Squeezed by encroaching cities and soaring land prices, Mennonites in Canada are once again on the move

Aaron Bowman is an Old Order Mennonite. He drives a horse-drawn buggy and lives in a modest farmhouse without electricity or running water. The dirt roads and rolling farmland of rural southern Ontario have always been home to Bowman and his family, but they no longer see a future here. The nearby city of Waterloo is expanding into the countryside – and encroaching on their traditional homesteads.



“There’s no land here for love or for money,” said Bowman, who farms and works as a bookkeeper for his church, and who has agreed to give a rare interview to a journalist. “We need new communities if we’re going to continue to raise our families on the farm.”

Later this year, Bowman’s brother will uproot his family and move eastward to tiny Prince Edward Island (PEI), away from the pull of the city that is now just a few kilometres away, but remains several centuries apart. His other younger brother is expected to join him later. Dozens of other families from his church have similarly been scattering.

Bowman isn’t happy to see them go, but he understands why they’re leaving. The survival of Mennonite culture depends on it, he said.

It wasn’t easy leaving. I spent most of my 50 years on that farm Samuel Bowman

Pushed out by large-scale farms, suburban encroachment and soaring land prices, Ontario’s Mennonite and Amish communities are making the migration from Canada’s largest province to its smallest. In PEI the land is cheap, and the province accepts their desire to live apart from mainstream Canadian society, rejecting things like government-run secular schools, voting, carrying drivers’ licences or paying insurance.

Small-scale farms in Ontario are increasingly out of reach. The province has lost 20% of its farmland in the past 40 years, much of it to a growing urban population, new residential developments, and industries such as aggregate extraction that have gobbled up huge swaths of farmland.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mennonites at a market in St Jacobs Ontario, Canada. The province has lost 20% of its farmland in the past 40 years. Photograph: Alamy

“We’re losing a lot of farmland to non-agricultural uses, and it’s really not sustainable,” said Kathryn Enders, executive director of the Ontario Farmland Trust.

“This just shows how high the value for farmland in Ontario has gone up, and how difficult it is for young farmers to enter the market, because they can’t afford to compete with those prices. A lot of people are being displaced.”

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Prime farmland is also being lost to affluent urbanites. City dwellers have taken to building mega-homes in the country, further driving up the price of rural land. The trust is trying to slow the trend by putting legal easements on farms to protect them from development, but Enders says the rate at which they are disappearing is alarming.

“It’s very concerning. Once we lose farmland, we can never get it back.”

Bowman’s relatives plan to settle in a new Mennonite colony outside PEI’s Hunter River, in the hilly rural heartland. Samuel Bowman, his cousin, moved there a year ago, and he and his wife, Ellen, sell homemade pies, organic eggs and grass-fed beef out of a small shop on their farmstead.

Menonnites can’t afford to compete with those prices. A lot of people are being displaced Kathryn Enders, Ontario Farmland Trust

“It wasn’t easy leaving. I spent most of my 50 years on that farm,” he said. “That was difficult to let go, and leave everything familiar behind. There were a couple of sleepless nights.”

But Ontario was getting “too crowded with Mennonites”, he said, and the PEI farm cost a fraction of the price. Today he says his business is growing and he’s happy he made the move.

High fertility rates among his people are part of the demographic shift. There are now more than 251,000 Amish people in the US and Canada, according to Ohio State University researchers, more than double the estimated population in 1989. The Mennonites, who average five or six children per family, have experienced similarly rapid growth.

“It’s like a snowball,” Aaron Bowman said. “First there’s one son, then there’s two sons, then there’s four. And they all need farms.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Among the trappings of modern society Mennonites reject are government-run secular schools, voting, driving licences and insurance. Photograph: Gail Shotlander/Getty

These new settlers are bringing with them traditions that date back to 18th-century Pennsylvania. They speak a German dialect, but learn English in school, dress plainly and reject almost all modern technology. The church is the central part of their lives.

While the province of Quebec is closer to Ontario than PEI and has plenty of farmland, its government will not allow the Mennonite settlers to run their own parochial schools exempt from provincial curriculum, he said.



In PEI, on the other hand, the new settlers have been welcomed and are creating a mini-boom for land in a province with an ageing population and fewer people wishing to maintain old farms.

The provincial government has granted them special exceptions, allowing them access to doctors’ care without health cards, and changed the law to allow Amish and Mennonite children to be home schooled and to end their education in Grade 8 (age 13-14).

Brad Oliver, a realtor on the island, says he can’t find farms fast enough for the Amish and Mennonite buyers. He helped start the eastward pipeline a few years ago when he met with church leaders in Ontario and arranged bus tours for the 18-hour drive to the island – a necessity, since their faith forbids them from flying.

“I’ve got more buyers than I’ve got sellers,” said Oliver, who says he has already sold about 40 farms to Amish families in eastern PEI. He even installed a hitching post at his office to accommodate his new clients. “If I could get 10 farms right now, I could sell 10 farms.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mennonite girls walk with their father on a street in Niagara Falls, Ontario. Photograph: Alamy

Islanders are growing accustomed to their unique new neighbours, he said, who have brought back long-vanished trades and revived PEI’s horse-exporting industry.

“We don’t even look up when we see a horse and buggy go by,” Oliver said. “We’ve got new skills here now that had disappeared. We’ve got a couple a blacksmiths, a buggy maker, harness guys.”

The migration is highly organised and approved by church leadership. Scouting parties are sent out to inspect potential farms, and each community sends craftsmen to help the settlers raise barns, build churches and establish a foothold in the new colonies.

“The squeezing is going to continue,” said Sara Epp, a researcher at the University of Guelph who has studied Mennonite migration. “They recognize they’re being pushed out of southern Ontario because of the cost of land. They’re always looking to the next generation, and if their sons want to farm, they know they can’t do it in southern Ontario.”

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Cheaper land also means less pressure to adopt modern farm technology, Epp noted. Horse-powered farming methods are a crucial part of Mennonite culture.

Migration is similarly as old as the Mennonite faith itself. In the 1800s, Bowman’s ancestors left Pennsylvania in search of cheaper land in Canada. “It’s part of our history. Part of the reason we pushed into the wilds of Ontario 200 years ago was because of land prices,” he said.

“We just can’t compete with the large operators” taking over southern Ontario, he added. “You can be the best farmer there ever was, but if you can’t make it economically viable, why even try?”

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