A new family farm has sprouted just outside of Campbell’s Bay, where its two owners are trying to bring local food to the Pontiac.
Behind Innishill Farm are a young couple, Scott and Eryn Brown, who moved to the Pontiac three years ago from Southern Ontario to start a new life with their two daughters.
On their property the pair are already raising pastured-raised pork, chickens (for meat and eggs) and vegetables. This year, their third on the farm, they are preparing to launch a full-time market garden where they will sell vegetables in the very same field where they are grown.
The couple weren’t always farmers – far from it. Scott, from Point Edward, Ont. was a career boilermaker while Eryn, from Toronto, was a child and youth care practitioner and a holistic nutritionist. Scott said the couple started learning how to grow food in their backyard, gradually producing more as they learned more techniques and read more about it.
“Can we do 100 feet of potatoes, or 50 feet? Can we try this? How about this? And we just started playing around, reading more literature. I read a book called The New Farm [ . . . ] and they started farming because they wanted to feed communities that didn’t have access to the healthiest food for a good price point.”
Farming isn’t just a job for the couple – it also allows them to feed healthy and naturally produced food to their kids and to the community. Eryn said her focus on nourishing food as central to wellbeing began at an organization called The Stop in Toronto, which brings in professional chefs to cook gourmet meals for people in need.
“I thought I was going to go into social work, and that was kind of where my interest was. But then food and helping people kept meshing together in every avenue I was going. And we kept coming back to that, so it was only natural to get into food somehow,” she said.
Now with two kids of their own, Eryn said the health aspect of farming has become even more important. When she worked in social services, she saw the food that was being served to kids who were about to go into group homes or medical institutions, and she wanted to provide a better alternative for her own kids.
“There would be like Wonder Bread, Hamburger Helper, and green Jell-O. And I was looking at the food thinking, ‘How is this conducive to health and healing? This is so backwards. I can’t do this. When we decided we were going to have a family of our own, it was just natural that food had to be first and foremost,” she said.
While providing healthy food for their own children was a major motivation, the Browns say they also want their farm to contribute to the long-term health of the wider community. They said they hope the Pontiac, like other small communities, can be strong by attracting more young people.
“They’re the future of a small community. If you don’t keep them there, then the roots disappear. We want to feed young people really good food. We want to offer employment for young people to keep them involved in their food and to keep them in the community,” Eryn said.
The pair count themselves lucky to be able to afford farmland, as the price of land across the country skyrockets. They say they are hoping to show that operating a small family farm is still possible, without the social media presence that some young farmers now are leveraging as income.
“We want not to prove but to show that you don’t need to be a top influencer on social media to have a successful farm. Your farm should be selling food, not t-shirts and coffee cups,” Scott said.
Eryn said that like many others who were dreaming of what life would be like on a family farm, she had a somewhat romantic notion of what it would be like – a notion that was promptly squashed upon moving here.
“I did subscribe to all the homesteaders on YouTube. I loved that. So I had a vision that we were going to walk into a life kind of like that [ . . . ] I dreamed of walking through fields in a sundress with a basket, but mostly I’m covered in manure and mud and I have a kid strapped on my back who’s screaming because I’m an hour late for dinner.”
This summer will mark the Browns’ first season full-time on the farm – a year Scott said will be spent developing some of the infrastructure for their farm, such as water lines, electricity and fencing.
They hope to open the market garden later this year, where customers will be able to purchase dozens of varieties of vegetables directly from the farm. Along with pork, chicken and eggs, the couple hopes to continue expanding the variety of food they can offer while keeping production at a scale they can manage as a family. Eventually, they hope to add beef to their offerings
For the Browns, success isn’t measured by becoming a large commercial operation. Instead, they hope to show that a small family farm can provide healthy, locally grown food while remaining financially sustainable.
“We are not a hobby farm. We are not homesteading,” Scott said. “We are trying to build a business here that can be passed on to another generation.”
