In order to comply with tougher provincial environmental regulations, the venerable Wilton Cheese factory will be installing a modern waste water treatment facility to deal with the contaminated water used for the various processes conducted at the plant.

Last December, the plant was given an one-year extension to comply with the new regulations which banned the dumping of waste water on farmland in the winter time.

The regulations are part of the Nutrient Management Act, which was designed to protect water sources from pollution, and was a direct result of the issue in Walkerton, ON, where seven people died and thousands of other residents got sick because of bacterial contamination of local drinking water sources by farm runoff.

“All the plants have been granted another five years of winter spreading. But there’s also potential grant money coming out, so I think a lot of the factories are going to be doing something this year. Right now I am in the midst of getting a plan together,” said Dave Larkin, the Wilton Cheese plant manager.

“What we’re going to do is put in an in-house waste water treatment plant. So when our waste water comes out of the plant, it will go through this waste water treatment plant, and be almost potable water at the end. And then we’re going to truck it up to our field and put it into basically a dispersal bed, and we would do that starting next year.”

Water being taken to the designated chunk of land will be nearly potable, and this process will happen throughout the year, not just in the winter, when the waste water treatment system is up in place.

“The water that is going to be going up to that field is going to almost potable. Probably the only difference between potable water and what we’re taking up is it hasn’t been run through the UV light.”

Wilton Cheese, which has been in business since the late 1860s, employs 14 full time staff, and up to nine more part time staff during peak sales times, such as Christmas.

The facility sells about 225,000 kilograms of cheese each year, Larkin said.

“We specialize in curd and cheddar. Those are our main products. We sell a lot of curd, it’s the quickest sale. As soon as you make it, you can sell it the next day. And also we make the brick cheeses,” he said. “We also do a lot of fundraisers. We do a ton of schools. Almost every school in the area, they come to us for fundraisers, and a lot of hockey team and churches. We donate a lot too, for door prizes and stuff like that.”

Wilton Cheese is actually the manufacturing arm of Jensen Cheese (A.M. Jensen Ltd.), which is based in Simcoe, ON.

“Kingston and surrounding area is the main sales region for Wilton Cheese. Our warehouse is in Simcoe, and that’s where our owner actually lives. So we ship there and that’s where we actually store our cheese. But our cheese is also distributed through his store, and also a little bit into Toronto, but under a different name, not under Wilton.”

Larkin has been on the job as plant manager for nine months, having been with the company for 25 years. He took over from Norm Brooks, who retired last spring after more than 40 years with the factory.