further information contact:
The Municipality of Morris-Turnberry
Telephone 519-887-6137 Fax: 519-887-6424
E-mail: morris@scsinternet.com
PAGE 6. THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JANUARY 29, 2004.
Field to Table Network aims to take next step
By Keith Roulston
Citizen publisher
A plan to add more value to the
products of Huron County's farms
through more direct-to-consumer
selling and small scale food
processing took another step in
Clinton, Jan. 20.
The Huron Field to Table Network
welcomed 60 producers and
processors to a one-day conference
called "Marketing The Tastes of
Huron From Field to Table".
The Huron County Field to Table
Network is a coalition of county and
community groups dedicated to
finding ways to put money into the
pockets of primary food producers
and create more jobs and economic
gain through processing that food.
The initiative brings together the
county, through its Health Unit and
Department of Planning and
Development, the Ontario Ministry
of Agriculture and Food, the Huron
County Federation of Agriculture and
the Huron County Business
Development Corporation, as well as
local groups such as Blyth Heritage
Foods.
"We're tired of being the best kept
secret" said Pamela Stanley
who hosted the event for Field to
Table Network.
Laurel Armstrong, a Ripley-area
marketing consultant who specializes
in the hospitality and cultural tourism
sectors, laid out the Rotential for
taking food to another level.
"We have a very educated
consumer," she said, passing out an
array of glossy magazines that
"celebrate food". These consumers
seek out information on how food is
produced, how they prepare that food
when they get it home, As baby
boomers age, they've become
extremely interested in the health and
nutrition of food and as they retire,
they have the time and interest to
devote to food buying and
preparation.
As evidence of the value people put
on food and food preparation,
Armstrong noted that one of the
heaviest uses of the Internet is to seek
out recipes.
At the same time as farmers are
struggling to make money producing
commodities, consumers are willing
to pay extra for gourmet hamburgers,
Armstrong said, producing a Globe
and Mail story on the expensive
By Andrea Hruska
Special to The Citizen
In 1983, when the province
granted a certificate of approval to
open the Walton landfill site,
engineers estimated it would be full
sometime around 2006. Presently, it
is estimated that the landfill site will
be active until 2016. According to
Huron East councillor and Walton
landfill board member Alvin
McLellan, this "fill rate" can be
attributed to the strong commitment
residents have toward recycling.
"Initially, when recycling and the
`bag tag' system were introduced in
the area we thought we would be
finding garbage bags tossed along
roads and in ditches, but it really
hasn't been that bad," McLellan
explained.
Public works co-ordinator John
Forrest explained at the Jan. 20
council meeting that recycling saved
100 tons of refuse from going.--into
local landfills last year.
meals. "People are willing to pay a
whole lot of money for a hamburger
if someone can tell them a story of
where it came from."
One of the trends in food is the
Slow Food Movement which began
in Italy and has spread around the
world. It supports artisan growers
who bring back heritage varieties of
fruits and vegetables and promotes an
appreciation of the preparation of
foods using natural herbs and spices.
The movement is growing in all
sorts of ways in North America
among people who value good food,
Armstrong said. These people
support local food producers and feel
good natural food is worth valuing.
There are opportunities for bed and
breakfast operators or hotels to offer
classes in food preparation from
baking good breads to making
savoury soups to attract these food
lovers, she said.
The key to adding value to food is
to tell a unique story, Armstrong said.
Olt of the challenges over the years
has been to get that story told to
customers in high-end restaurants. A
chef may make the effort to search
out local producers of high-quality
fresh food and develop recipes to
make the best use of those products
but often the serving staff doesn't
convey the story behind that food,
what makes it special.
Restaurateur Alun Elias of The
Riverboat Restaurant in Wingham
illustrated that lesson with a story
from his own business. He grows his
own vegetables in summer on a farm
near Be!grave and created a fresh
field tomato salad using seven
varieties of tomato, many of them
heritage varieties. But often servers
don't tell the story of what makes that
salad so special, he said, such as the
fact those tomatoes are at their peak
of flavour because they are never
refrigerated.
Mary Wiley of Mary Wiley
Communications and Marketing who
also operates agritours in the Niagara
Peninsula said the key to regional
cuisine is food from the farm and the
rural roots of the region. "What we
do is celebrate those roots: the hearty
farm folk who cleared the land and
developed farms. You have all the
ingredients here. You just have to
promote it."
"People have a yearning to come
into contact with the land and
experience the things they won't get
Huron East deputy-mayor Bernice
MacLellan would like to see an even
stronger recycling program
throughout the municipality and
suggested to council that they "all
need to consider ourselves better
in everyday life. Don't take for
granted what you have."
Wiley presented a report
commissioned by Field to Table
Network which looked at breaking
down barriers to putting local food
on store shelves and restaurant plates.
She interviewed 34 chefs and
independent food retailers.
