Future farm: Bringing a historic farm back to life as a classroom

A nearly 200-year-old dormant farm in Fredericton will be brought back to life this summer as a training ground for future farmers. 

The historic Hayes farm in the community of Devon will be the site of the Hayes Urban Teaching Farm, a project dedicated to teaching new farmers how to make a living off small harvests. 

"Essentially the goal is to create a full-season, full-time farmer training program," said Claire May, the outreach coordinator for the project. 

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Although currently covered in snow, the property will be used to teach about a dozen students how to cultivate soil, grow vegetables and harvest crops. 

"We'll be using about an acre and a quarter of the cleared fields to grow annual vegetables and use the wooded areas and the other nooks and crannies on site to check out permaculture techniques and things like mushroom growing and fruit-trees really maximize the space that we have here," said May. 

Nestled between suburbs and busy streets, the surrounding tree cover isolates the property from the bustle of the city that has grown up around it.

Wooden fences separate the farm from residential backyards. Three fields surround the Hayes farmhouse that was built in the 1840s. It stands next to an empty dairy barn and weathered, leaning, hay barn.  

More than 170 years ago, the Hayes farm occupied much of what is now the community of Devon. The property was around 500 acres, according to the New Brunswick provincial archives and living family members.  

Over time, the property has been whittled down to just eight acres after land was sold or donated for development. 

The centralized location, the country in the city, makes the land attractive for urban farming. 

"We have two gardens right now on the northside that are flourishing and a lot of people were commenting on how much they enjoy their time when they are gardening," said Edee Klee, the co-chair of the volunteer non-profit NB Community Harvest Gardens. "And it's very peaceful. There's so many benefits to it. And they lament that they can't make a living doing this. This is something they want.

 "So, we checked it out and found that there are a number of teaching schools across Canada that are doing something like this and we thought why not just bring it here to Fredericton."

While family farms make up most of New Brunswick's farming operations, Klee says many of them are no longer handed down from generation to generation. Instead, she believes the farmer of the future is very different. 

"There was a survey done about two years ago by the National New Farmers Coalition and they discovered that the new farmers today are coming from an urban setting," said Klee. "The majority of them are female. So, we thought why not set it up, like bring the school to them and find these folks and make it easy for them to transition to a more rural setting."  

In the fall of 2017, volunteers for the project started to till and prepare the soil for this year's upcoming harvest. Since then they have worked with local farmers to build their curriculum, and recruited about a dozen students to begin their farm training once the ground thaws. 

The group is will use the upcoming summer as a pilot project for the teaching facility as it looks for a formal educational institution to partner with. The hope is to eventually offer formal educational credits or a degree.

A family wish 

 Bringing the farm back to life is something the Hayes family wanted more than the cash that would come from selling the land for development, according to the estate holder of the property.  

"We had fresh, unpasteurized, Jersey cow milk from the herd that my grandparents raised and it was primarily a dairy farm," said Ian Robertson, who grew up visiting his grandparents on the farm when he was a child.

"As kids we would build forts out in the woods. There was no development out there. There was a gully that flowed through the property and it would flood in the winter time. And it enabled us to learn how to skate and play hockey out there. So, you really couldn't of asked for a better location." 

Robertson now lives across the street from the Hayes farm. He can see the farm house and the frozen fields from his living-room window. After two years of consulting and talking with the urban farming project he's given the group permission to use the farmland for farming and teaching.

"There's so much potential for New Brunswick to be more self-sufficient in its food stuffs," said Robertson. "And if something like the urban teaching farm can help produce more farmers, more people that are interested in perhaps an alternate lifestyle, then that sounds like a positive thing."