As if he knew the house would one day sit on the edge of one of North America’s busiest highways, British settler Jacob Scott laid the red brick walls of his farm house 14 inches thick, then slapped on a layer of horse-hair plaster for good measure. For that, the Hustler family is forever grateful — their home, built by Scott in 1828, is uncannily quiet.

Outside on the farm, it’s a bizarre cacophony of urban and rural noise. Massive Hereford cattle bellow. Three dozen sheep swap nasally baas. Titan and Bailey, the Hustler farm dogs, bark replies.

The animal chorus competes against the roar of cars speeding down the 401 and the on-ramp to the 407, which together form the Hustler farm’s northern boundary. To the immediate east, the cars swerve in and out of the bustling big-box shopping centre, a maze of chain stores and restaurants.

“The cows used to summer pasture across the road,” says 34-year-old Jason, a fifth-generation Hustler, trudging through soggy grounds on a recent spring day.

“Basically, where the Rona is, the Buffalo Wild Wings, the Michael’s.”

Once just another farm in a predominantly agrarian region, the Hustlers today operate the last working farm in Mississauga, a 52-acre lot tucked in the very northwest corner of a city better known for cosmopolitan condos and sprawling subdivisions.







As the landscape around them morphed and modernized, the Hustlers have toiled in the fields of the farm, purchased in 1838 by Jeremiah Hustler, great-great-grandfather to current owner Frank Hustler. Today, the prime real estate is worth several million dollars.

“When we tell people that we live on a farm,” says Theresa Hustler, Frank’s wife of nearly 40 years, “they look at us as if we’re crazy.”

While it has withstood everything from tornados to expropriation to threats of demolition to make way for Peel Region’s garbage dump, the Hustler farm is now facing what could be the end of its 176-year run.

Frank, the Hustler family’s last farmer, is dying. Decades spent in the fields, rain or shine, on-call 24/7 for animal emergencies, and struggling to squeeze money out of land that has shrunk by half during his lifetime, prompted Frank to dissuade his sons from taking up the family trade. He urged them to find something stable, predictable.

But it’s one thing to set in motion the end of an era. Dealing the final blow is entirely another.

“We all knew,” says Adam, 30, Frank and Theresa’s youngest son, “that our father was never going to sell it.”

That task, becoming increasingly inevitable, may soon fall to them.

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OVER THE WINTER, a small “buddy seat” was installed in one of the Hustlers’ tractors, tucked between the door and the driver’s seat, so a passenger could come along for the ride.

The seat, a Christmas gift from his family, meant Frank could still ride around the property where he’s lived each of his 74 years, albeit with someone else behind the wheel.

Frank was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2011. Theresa and the couple’s three adult boys — Matthew, Jason and Adam — had for years watched his once-sharp mind gradually deteriorate.

Routine chores became confounding. Anger and agitation replaced his calm, happy-go-lucky demeanor. He became restless at night. Theresa ultimately asked Jason to temporarily move back into the house, so she could get some sleep.

Before long, they worried for Frank’s safety. One day, he was driving the tractor when he suddenly decided he didn’t want to be on. He got out while it was running.

“It’s darn lucky that he didn’t get hurt,” Theresa said.

Last summer, when there was hay to bring in and animals to feed, she and the boys gave him simple tasks — picking up twigs, tidying up the yard — to keep him busy. It was his last summer on the farm.

In March, faced with the reality she could no longer care for him, Theresa moved Frank out of the house. He’s now in Milton District Hospital, awaiting long-term care placement.

“It’s hard, because he was born here, and he always said he would die here,” she said.

Theresa met Frank at a dancehall in Maple in 1972, after his matchmaking buddy approached the pretty Acadian to see if she would be his friend’s square dance partner.

They married three years later, and Theresa moved into the Hustler residence. Frank, who had taken control of the farm after his father’s death in 1959, had previously been living there as a bachelor. She quit her secretarial job and became a farm wife, collecting and grading eggs while raising their three boys.

She remembers looking out to vacant fields surrounding their land and having to drive to Milton, or Brampton, to do the grocery shopping, a far cry from a Walmart less than a 10-minute walk away.

Over the years, the farm’s sources of income have shifted. For decades, the Hustlers grew wheat and oats, but the crops became less profitable as the farm diminished in size. In 1957, when a northern section was sold to the government to build the 401, it dropped from 100 acres to 82.6. Beginning in the 1990s, land was first expropriated for the 407 on-ramp, then for a hydro generation project that was never built, bringing the acreage to 52.

