AUGUST 2023
CELEBRATING 144 YEARS AS CANADA’S PREMIER HORTICULTURAL PUBLICATION
THEGROWER.ORG
FARMING PICKLES
Ontario hand-harvested field cucumbers fill U.S. processing needs
Ontario’s field cucumbers are mostly hand-harvested to be pickled. Dan Froese is a field cucumber grower near Vienna, Ontario where he also oversees a receiving station for Hartung Brothers, a green shipper with the rights to export the raw ingredient to a brining station in the United States. Photos by Glenn Lowson.
KAREN DAVIDSON The French call it a cornichon. The Brits call it a gherkin. Canadians call it a baby dill. Cucumbers, the size of your pinky finger, currently sell for $1,400 per ton. And growers in southwestern Ontario believe that field cucumbers are worth growing again after a decade of annual planting declines. The Ontario Processing Vegetable Growers (OPVG) report that field cucumbers earned $16 million in 2022 farmgate value, a record over the last seven years. But many of those raw ingredients go to the U.S. and come back as slabs of dill pickles on a cheeseburger or as relish on a hot dog. “We sold field cucumbers as far as Texas last year,” explains Dan Froese, a field grower with Froese Vegetables and a director on the OPVG board. He also oversees the Hartung Brothers receiving station located near Vienna, Ontario, accepting hard-harvested crops from about 40 farmers from mid-July to early September each year.
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The receiving station is but one of the steps en route to the jarred pickles returning to Canada under various brand names with Vlasic perhaps being the most familiar. The pickling industry operates on a North American basis. Hartung Brothers, headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin, has a raw ingredients division that spans several states and Ontario, with receiving stations in Vienna, Alymer, and Chatham. Payouts vary by pickle size. After each wagon has been unloaded and graded, the wagon’s owner carefully reviews the grading percentages and load value. It may seem counter-intuitive, but larger cucumbers suited to the foodservice trade, fetch less money. And nubs and crooks -stubby ends and deformed shapes which signal poor pollination – are destined for relish. Jeff VanRoboys, a third-generation farmer who runs The Pickle Station and a Hartung Brothers’ receiving station near Chatham, Ontario, is bullish about the future. “Pickle demand grew during the pandemic,” says VanRoboys. “Pantry items became more valued.” His grandfather Norm VanRoboys sold the family’s
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first load of cucumbers in 1964 to Walter Bicks, the founder of Bick’s Pickles, who insisted that a grading station be set up in Chatham. The following year, VanRoboys contracted out two million pounds to farmers in the region. Although the famous Bick’s brand was swallowed up by J.M. Smucker Company in a 2004 transaction and Ontario pickling facilities were closed for some years, the brand remains invincible. Since 2019, it’s co-packed in Ontario and still in #1 spot as Canada’s most popular pickle brand. Now celebrating the company’s 60th anniversary, VanRoboys explains that 90 per cent of field cucumbers are hand-harvested. In his area, the business model is to contract temporary foreign workers for premium picking while using machine harvesters for the bigger cucumbers that end up as a pickle slice on a sandwich.
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