Jenny Butcher and Wes Kuntz of Little Brown Cow farm near Brantford are the winners of this year’s Ontario’s Outstanding Young Farmers award.
Kuntz left his job with CanWest DHI to start a dairy farm with about 20 Jerseys and he and Butcher have boot-strapped it into a popular farming and retail business that attracts about 5,000 visitors a week.
They market milk, cheese and meat produced on their farm as well as farm produce from neighbours sold from a store on the next-door property they bought.
They also experimented with processing their own cheese, eventually renovating an old abattoir on their farm to process their own milk.
The finalists were Mike and Danielle Cornelissen, of Twin Creeks Greenhouse near Watford, bought land and within five years had 40 acres as a greenhouse business and Ryan and Romy Schill who developed an 800-head sheep business in Wellington County.
