The founder of a livestock, horticulture and agrotourism enterprise located on the outskirts of Montreal suggests urban expansion is the biggest hurdle facing farms today. Quinn Farm is a 200-acre enterprise established in 1982 that produces horticultural crops, Christmas and balsam trees, raises chickens, pigs and sheep, including several rare breeds, and operates a large farm store that features the farm's own produce, homemade pastries and a variety of local products.
Farm founder Elwood Quinn says the farm is located in the shadow of Montreal, one of the largest and most diverse cities in North America.
Quote-Elwood Quinn-Quinn Farm:
The more affluent expansion happens on the west side of every city so that's what we have all around us are million-dollar homes. In our municipality we have about 10 thousand residents. Eight families make their living out of agriculture so, the challenge is making that awareness that the farmland is what we live on and we're losing it so quickly in the urban sprawl. It's unbelievable, Ontario losing between 375 and 400 acres a day to urban development, loss of good farmland.
That's crazy. It's totally unacceptable, but it's what it is. That's what we have to put up with, the traffic that go by our place, the people that live adjacent to us. Noise, smell, operating equipment, animals and what animals do outdoors is not acceptable to some urban people. All of that takes education and you just can't do enough of it. Converse to that, most people believe they're too intelligent to be educated. "I know it all so don't tell me anything."
So, you have to work with that envelope also.
Quinn says most of the farm's visitors come from within 40 kilometers of the farm, an area with a population of two to three million people, typically at least two generations removed from agriculture and most have never visited a farm.
Source : Farmscape.ca