After years of trying to bring out the best in Ontario fruits and vegetables, the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre is setting its sights south.
And to the east.
The horticultural science hub has started experimenting with growing produce typically found in the Caribbean and south Asia.
About 21/2 acres of fuzzy melon, okra, a new type of eggplant and yard long beans, callaloo, a leafy vegetable similar to spinach, are growing at the Victoria Ave. property. More acres at the centre's test site in Simcoe are devoted to the exotic crop.
The new ethnic produce will help meet demand for the goods, thanks to the growing immigrant populations in Canada from both Asia and the Caribbean, said Jim Brandle, CEO of the Vineland Research and Innovation Centre.
It also means new opportunities for farmers in the province, including Niagara.
Supplying even 10% of the ethnic vegetable and fruit market could be worth about $80 million for the province's farmers, Brandle said.
Vineland Research has been working with Toronto's Stop Community Food Centre, which offers food bank services as well as The Green Barn, a sustainable food production and education centre with a 3,000-square-foot greenhouse, commercial kitchen, classroom, sheltered garden and composting facility.
Several of Stop's clients come from diverse cultural backgrounds. Many have been growing crops such as callaloo in their urban backyards for years with success, said Rhonda Teitel-Payne, Stop's urban agriculture manager.
"The trick is growing in your backyard and growing on a farm scale are very different things. So the research that Vineland is doing right now is growing at a commercial scale so making it viable for farmers to grow these crops."
Produce grown as part of the project will be distributed through Toronto area community food programs and markets, such as The Stop. The non-profit organization runs a program called Global Roots Garden, which grows foods typically associated with seven of Toronto's major ethnic communities, will provide their own horticultural knowledge, inspection and taste-testing of the Vineland-produced crops.
"This gives us an appraisal of how well we're doing," Brandle said. "Whether people accept them or like them and so on and so forth. The other channel is to then get them into grocery stores."
Teitel-Payne said connecting urban immigrants will give researchers an indication that the right crops are being produced the right way.
Many of the vegetables being grown on the test site are available in Canada, but have be trucked in from across the globe at high monetary and environmental costs, Teitel-Payne said.
So far, Vineland's preliminary tests this year are going well. The crops are "growing like gangbusters," said Brandle.
"We pre-screened last year for adaptation so we knew pretty well that they'd grow. They're just doing extremely well."
He said they hope to start limited commercial production of the crops next year.
The partners have received $88,000 from the Greenbelt Foundation to diversify food production in Ontario's Greenbelt.
This project follows a four-year initiative by Peter Mitchell at the University of Guelph's Centre for Land and Water Stewardship, where Greenbelt tours were held for GTA immigrant communities and five new ethnic crops were demonstrated on Greenbelt farms. The Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers' Association will assist by fostering relationships between growers and consumers and sharing information across the province.