Carrots or cars: choose your economic driver

By: Karen Davidson, Editor for The Grower

How to grow the perfect carrot doesn’t excite Paul Smith. He’s got 900 acres of root vegetables in the Holland Marsh that need to be washed and  polished for clients along the U.S. eastern seaboard and grocers in the Greater Toronto Area. His mission? Just-in-time pieces.

Unlike car manufacturing, agricultural processing is about disassembly. It’s about growing millions of imperfect parts and taking them apart for multiple end uses. In the case of Smith’s Pier 27 plant near Keswick, Ontario, it’s the key source of two-inch carrot plugs that are shredded by major salad  companies in the U.S. What would be a culled carrot for some, is a value-added piece for Pier 27.

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