ONTARIO – The holiday season is often called the season of giving – a time when we think a little more about neighbours, community and those who may be struggling. This year, that spirit feels even more important.
Cost-of-living pressures continue to make it harder for families to put nutritious food on the table, and demand for food banks is rising at levels Ontario has never seen before.
According to the latest Hunger Hurts report from Feed Ontario, more than 1 million Ontarians made a record-breaking 8.7 million food bank visits in the last year.
Feed Ontario depends on a network of community partners to help more than 1,200 food banks and hunger-relief organizations; and farmers are some of their strongest supporters.
Across every sector of agriculture and every corner of the province, farmers, farm organizations, processors, transporters and industry partners step up to help ensure Ontario families have access to good, healthy food.
I’m a director on the board of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA) and my family and I farm in Oxford County. We’ve participated in a food bank milk donation program ourselves over the years, so I was proud to see this year’s Paul Mistele Memorial Award, presented by Feed Ontario, go to the Ontario Dairy Council.
They’re a partner in the Ontario Milk Program with Dairy Farmers of Ontario and the Ontario Milk Transportation Association, which donated 1.4 million litres of milk – that’s more than six million servings – in 2024 alone.
In addition, local dairy producer committees across Ontario have donated an additional $400,000 this year to support community activities like breakfast programs, food banks, local fairs and sports activities. Gay Lea, a large dairy co-operative, has partnered with food rescue organization Second Harvest to invest $1.2 million over three years.
And dairy is just one part of agriculture’s broader commitment to fighting hunger.
So many sectors across the farm community have their own way of giving – and their generosity is making a difference.
Ontario’s greenhouse vegetable growers have so far this year donated almost 6.2 million pounds of fresh peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers, surpassing last year’s total of 5.6 million pounds.
The Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers’ Association is also supporting Second Harvest, donating $25,000 a year for the past five years, which has helped the organization provide more than 125,000 meals to communities experiencing food insecurity.
Many more fruit and vegetable growers make donations directly from their farms to food bank programs.
Ontario Pork’s Friends of the Food Bank program, which grew from the original Donate-A-Hog initiative launched in 1998 by hog farmer and former OFA vice president Paul Mistele, has now supplied nearly two million servings of fresh Ontario pork.
Ontario’s beef farmers have donated $360,000 since 2014 to supply more than 127,000 pounds of beef, almost 770,000 servings, to families in need, and turkey farmers have supported more than 460,000 servings of turkey since 2013.
Through the CFO Cares program, Ontario chicken farmers help provide more than one million meals through food banks each year, and fish farmers across Ontario donate thousands of servings of fresh rainbow trout to local food banks annually.
And our province’s egg farmers donate the equivalent of $350,000 in eggs annually to Feed Ontario and another $85,000 to Student Nutrition Ontario. Since 2015, farmers have donated over 15.9 million eggs, including more than 100,000 dozen every year.
Agriculture’s generosity also shines each year through FCC’s Drive Away Hunger campaign, which has become one of Canada’s largest food drives powered by farmers, agribusinesses and rural communities – donating 514 million meals nation-wide in 2024.
Sarnia-Lambton MPP Bob Bailey championed the Local Food Act more than a decade ago, which created a tax credit program for farmers who donate agricultural products to Ontario food banks and community food programs, and helped ensure even more fresh, local food reaches Ontarians who need it most.
And there is support coming in other ways too, like farmers in my area coming together to support local food banks by helping to buy refrigeration equipment so those organizations are better able to manage and distribute fresh food donations.
This is a difficult year for many families.
But it’s also a year filled with countless examples of generosity from people across agriculture who believe strongly in giving back – and as the holidays approach, the OFA is proud to shine a light on their efforts.
***
Tracey Arts is an Ontario Federation of Agriculture director.