Mennonite families set sights on farming in Kent County, put offer on 1,000 acres
CBC
Old Order Mennonite families from southern Ontario have placed an offer on about 1,000 acres of land in Kent County, where there is hope the new community will bolster efforts to revitalize agriculture.
Paul Lang, the CEO of the Kent Regional Service Commission, said the commission has been working for five years on a project to bring Mennonite or Amish communities to the area.
"We thought this was a great opportunity for us to bring back agriculture in a region that [valued] agriculture for the last century," he said.
Lang said three Mennonite families from Lucknow, Ont., have confirmed their intentions to come to New Brunswick and are confident others will follow. He said six families are needed to officially create a Mennonite community.
The land the farming families want to buy is on Richard Village Road in Acadieville, known locally as North Branch. He said everything should be finalized early in the new year.
Lang said more education of Kent County residents will be needed about who the Mennonites are and how they live their lives. But since the official move might not come until late 2024 or early 2025, there's time to do that.
Although many Mennonites today are part of a more mainstream culture, the members of the Old Order group from Lucknow travel by horse and buggy, which means some accommodations will be needed in the area, including possibly putting up posts for the horses at certain locations.
At the beginning of the process to attract Mennonites to the eastern New Brunswick community, the commission brought in a consultant to prepare packages about available land.
That consultant was Gerard Thebeau, a Richibucto resident and agrologist, who described an agrologist's job as serving the agriculture industry with professional standards.
Thebeau said Kent County has deep roots in agriculture, but a lot of farmland has been lost over the years.
For years, many farms in the area concentrated on brussels sprouts, but the industry went into decline and a lot farms stopped operation altogether.
At an agricultural forum put on by the service commission in 2019, Thebeau said, he and others planted the idea with commission of trying to attract Mennonite and Amish farmers to the Upper Rexton area.
Thebeau said being from the Acadieville area, he knew there was a lot of farmland at one point, so with the commission's help, they included that area as one potentially suitable for such a plan.
In his conversations with the Mennonites interested in coming to New Brunswick, Thebeau said, he learned the growing cost of land in Ontario was making it difficult for them to compete.