Living Lightly in Halton Hills

Where are all of these people going in the rain?

They are all attendees of the annual Halton Farm Tour which is organized by the Halton Agricultural Advisory Committee. I have attended many of these tours and always find them informative.

The first stop on the tour was Danbrie Farms on 15th sideroad in Halton Hills. It belongs to Jay Thoman who is pictured below (on the left) with Regional Chair Gary Carr as Gary presents him with a memento of this year's tour.

Jay and his wife moved to this location 8 years ago with the idea of getting out of the city and to live in a more sustainable fashion. The farm already had many maple trees and so they began a small maple syrup operation. At this point they have 1500 taps. The syrup is available primarily at farmer's markets in the city. Jay remarked that the recent local food movement has helped his sales and also that people recognize the benefit from this natural product.

The real reason this operation was chosen for the tour was to illustrate the way that Jay has diversified in order to supplement his income. In this case he chose to take advantage of the provincial program that allows property owners to generate electricity and supply it to the grid. In this case it was the Micro FIT program.
At first Jay got permission to install a wind turbine, however, he has not followed up on that. Instead, he installed approximately 50 solar panels that can be seen on his barn.

From this installation Jay reported that he had generated 1250 KWH in the month of August. He anticipates that his investment will be paid back in approximately 9 years which he considers to be reasonable.

Jay was quite complimentary of both the Ontario Power Authority and Halton Hills Hydro as he worked his way through the approval and set up process. It was recommended that anyone thinking of installing solar panels do their research in order to find a good vendor. The vendors and manufacturers will continue to increase because the rules of the provincial program require a percentage of the equipment to be manufactured in Ontario. As a result there is great interest by both large and small corporations in setting up manufacturing in Ontario. Our own Econonic Development Officer, Doug Penrice has noticed the number of inquiries for space or land has been dominated recently by renewable energy businesses.