City life can be hectic, and sometimes grabbing food on the go is your only option – and by on the go, that usually means running down the street with a granola bar or trying not to spill your smoothie in an uber. And while it’s hard enough finding time to eat, it’s even more difficult to take the time to truly know where your food comes from, and how it ends up on your plate.
 
So, when the Good In Every Grain team invited the K&P team to a real-life farm for the REAL-LIFE experience, we were stoked and ready to live out our rural dreams of riding a tractor, husking corn, and of course, learning more about where grains come from.
 
Thanks to much hospitality and patience, Lauren showed Dani, Ema and Sarah around her family’s farm in Kirkton, Ontario to see just what a typical day on the farm looks like. Dani was able to put her grain glossary knowledge to the test as she walked through the crop fields to see the entire process IRL.
 
What we learned pretty quickly is that it’s completely normal to be sharing the field with some pretty hefty machinery, such as a sprayer, which is used to spray fertilizer onto the crops.
 
Lauren also took us through how corn is properly inspected and about the practice (and importance!) of crop rotation, where farmers rotate which crops are planted in a field for crop management. On Lauren’s farm, they do soybeans, wheat, and corn. While we were there, they had just planted wheat for next year, and finishing up their corn. We learned A LOT of fun facts about corn.
 
We also got to visit the family Grain Elevator, which is a facility used to store, dry, and ship grain to processors. This is where they store harvest grains in huge bins (think of more high tech looking silos) with fans and vents to circulate air and prevent grain spoilage. Trucks drive in with their crops, are weighed, and unload. Lauren also showed us how to weigh a grain sample to measure moisture in the crops, which needs to be an exact percentage — 15.5%
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To see more of our adventures, watch our visit below! Thanks to Lauren and her family, and Good In Every Grain.

 
Direction: Dani Roche
Photos: Dani Roche and Sarah Suresh
Video by: Ema Walters
Assisted by: Sarah Suresh
Written by: Leah Lalich