In the 1960s, the farm income shifted to egg production. For 30 years, Frank and Theresa owned 1,600 hens, and Frank sold them door to door in Brampton. In the 1990s, they downgraded to about 100 hens, then gave them up after Frank required heart surgery in 2003.

Their income now comes from their cattle — 38 head — and the three dozen sheep they’re raising for meat. Their farmland is used to feed the livestock; they grow sorghum, a high-protein grain that maximizes the amount of feed they can grow in a small area.

As it became evident that Frank could no longer run the farm, Jason and Adam gradually took over the majority of the work. Matthew, the eldest son, lends a hand whenever possible — he lives in Burlington with his young family, running his own massage therapy business.

Jason and Adam, too, heeded their father’s advice to find jobs outside the farm. Adam works full time for the City of Mississauga, while Jason runs his own carpentry business; his handiwork — kitchen cabinets, bed frames, a wall-sized closet unit — is featured throughout the Hustler home.

But the farm doesn’t bring in enough to allow the men to quit their jobs. To really make it work, they say, they’d need to become a factory farm, but there isn’t the space.

The farm chores, then, must be done before or after the work day. Adam does the majority of the evening chores, which consist mostly of feeding the animals. Jason, whose schedule is more flexible, usually comes by in the morning.

The brothers have made changes to ease the pressure. For example, this year they shifted the animals’ birthing seasons, arranging to have the calves arrive in the fall, and the lambs in the spring. They came all at once last year, and, well, it was hectic.

But the brothers aren’t sure how long the current setup can last. Jason, who is engaged, is especially torn.

“We’re trying to start a life together and it’s not fair to her, either, so I’m trying to figure out what’s the right balance. If we could make a living doing it, it would be a different story; then we could pursue it.”

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WHAT PRICE DO you put on 175 years of family tradition? What is the value of the home where your father and grandfather were born?

Theresa recently had the farm land appraised and, while reluctant to give details, she confirmed its worth at several million dollars.

A few years ago, 75 acres of land immediately south of the farm — now host to large warehouses — sold for $45 million, or $600,000 per acre.

But money isn’t everything, said Theresa, and for now, she and her sons want to keep farming.

Jason and Adam say they are frustrated by the presumption that selling is a no-brainer. Everyone, they say, seems to ask why they don’t just cash it in, buy a huge house, retire.

“They don’t get it,” said Adam. “It’s got a lot of sentimental value. We’re the fifth generation, and we’re just trying to hold onto it as long as we can.”

They haven’t always seen it that way. Growing up on a farm in Mississauga meant no soccer or hockey games, no Boy Scouts. Extracurricular activities consisted of egg collection, cleaning pens and, when they were older, driving the John Deere tractor — though, Theresa points out, they were paid for their work.

It also meant being the only farm kid in class. Jason says he felt judged for being ‘a dumb farm boy.’ Adam says he didn't talk much about it.

Dayna Shura, Jason’s fiancée, was a schoolmate of Adam, but didn’t know the family lived on a farm until her first date with Jason.

“She was asking what I do and where I live, and I said I lived on a farm, and her jaw dropped. She said: ‘Really? Where? How?’”

But the boys’ connection to the land has increased as they have taken over the real work of the farm. The longer they do it, the stronger the bond.

“For us to walk away is probably not going to be as easy as is it would have been, had we never started,” Adam said.

When the time finally comes to sell, the plan is to hang on to the house and maybe a few acres around it.

Admittedly, the house “is a big place by yourself,” says Theresa. With Frank in the hospital, Jason has moved back in, with his fiancée. Adam still lives in the house, but he’s barely around thanks to work, farm chores and, now, visiting his father in the hospital most nights.

Some days, they joke about their other plans for the land, a scheme that would see Frank come back on the farm.

“The boys and I have discussed it, and thought, this would be a great place to put a nursing home, that we would own,” Theresa said. “And then Frank would be home.”

Hustler farm history

1828: Jacob Scott, a school teacher from England, buys the land and begins developing a farm.

1838: Jeremiah Hustler buys the farm.

1883: Frank’s father, William, is born in the house.

1940: Frank is born in the house.

1957: Frank’s father sells land to the government to make way for Highway 401. Now the farm is 82.6 acres.

1972: Mississauga is amalgamated, bringing the farm, formerly part of Streetsville, into the fold of the new city.

1973: The farmhouse is officially designated under the Ontario Heritage Act.

Late 1990s/early 2000s: Parts of the farm are expropriated for Highway 407 and a power generation plant that was never built.

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