Of the restauranteurs, 78 per cent
saw opportunities for marketing new
and different locally-grown foods
and were interested in more game
meats such as wild boar, pheasant and
venison. Growers need to talk to
chefs to see what they need, Wiley
said.
Among the barriers to restaurants
or stores using locally-grown
products is delivery. Most chefs want
the food delivered to the kitchen door
because they don't have the time to
pick it up at the farm. Availability and
consistency of supply are also
barriers, she said.
Chefs and retailers praised the
Huron Harvest Trail program which
suggests farm and food experiences
that people can explore through a
map and brochure. More work needs
to be done to revitalize this
innovative program, Wiley said.
Wiley also surveyed 300 buyers of
the Good Food Box program which
provides fresh nutritional fruits and
vegetables to those who might not
normally have them including seniors
and those on fixed income who might
run out of grocery money before the
month was out.
The survey had an astounding 47
per cent response and those who
answered gave the boxes a high
approval rate. Of those responding,
81 per cent said the quality of the
contents and the healthy food were
their biggest reason to buy with value
of the basket also praised. Eighy-five
percent said the boxes had increased
their use of locally- grown produce
and 75 per cent said the boxes taught
them more about locally-grown fruits
and vegetables.
Wiley urged those present to "Tell
the story of local food and be proud
of it. Huron's diversity needs to be
celebrated. You need to promote the
unique quality of the Taste of Huron."
An innovative way to tell the
stories of farms was outlined by
Wayne Knox of the Grand Erie
Business Centre in Caledonia who
helped develop the
Freshfromthefarm.com website, an
stewards".
Mayor Joe Seili agreed. "If we
don't do something about our
garbage today, it will be a more
expensive issue than water in the
future."
effort to connect farmers directly to
consumers. -Knox said the $300,000
site grew out of a desire to help
promote grassroots production in an
area that doesn't have the
infrastructure of Huron County like
the Good Food Box program and
Huron Harvest Trail. There was no
tourism to speak of in Haldimand
though it sat between two of the
biggest tourism areas in the province
in Niagara Falls and Stratford. The
group wanted to develop a self-
sustaining website and realized it
could only get the volume to do that
by going continent wide.
Freshfromthefarm.com is a portal
for producers to contact consumers as
well as a business-to-business
contact centre. In future it hopes to be
able to offer farmers a chance to take
orders directly from consumers.
Part of the site is a search for
recipes for products sold by farmer
members. A consumer can be looking
for a recipe for fresh strawberries and
it may have been contributed to the
site by one of the farmers. The
consumer can not only download the
recipe, but can click on the name of
the farm that contributed the recipe
and bring up a page that lets her learn
about farm, including a photo gallery
of farm activities.
"The idea is to bring new
customers to your farm or rural
event," Knox said. Members, who
pay $200 a year to take advantage of
the new market potential, can set up
and change their listings with the
latest information by filling in a
template on the site. Consumers can
search by commodity or by region
when seeking food information.
There's also a calendar of events on
which a farm or rural festival can list
its events.
Following a lunch of Huron-grown
products, a panel representing food
success stories discussed "Seizing the
Opportunities". Jackie Rowe of The
Garlic. Box -in Hensall and her
husband were garlic growers in 1997
and were looking for ways to make
use of damr.ged cloves and poorer
grades of garlic that couldn't be sold
profitably for the fresh market. She
started working on recipes at her
kitchen table, developed a number of
products like a garlic mix for mashed
potatoes, started with a mail-order
catalogue and progressed to now
distributing product to 1000 retail
outlets across Canada and, through
the company's website, is now
entering the U.S. in a small way.
At the producer level, Tyler Papple
of Seaforth has taken the opposite
path to most farmers who feel the
solution is to get bigger to make ends
meet. He and his wife operate a
market-garden operation with 30
acres of vegetables and five acres of
fruit, selling most of their produce, as
well as bedding plants grown in his
greenhouse, through a self-serve
stand on Seaforth's main street.
The Riverboat Restaurant's Elias
said he has tried to raise the bar at his
restaurant by using more locally-
grown fresh ingredients and has seen
the tastes of his customers change as
a result.
Also present was Antony John,
Sebringville gourmet vegetable
grower and host of The Manic
Organic on The Food Network and
Craig Thompson, producer of the
show. They said that 30,000 to
80,000 people watch the show and
they want to feature more food
producers from the Perth and Huron
area.
John emphasized the opportunities
for value-added production, saying
he sells lettuce to Toronto restaurants
for $18 a pound, 52 weeks a year.
Wrapping up the day, Stanley said
the Field to Table Network hopes to
build on the success of the
conference but needs ongoing
support for the position of the Good
Food Box co-ordinator who is
working to create more markets for
local food by expanding that
program.
Huron East considers
benefits of recyling