With the summer weather this year, Quebec farmers are harvesting a lot of corn - all at once and that means the price for fresh, local corn is going down. “We did nearly two thousand dozen corn this past weekend,” said Phil Quinn of Quinn Farm in Notre-Dame-de-l’Île-Perrot, who added that his corn sales are really brisk. On weekends, he has lineups of clients who come to buy fresh-picked corn. “For some reason this year with the cool weather, it all just kind of stagnated and then boom, they’re all ready at the same time,” he explained. Quinn’s teams have been working long hours harvesting the corn as prices have come down. “At the beginning of the season we were $13 a dozen and now we’re down to $10. And next week we’re probably going to go down a little bit more and move more corn, more volume.” Plus, his dozen is a generous size. “We do a farmer’s dozen here. Fourteen to the dozen for anyone coming to the farm,” Quinn said. Meanwhile, at the Le Roi du Mais Sucre in Saint-Jacques-de-Mineur, Que., Jean-Yves Deneault said the corn is sweeter than last year because of the weather. He noted his crops are also ready to harvest all at once, so his price is lower, but the cost of fuel to deliver to the public markets he serves is higher. At Quinn Farm, the plan is to sell all the corn soon and then get ready for apple season.
