Growing Up on the Farm, a look into local agriculture, presented by Briwood Farm Market, also fueled by KUBOTA. Today we are profiling Mike Simon.
In the West Elgin area, Mike Simon is working several thousand acres, with a small portion of land in Kent County.
While a good amount of the acreage is dedicated to sweet corn and soy, his newest venture is carrots, with about 200 acres dedicated to that crop which he began growing in 2022.
He is a third generation farmer with his grandparents moving into the area from Hungary.
Simon admits carrots are not the easiest crop to deal with.
“We’re spraying, oh every two weeks. We have to spray a fungicide. We probably spray some of these fields about 10 or 12 times. At harvest it’s very slow. We’re only harvesting less than an acre an hour. We probably in the field have about 10 people. It’s time consuming.”
Most of the carrots are destined for Nortera Foods in Ingersoll.
“A little bit will go into New York. We’ve sent a little bit into Quebec,” adds Simon.
“Now, our carrots, we call them a jumbo carrot. We’ve had carrots upward of 5 1⁄2 pounds per carrot. So the bigger the carrot we can get, the more recovery, higher recovery they get.
“So most of our carrots go into dice. So, like, a three-eighths cube. So when you’re looking at Green Giant bags with, like, mixed vegetables, they’ve got peas and carrots, carrots and corn, our carrots are usually in those.”
He’s also working about 4,000 acres of sweet corn.
In addition to all of that, he operates Mike Simon Trucking out of Rodney and Duart, located west of Rodney.
“We have 18 trucks and we have 33 trailers. We’ve been down to Miami, Florida, all the way to eastern Quebec. So if we’re down in Florida, we’ve been taking hay down there, bringing produce back.”
He is operating refrigerated trailers and, in some cases, has back-hauled flowers into Canada.
He and his wife have three young children and the hope is one or more of them will continue on the family tradition.
“Well, there is a lot of work, but I remember back when my parents were doing it, I was that age, there was a lot of work then. The things are just a lot different now.
“It’s way more mechanized. And now they’re coming out with autonomous tractors and all that. It’s a lot more management. Like at times, we could be up to 30 people here. And it’s a lot more trying to just manage people. And you think, okay, it’s kind of getting me a little bit away from carrots in the ground, but that’s all part of the chain of events to get them to market.”
Looking to the future, he has hopes of acquiring additional land.
“With the carrots keep growing, it’s nice to have more rotation. To have more rotation, you need more land. So the farm side, I like doing that.
“And the truck side, yeah, I always enjoy doing that. That’s the reason why we got into it. We got one truck to start with and then we basically hired another guy to help out.
“And I just thought, you know, I’ll get a second truck and keep the first guy going. Now you’re up to the 18th truck. And we just kept doing that.”
Hear a portion of our interview with Mike Simon below.
Written by Ian McCallum
