On any given day, children squeal with delight as a fluffy kitten skirts onto their laps, or when they get the opportunity to feed a baby chick. Welcome to Maplewood Farm — the only remaining working farm on the North Shore — open to the public.
“The best thing is to see little children’s eyes go wide and light up when they make a connection with the animals, especially when milking the cattle,” says Derek Palmer, the farm’s facility manager.
What separates Maplewood Farm from things like agricultural fairs, which have animals on display, is people can touch and cuddle the animals. The animals here are used to people. At the foot of Mount Seymour, on the banks of the Seymour River, Maplewood Farm sits on five acres of farmland. The farm began life as an actual working dairy farm in the 1920s – 1950s, providing milk and cream throughout North Vancouver.
Then, in the early seventies, the North Vancouver Parks Department acquired the farm and opened it to the public in 1975, to serve as both an educational farm experience for kids and to preserve some of North Vancouver’s agriculture heritage. That it still exists to this day is thanks to a parks' superintendent, who saw a need to expose urban children to basic farming.
“The District of North Vancouver purchased the farm in a land swap and rented it out until Dirk Oostindie (park superintendent) came along and suggested it be used to educate children,” says Palmer. “Dirk is Dutch, and small farms like this were, and still are, very common in Holland.”
