The farming of fun

Crops and livestock alone can’t always keep the family farm running. 

When that is the case, creative solutions can take root. Some farmers try to replace fruits and vegetables with different produce—something a little harder to pack in a market basket, but perhaps just as sweet—and instead start farming family fun. 

Across the Fraser Valley, visitors and locals alike flock to farms for pumpkin patches and corn mazes and flower-picking and goat-petting throughout summer and fall. Agriculture has been a popular tourist attraction for decades. Sometimes tours and farm experiences take place on working farms. Other times, agri-tourism outfits are created after other efforts to farm the land on small scales fail.

Farmers, families, and field trips

Six yellow school buses line up outside Greendale Acres. It’s a warm Thursday morning in October, and elementary school students pour onto the small farm and take an eager look around. The air smells like smoke from the nearby campfire and, faintly, animal poop. 

The group is whisked away on an educational tour. The kids meet goats and chickens and other farm animals. They learn about giant pumpkins and apples and how food is grown on farms like this one, but bigger and with fewer ten-year-olds. Then they’re set loose to play on the big, bouncy, trampoline-like airbag, on the playground, and in the corn maze before it’s time to head back to school. More buses arrive, and the cycle repeats. 

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