PEOPLE

Baseball season was a little more interesting this year for Ontario dairy farmer Derek van Dieten. Van Dieten, who milks 90 purebred Holsteins on his dairy in midwestern Ontario, decided to match each home run from the Toronto Blue Jays during this year’s World Series play-offs with a donation of 100 litres of milk that would then go to local food banks.

After swinging a machete for several hours in the sweltering heat of the tropics, I was begging for a little mercy and a long break. I asked Cusa, the owner of this 22-hectare farm, if she saw any barrier to being a farmer in Cuba. “No,” she answered calmly, “nothing.”

She’s bright, cheerful, welcoming – and very passionate about life and her dairy business. Raised on a farm with a beef feedlot in the Cobourg, Ontario, area, along with a sister and two brothers, Cynthia Crowley wasn’t planning a career in the dairy business.

The Baas family, parents Wiebe and Akke with sons Jan and Bert, emigrated from Holland in 1996. They settled northwest of Edmonton, near Barrhead, Alberta, purchasing a quarter-section of land (160 acres) with an existing dairy operation.

If you’re ever driving just outside of Surrey, British Columbia, and you spy a field of Holstein cows grazing next to the road, you just might be at Nicomekl Farms Ltd., which is known to the locals as the “farm that has the cows outside all of the time,” says farm owner David Janssens.

The Portena family emigrated from Holland in 1988 and set up a dairy business in the Monkton, Ontario, area.