This year's award winner for Innovative Farmer of the Year goes to Zac Cohoon.
The Port Perry area farmer has been adding organic material to his farm for 20 years through composting.
Cohoon's 1200 acre farm used to raise livestock, but now features a wide variety of crops.
Two decades ago, he started to mix municipal paper by-products with chicken waste before spreading it on his fields.
When he emptied his barns 10 years ago, he then began to mix leaves and yard waste with mushroom compost and food scraps.
Cohoon says when he first bought one particularly sandy field it only yielded 10 bushel-an-acre soybeans.
He points out it now has one per cent more organic matter and is full of worms, and this fall his soybean harvest hit 54 bushels an acre.
The Innovative Farmer of the Year award will be presented at the Innovative Farmers Association of Ontario Conference in London this February.
