Elora farm's great mystery cabbage caper solved

ELORA – A mystery at an Elora-area farm has been solved with a pretty mundane explanation. 

It turned out an error in a waste management company’s IT system was the reason a dump truck load of halved cabbages were dropped off at Wilowhead Family Farm on Wellington Road 7, said farm owner Elizabeth Shoemaker.

Last week, Shoemaker told EloraFergusToday the farm had discovered a large pile of cabbages they weren’t expecting had been dropped off the morning before and took to social media to try to figure out what had happened. The company was also struggling to make sense of the situation as well, she said at the time.

She said in a follow-up interview over the weekend she spoke with the driver and learned what had happened. 

The driver had picked up a load of organics from a salad processing plant in Kitchener and it was intended to go to a biodome in Elmira but their system directed the driver to Wilowhead as Shoemaker said the farm sometimes takes organic waste.

“The driver didn’t know any different because it was the first time they had ever accepted a load of cabbages,” she said. “There was nothing to tell them that he was doing anything wrong, I guess in their computer system it listed this as the closest place to drop off organics.”

Shoemaker said they ended up mixing the load of cabbages into their compost. 

She said she didn’t expect such a big response to this “funny small town event” but received countless requests for interviews, jokes and people sending cabbage-based recipes.

“We still think it’s very funny, everyone’s in super good spirits about it so it’s nice,” Shoemaker said. “It all turned out good in the end.”