When John Bruinsma's father-in-law heard the plan, he didn't mince words.

The old dairy farmer had immigrated from Holland, built a life on the flat fertile land outside Chilliwack, and spent decades watching people work the earth for reasons that made sense: food, livelihood, survival. And now his son-in-law was going to cut patterns into a field of corn and charge people money to walk around inside it. “That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard of," he reportedly said. "Why would someone want to come walk around in a field and pay money to do it?"

Well, people came, and he did too — every weekend until he passed away. And what he found there — families wandering through the rows, kids shrieking with the particular joy of being lost somewhere safe, strangers becoming regulars becoming friends — was perhaps something he hadn't been able to picture from the outside. Something that took a leap of faith to see.

It was 1999, and John had been reading — which, according to his daughters, is something he has never stopped doing. Magazines, books, clippings, lists of ideas: the Bruinsma farmhouse on Yale Road West in Chilliwack's Greendale neighbourhood was always stacked with them. One article stopped him cold. A university student in Utah was calling on farmers across North America to open their land to the public — to corn mazes, to picking seasons, to the smell of turned earth and the novelty of getting temporarily lost. Farms, the student wrote, were becoming invisible to the people who depended on them. Someone needed to close the distance. John thought about it for a year. Then he called his business partner Lloyd Taekema, and they started cutting.

In 1999, that farm on Yale Road became the first corn maze in Canada. Agritourism, as a concept, barely had a name yet. The internet was a novelty. There was no Instagram, no playbook. John and his wife Diane sent letters to a handful of newspapers and waited. Word got out. "There were helicopters flying over," recalls Danielle Miller, the eldest of John and Diane's three daughters. "CBC said they, meaning we, were open on Sundays, and we weren't. But we said, 'I guess we're open Sundays,'" she laughs. "The gate was closed and there was a lineup of people outside it. We lived on the property. We were like — we can't say no, I guess we're open."

One of the first big groups that ever booked a visit came from Germany. They were all blind. They arrived early, before the farm was ready for them, and John and Diane said come anyway. "Our guests become friends and family," says Danielle. "Growing up, we always had random people at every holiday. Guests from every country staying at their house. They just really do invite everyone and anyone in." It goes back further than that, she says. Both John and Diane grew up in immigrant Dutch households where the table was always welcome to new people. Hospitality, in the Bruinsma house, wasn't a policy. It was just what you did.

Even now, John still lives on the property. If you pull up to Greendale Acres in an RV and park in the wrong spot, there's a reasonable chance he'll come out to greet you, and an even better chance you'll end up having coffee with him on the back deck.

His daughters run the farm now. All three of them, with their husbands, are equal partners in the business they bought from their parents and the Taekemas in 2020: Danielle and Steve Miller; Vanessa and James Oddy; Mariah and Chris Vermeer. Between them, ten children and a 25-acre farmstead running programming from early spring through fall. None of the sisters grew up wanting this.

"We didn't love the corn maze because it brought chaos," Danielle says plainly. "We did it because that's what our family was doing. It wasn't, 'I can't wait to get out there.' We were contributing, and this is what we're doing right now." Vanessa puts it more simply: "This is what the family needs to survive. To keep the land. To keep us on the property."

Before there was a corn maze, there was an apple stand. John had tried a lot of things with the land — apple trees, Saskatoon berries, boarding cows and calves, a roadside fruit operation run out of the garage they'd converted into a giant cooler. Every evening, the girls would fill old Safeway and Save-On bags with apples from the dwarf trees planted across from the local golf course and set them out on an antique stand. The golfers bought them. It worked, sort of. And before the apple stand, there was picking up sticks. "More sticks than I can express with my words," says Danielle.

These are the textures of a farming childhood — not romantic, just work. The kind that teaches you things before you know you're being taught. Vanessa learned to make change and speak clearly to adults twice her age. Mariah, the youngest and too small for the cash box, learned to direct strangers through the maze. "I was definitely the one on the postcards," she says, "telling people what to do once you're in." All four kids — a brother too — worked it alongside two parents who both had full-time jobs and other commitments. 

"There were times you'd come into our house," says Vanessa, "and there's mud all over the floor, the dog's in the house. It was crazy. Really wild." She says it with warmth, not complaint.

