The New Farm, K2 Milling & Hillside Gardens Farm tour

Did you get the chance to go on field trips to visit local farms when you were in elementary school?

Luckily I did, those were some of my fondest memories. I remember piling into a big yellow school bus, hitting the road for a long drive, and finally ending up at a farm!

I vividly recall being in awe of all the animals. The sounds, the smells (how could you forget those) and sights of fields. I remember feeding goats, watching the chickens graze and the pigs roll around in their pen. I even remember learning how to milk a cow and how to churn that milk into butter.

100km Foods farm tours are a little bit like these field trips, but better, because sometimes...there’s also beer.

On our most recent farm tour, we hit the road in a yellow school bus making stops at The New Farm in Creemore, then K2 Milling in Beeton, and finally Hillside Gardens down in the Holland Marsh.

Our aim with these farm tours is to genuinely provide the opportunity for chefs and farmers to connect to each other and put faces to names. Other opportunities include our annual Chef and Farmer Meet & Greet, but the farm tours are a hands on chance to actually see where the food we deliver to you is grown and packaged, and it is well worth attending!

The New Farm

If you’ve never been to The New Farm, you have to go. It’s truly a magical place. Brent and Gil are incredibly warm, welcoming and insanely knowledgeable.

Their New Farm Kitchen is also now officially up and running, which is an amazing event and educational space dedicated to connecting kitchen teams, school kids, and members of the community to farming and local food.

Many of these events are also fundraising efforts – this year alone the New Farm managed to raise over 150,000 for the Stop Community Food Centre on Davenport!

After checking out the New Farm Kitchen, Brent took us out to the wash shed, which he refers to as the “nerve centre” of their entire farm. There, Brent gave us a quick history on their farm and also an overview of the model of industrial agriculture that dominates the food system of Southern Ontario, which is in essence “go big, or go home.”

Brent and Gil wanted to do things differently and their model of “Small is beautiful” is something they have proven actually works by maintaining a highly successful farm by using just 20 acres, but you’ll have to go up there yourself to learn the ins and outs of how and why!

Next, Brent took us out to their fields of greens and educated us about the particulars of their organic farming practices. He emphasized the importance of healthy soil and understanding that it’s a living medium - that is the key.

A lot of their farming efforts are focused on regenerating the soil by growing cover crops and rotating fields each season so that essential nutrients and minerals aren’t depleted year after year.

Following that, Brent went over how fields are prepared, sown and harvested. Make no mistake – organic farming is a lot of work and manual labour, and it was eye opening to glimpse even a little bit of the effort and dedication it requires.

Interestingly, Brent says one of the ways they measure the health of their farm is by seeing how many Bobolink nests there are. Bobolinks are a threatened species of bird and when they began their farm only a scant amounts of nests existed. A decade later, their farm alone is now home to over 100 bobolink nests!

As both Brent and Gil explained over the course the tour, their relationship with us as their primary distributor in the GTA allows them to harvest to order.

Considering the cost of inputs and labour to run their farm, harvesting to order allows them to cut down on wasted product and save money. Within 24 hours of you as a chef placing your order, they’re cutting the greens, washing them and packing them.

Our driver then picks them up from The New Farm, our team packs the order and the next day, our truck shows up at your door with the product!

Gil also pointed out that having100km Foodsas their distributor they can focus on doing what they do best: growing incredible greens for you to showcase in your establishment.

K2 Milling

The next stop on our farm tour was K2 Milling! We loaded back up in the bus and zoomed down country roads, eating a delicious lunch provided by iQ Foods.

The mill is such a kick ass cool space, so I won’t describe it to you and instead show you this wicked photo:

Inside the ‘general store’ we were greeted by Mark Hayhoe, the owner and operator of K2 Milling, an artisanal mill.

There, Mark began the tour by explaining what makes them such a unique operation: the amazing diversity of grains they mill. They do grits, light flours, coarse flours, and more. They mill dried fruits, vegetables, cereals, even quinoa!

As Mark pointed out, he never understood why traditional, industrial mills go to such lengths to remove the nutrition from the grains. At K2, his goal is to mill artisanal, high quality product that retains the unique properties of each grain AND the nutrition.

Of course, one of Mark’s biggest challenges over the years has been getting consistent flour with a good grind. Like any veteran, it’s taken years of trial and error and he and his head miller are constantly working to evolve and refine the process.

Mark himself has an amazing family history – they’ve been milling now for over 125 years! Initially they began as a spice milling operation down at King and Jarvis, and eventually moved out to the country side where in 1935 Marks grandfather decided to make a go of it with flour milling, and that particular mill operated until 2007.

Now Mark has downsized his operation and simplified the milling process, which he affirms is what allows him to create such high quality, small batch products.

At the old family mill, they could mill 15 tonnes of grain an hour – now, they can mill 1.5 tonnes of grain per hour. Mark took us through to the actual mill and explained in much more detail about how everything works – again, it’s one thing to read about it and entirely another to see the machinery and listen to him talk, so suffice it to say: it’s well worth seeing for yourself.

Hillside Gardens

After hanging out at k2, we loaded back up on the bus and made our way to the final stop of the tour: Hillside Garden Farms.

There, we were greeted by Ron Gleason, who is the owner and operator. Ron was one of the first farmers we worked with, and one of the first people to really see and understand the vision of what Paul and Grace wanted to do for farms and local food.

Ron introduced us to his son-in-law Steven, who facilitated the tour for us from there. 

They began growing just carrots and onions, but now also grow beets, celery, and coloured carrots. Hillside Gardens expanded from primarily conventional growing to include organic crops in recent years, and most of their local produce is available year-round.

There were two parts to this leg of the tour: the packaging and processing facilities as well as the fields. 

We made our way inside and, equipped with fashionable hairnets, got a closer look at the processing line. What an experience! They employ lots of staff who are set up at various stations: sorting, washing, weighing, peeling, cutting, packing, discarding… it was absolutely mesmerizing!

The crowd favourite was the carrot peeling machine!

Steven also told us about a great new program they’re involved in: Naturally Imperfect. They’ve teamed up with grocery stores and retailers to change the way consumers think about food.

Before, a carrot with even a slight imperfection would be considered as waste by a grocery store. It was deemed unusable even though it's only imperfections were aesthetic.

Now, this “Naturally Imperfect” produce is being featured in stores as an affordable option that also cuts down drastically on waste. We’re completely on board with that!

Next, we ventured out to the Hillside Gardens celery field. They have over 750 acres of farmland, so this field was just a fraction of where they grow!

Steven went into great detail about how things are planted and harvested, and echoed Brent from The New Farm’s philosophy that nurturing the soil is what produces such high quality food!

These farm tours are a great learning experience for anyone interested in knowing more about where their food comes from!