Feeding the Hungry: Pepper Farmer Starts Produce Donation Effort

An Ontario farmer has initiated a major donation program to help provide fresh produce to food banks in that province.
Feeding the Hungry: Pepper Farmer Starts Produce Donation Effort
Peter Quiring, founder and president of Nature Fresh Farms, and Joanne Santucci, executive director of Hamilton Food Share, have teamed up to distribute half a million pounds of bell peppers to food banks in Ontario. (Nature Fresh Farms)
Joan Delaney
7/22/2009
Updated:
10/1/2015
<a><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/nf.jpg" alt="Peter Quiring, founder and president of Nature Fresh Farms, and Joanne Santucci, executive director of Hamilton Food Share, have teamed up to distribute half a million pounds of bell peppers to food banks in Ontario.  (Nature Fresh Farms)" title="Peter Quiring, founder and president of Nature Fresh Farms, and Joanne Santucci, executive director of Hamilton Food Share, have teamed up to distribute half a million pounds of bell peppers to food banks in Ontario.  (Nature Fresh Farms)" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-1827204"/></a>
Peter Quiring, founder and president of Nature Fresh Farms, and Joanne Santucci, executive director of Hamilton Food Share, have teamed up to distribute half a million pounds of bell peppers to food banks in Ontario.  (Nature Fresh Farms)
Food bank fare has historically been short on fresh fruit and vegetables. But a major produce donation program being initiated by an Ontario farmer endeavours to change all that.

Peter Quiring, founder and president of Nature Fresh Farms, a large greenhouse operation based in Leamington, Ontario, is donating half a million pounds of bell peppers this year to help put fresh produce on the tables of Ontario’s growing number of hungry families.

Once fully operational, the pepper donation initiative will be the largest giving program of fresh fruits and vegetables in the country.

“We are facing tough times in Ontario, and we all need to do more to help each other,” says Quiring, whose 67-acre, high-tech greenhouse operation is Ontario’s largest producer of yellow, red, and orange peppers.

Quiring hopes his efforts will lead to tax changes that would encourage other growers to participate, putting millions of dollars worth of fresh fruits and vegetables on food bank shelves across Ontario annually.

Nature Fresh Farms harvests peppers ten months of the year, ensuring a steady supply of fresh produce from March through December.

Quiring has teamed up with Hamilton Food Share, a charitable organization that procures more than two million pounds of food annually for distribution through a network of community-based organizations.
   
“Fresh produce is something that has been missing from the mix, but we are set up to handle it with cold storage,” says Joanne Santucci, executive director of Hamilton Food Share.

“This donation is more than we could absorb in the local communities we serve, so we are working with the Ontario Association of Food Banks to get product to people across the province.”

Adam Spence, executive director of the Ontario Association of Food Banks (OAFB), says Quiring’s donation means a steady supply of fresh, nutritious product for food banks in tough economic times.

“In a period where we’re seeing an increase in the number of people returning to food banks—we’re up 20 percent this year alone compared to last year—this couldn’t come at a better time.”

Food banks are down about a million pounds of food this year due to closures in Ontario’s food manufacturing sector, Spence says. With the increase in demand, “the gap grows even wider in terms of the amount of food that we need to move through the system.”

OAFB has been lobbying the Ontario government to create a small tax credit to provide incentive and compensation for farmers and processors who donate products.

“The return on it is really high,” says Spence. “Every dollar the government would invest in this would create $7 worth of local fresh food for families that need it the most.”

When OAFB submitted its proposal in the spring the response was positive; however, there has been no commitment to follow through on the initiative.

In the hope that it will be implemented by the Fall Economic Statement, OAFB is circulating petitions, has launched a letter-writing campaign, and has been meeting with provincial governments officials.

Quiring says he believes other Ontario growers would be willing to divert millions of pounds of produce to the province’s food banks if tax credits were in place to help offset the costs of managing such programs.

Currently, Ontario’s farmers and processors receive no benefit or compensation for food donations.

“There are tax credits in place for financial donations, for people who give money and also people who give time, but for food there’s no tax benefit that you get for that donation. Many states in the U.S. already have this kind of tax credit, places like Oregon, Colorado, and North Carolina, and that has generated millions of pounds of fresh food for food banks in those states,” says Spence.

Once the produce donation program is in place, there’s a possibility it may be adopted by other provinces, Spence says. Currently, the only fresh produce going to food banks across the country comes from local farmers making small-scale donations.

“If we can encourage this to happen in Ontario in one place it will happen in other places across the province and in other provinces across the country…. The volumes are out there—there’s up to 25 million pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables that are available in Ontario alone, and so across the country the volumes would be even greater than that.”

Currently, the only fresh food program OAFB has is a milk program with the Ontario Dairy Council and the Dairy Farmers of Ontario which generates up to a million and a half liters of fresh milk every year.

“So accessing farm products, fruits and vegetables, and livestock, is extremely important for us given that persons living in poverty have particular challenges with health which are related to the food that they eat,” Spence says.
Joan Delaney is Senior Editor of the Canadian edition of The Epoch Times based in Toronto. She has been with The Epoch Times in various roles since 2004.
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