Forest Farm – A “Naturalist’s Paradise”

Jeff Green | Aug 26, 2010

Over 30 years ago, David Hahn was working as a school teacher in Toronto. David came from a farming background from the Kitchener area, and he and his wife Leslie were in agreement that the city was not where they wanted to raise their two children.

So they began to consider moving away from Toronto, but his father's farm was a small one and David knew he did not want really want to return to a traditional farm, he wanted something else.

So, after seeing an ad in the Toronto Star promoting a “Naturalist’s Paradise” in the Westport area, they decided to pack up the kids and take a look.

What they found was a 200 acre property that had been farmed for 60 or 70 years in the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th Century but, being located on the Canadian Shield, it fell prey to the same fate that befell hundreds of settlement farms in the Frontenac spur of the shield, as families moved away in search of an easier life.

It was not the loose patchwork of low-lying fields surrounded by hardwood forest that attracted David Hahn to the property, it was the forest itself. Before he even started to figure out how the land would be able to support a young family, David was sold on the land itself, and on the hardwoods that it supported.

“My dad's woodlot was 7 acres on an 85 acre farm. We had one red oak. I watched it all my childhood. When I came here and there were all these beautiful red oaks, it really impressed me.

“We made enough from the sale of our house in Toronto to buy the land and build a house here, provided I did the building myself, and I didn't have any carpentry skills. But I learned,” David said.

Leslie took a job with the Kingston Children's Aid Society, based in Sharbot Lake, and David built the house. “I cut and milled wood to build the house, then cut wood to heat it and to sell, and learned techniques for managing a woodlot. We also grew our own food, and I hunted a deer in the fall,” he recalls.

Their lives changed profoundly in the late 1980s, when Leslie developed leukemia and died in 1988. David has since remarried, to Marion Watkins.

During the '80s, David also developed an interest in local politics. He spent six years on Bedford Council, the last three as Reeve, until he lost the election to Carl Barr in 1991. He kept his hand in the political world indirectly through the '90s, working on the Collin's Creek watershed plan for the Cataraqui Region Conservation from 1992-94, and for the Frontenac/Lanark Maple Producers’ Association, co-ordinating clean-up crews in sugar bushes after the 1998 ice storm.

Since 2001, David has been back on council, this time in South Frontenac as a Bedford District representative.

Meanwhile, work developing Forest Farm has continued.

Trails into the maple bush were developed, and competing underbrush and trees have been thinned to encourage younger maples to come on. The sugar shack has been improved over the years and up to 1,000 litres of maple syrup are produced at Forest Farm on a good year.

The 200 acre property buts up against 200 acres of crown land to the north and 400 acres to the east, as well as a 200 acre retreat to the west, and a 200 acre property to the south that has also been left in a wild state.

“All told, we are surrounded by 1,000 acres of wilderness, so there is a lot of wildlife in my back yard.”

About ten years ago, Forest Farm expanded from a woodlot/maple syrup operation to a new crop, garlic. Garlic fit in at Forest Farm for several reasons. Because of its location, there are none of the large fields on Forest Farm to grow cereal crops or pasture large numbers of cattle, but there are small pockets of fertile land in some of the valleys. Over the years, gardens had already been developed on these pockets, and garlic does not require a lot of space.

With help from Maberly's Garlic Guru Paul Pospisil, David has not only learned how to grow garlic, he has been able to grow a mix of varieties that have proven to be very popular at garlic festivals.

He also keeps chickens, and uses the chicken manure to make rich compost for the garlic beds, which are rotated annually. It's garlic in year one, vegetables in year two, and a fallow year for the beds. There are three now, and a fourth, larger bed is being developed.

One of the good things about growing garlic is the fact that the labour is concentrated in about a one-month time frame in mid-summer, which fits in well with maple syrup and managing a woodlot, neither of which require work in the middle of the summer. Marketing garlic has been greatly enhanced throughout the region through the development of garlic festivals, and it is at the Perth Festival that most of Forest Farm's garlic is sold.

The Verona Garlic Festival on Labour Day weekend is another marketing opportunity.

This year a new product is being added at Forest Farm: power. When the MicroFIT program was announced last September, it brought an added incentive to something that had already been on David Hahn's mind, the energy sustainability of his operation. With a brand new 10 kw photovoltaic solar system in place, Forest Farm is now producing power for the hydro grid.

“Sustainability is our watchword,” Hahn said. “Our goal is to see the forest and the fields in a more healthy productive condition than when we came here. The farm’s heating needs have largely been supplied from burning biomass (firewood!) produced on the farm. We now also produce about as much electricity on the farm from a renewable source as we need to operate the farm.”

When he answered the ad in the Toronto Star so many years ago, the ideas of sustainable farming, local food, and food sovereignty were not part of anyone's vocabulary.

Thirty years later, all the decisions about land use, about jumping into organic farming and joining in with the local food movement and working with the National Farmers' Union, have put David Hahn and Forest Farm into the forefront of the alternative farming movement that is springing up in the Kingston and Frontenac regions. “The farmers that I've met through the National Farmer's Union and the local food movement are now my strongest community,” he says.

Answering that ad put David Hahn onto a path that has changed his life, and through his community participation it has changed the lives of others as well.