If you want to see how to feed 800 or so people in half an hour, you have to be at North Gower Grains Customer Appreciation Day in North Gower. It’s an event held at the end of June for the past 12 years. And it’s not just a burger you get on a plate. There’s barbecued spare ribs, salads and the works. If you prefer sausage on a bun, that’s there too. And if you’re hungry for more ribs you go back as often as you want. But you’ll want room for the pies and ice cream.
Dwight and Ruth Foster, the owners of North Gower Grains, have a massive operation. The grain bins have a 92,000 tonne capacity. There’s a newly built barn for finishing beef cattle that is 650 feet long and 120 feet wide. It’s the biggest barn in Eastern Ontario. Foster also crops 6,000 acres of farmland. A building that houses the modern machinery and tractors is so big they use the front part and set it up with rows of table and chairs for the Customer Appreciation Day.
So how do they feed so many people in such a short time? Once all the spare ribs are barbecued outside, they are brought inside and set on numerous tables where people stream by on both sides. Folks help themselves to salads and when they get to the ribs, servers fork them over to the plates. It’s like an assembly line.
The line keeps moving. Everyone has a seat for lunch — no one has to stand up eating.
At last year’s event, Foster didn’t advertise that he’d have a school bus to take people over to see his new huge beef barn as he didn’t want to attract the wrong kind of people seeing the thousands of cattle. So he announced it at the event. Anyone wanting to tour the new facility could get on the bus. The bus made many trips throughout the day. The new barn is down the road from the grain elevators. I wondered how we would be touring the cattle barn. The building is 650 feet long. Would we be getting on hay wagons?
We never got off the bus. The bus driver drove very slowly through the centre feed alley of the barn as we watched the fattened cattle in their pens. After going through the barn, he turned the bus around and drove through again.
The barn is one of a small handful in the province constructed with a slatted concrete floor over a pit to catch manure. The cattle are comfortable by lying down on perforated rubber mats over the concrete. It eliminates having to bed with straw.
The centre feed alley is on a solid concrete floor that covers a water reservoir below to supply the water bowls in the barn, one for every two pens.
The barn design leaves each pen wide open for the cattle to relax in clean, dry surroundings with temperature and ventilation controlled by raising or lowering the 14-foot curtains on each wall. The waste that falls into the pit below is liquid enough that it can be pumped out as needed.
The barn is filled pen by pen with same-sized cattle and each group stays together as a closed lot until they are shipped. As one group finishes, another group enters. The farm’s total annual carrying capacity is 9,500 head.
The bus also drove by the two-hoop, fabric-covered barns that were full of cattle. The hoop barns are open along the feed-bunk side so that they can be filled from the outside, and cattle are bedded along the opposite side.
It was an awesome tour —all from the seat of a school bus.
