The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

LAR FARMING Farming has long been the backbone of modern civili- zation and nowhere is this truer than in Ontario. For the past 25 years, however, global supply and demand, the profit margins in agriculture and the cost of technology has turned this once noble profession into jeopardy. Three years ago I was involved in a project of photo- graphing barns of Scugog, only to discover the majority of them were in disrepair, if in fact they were still stand- ing. Farmers, faced with a bleak future, sought answers from government, education and business, without much success. But James Mann, a resident of Scugog, has helped change this with his proposal to replace a farmer’s old barn with a brand new barn. He then leases it to the farmer for a specified period — after which time the barn is turned over to the farmer at no cost. Too good to be true? Not in this case because hundreds of farm- ers are lining up to take advan- tage of the partnership in order to get a new barn. James was raised on a farm in southwestern Ontario and com- pleted an engineering degree fo- James Mann Local firm builds barns at no cost to farmers cussing on renewable energy and applying it to farming. His con- cept was simple: build a barn, furnish it with solar panels and sell the energy back to the grid in order to pay for the barn. “I was surprised at how receptive everyone was to the concept” James explained. His first task was to find investors and a company he could partner with. It was not long after he began to Pitch his idea that Hay Solar ULC (www.haysolar.com) was developed to assist Ontario farmers with the project, process applications and liaise with the Ontario Power Authority. The procedure begins when a farmer simply fills in an application online, which is processed by Hay Solar. Once approved, Hay Solar leases about an acre of land from the farmer and builds a barn on the acre of land on the farmer’s property. According to the Hay Solar website, the barn is owned by Hay Solar during the term of the Please turn to page 46 FOCUS - SEPTEMBER 2011 47