Each of the sisters went off and built their own lives before they came back. Vanessa spent nearly twelve years as destination marketing manager for Tourism Chilliwack. Danielle taught French immersion, moved to the Middle East to teach high school, came back, and co-founded a juice company with Mariah called The Habit Project. But still, they never fully left the farm; sometimes their mother would send what they call an SOS text, and they'd all show up without needing to be told why.

They hosted long-table dinners at Greendale, health events, things that blurred the line between the business and their own energy. Then 2020 arrived and collapsed everything at once. The women put together a proposal to buy out their parents and the Taekemas, closed in July, and reopened in four weeks.

The chaos of COVID, counterintuitively, helped. "Things had to change," says Danielle. "You couldn't host lots of field trips. Everything was scaled back in a way we could manage and grow into." The farm could be rebuilt at a size the six of them could actually hold — because the husbands came too. A helicopter engineer, a builder, and a landscaper. "Did you interview your husbands for this job before you married them?" people joke. For the first couple of years, the men kept their outside work while doing farm projects through the night — drainage at three or four in the morning. "There were some really hard, long years," says Mariah. Their kids noticed. "Sometimes they'd say, 'It's corn season again, you guys are always gone.' And we'd take it to heart, because we knew what that was like." She pauses. "But it shaped us into who we are now."

The name Greendale Acres is at once novel and and obvious. When the sisters rebranded in 2021 — Chilliwack Corn Maze had become a constraint, confusing guests who showed up in spring asking where the corn was — they turned to Taya Hawes-Puiu, a designer from the brand consultancy Partners and Hawes, who had become a friend the way most people become friends with this family: she'd shown up to one of their dinners as a stranger, been made to stand on a chair on her birthday while the table sang to her, and never really left. She was also the designer who had rebranded Chilliwack itself when Vanessa was at Tourism Chilliwack. She knew how to find what was true about a place.

A phrase she surfaced — guests become friends and family — wasn't something the sisters had invented. It was something Taya had observed. "We just thought that's how we grew up," says Mariah. "People come in, we accept them, they become family. She named it for us."

As for the name itself: John and Diane had a dormant holding company they'd never used. They told their daughters to take it. It was already called Greendale Acres. "We didn't even present the name," says Danielle, still slightly baffled. "All our checks already said it. It's very weird."

Running a farm with six equal partners and no CEO is, by most business logic, a disaster waiting to happen. Early on, everything went through a group text called the Corn Crew — drainage questions tangled up with dinner plans, decisions disappearing into the scroll. Now they use Slack, hold structured meeting rhythms, and work with a family business coach who has helped them build what Danielle calls "more processes that help us make decisions."

They ended their Christmas programming this past year — two seasons they'd built into something the community counted on — because November and December in the Fraser Valley meant volatile weather, eight warm days when people feel festive, and a month of setup for programming that might get rained out or stranded when the highway closes. It was hard to let go. "We knew we'd created something important," says Danielle. "We didn't take it lightly." The energy would go elsewhere.

That elsewhere, this spring, is a farm shop — a proper farmhouse building that will carry the things Greendale now grows and makes: jarred honey, beeswax candles, apple cider in strawberry and blackberry varieties. The label on the back of the cider tells the story of the apple trees John planted when his daughters were small. "People can connect with it," says Vanessa. "They can come visit, hold a family memory, and take a piece of Greendale home."

For six years, farm products came in and out of bins every night, stored in whatever space the old retrofitted admissions trailer could spare. The shop feels, to all of them, like something they've earned.

The ten children are growing up inside all of it. Danielle's oldest, turning eleven this spring, recently decided he wanted to work at the farm. He wrote a resume. He went through a formal interview. He sat through staff training with teenagers five years older than him, and gets no special access to the slushie machine. "We want them to choose," says Danielle. "To find their lane." Her mother always reminds her that when the sisters were working the maze as kids, the youngest was eight — not a toddler. It's different. And also the same.

At their 25th anniversary celebration, not long after they'd taken over, Vanessa stood in a full field and looked around — at her parents, at the Taekemas, at a crowd marking a quarter century of what had started as the stupidest idea anyone had ever heard of. "I realized that other people have so many memories here too," she says.

"And they're important to them. The work we do is important, because we are allowing other people to hold this really positive time with their families. It's not just about our families anymore. It's about everyone else and their stories."