Joyceville Institution dairy farm gets 'blue ribbon' from guest inspectors, MP Gerretsen

English essayist Thomas de Quincey wrote, "Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them; and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these quiet creatures." Deep brown and curious, bovine eyes are full of something that elicits an affection capable of melting hearts, and with the reopening of the penitentiary farms in Kingston, many hope the connection between man and beast can be put to good use for rehabilitation.

On Friday, Jan. 17, 2025, Mark Gerretsen, Member of Parliament (MP) for Kingston and the Islands, invited a handful of guests to join him on a tour of the Joyceville Institution dairy farm. The tour was a kind of happy ending combined with a new beginning for the farm and the prison farm program. Among the guests were members of “Save our Prison Farms,” who first protested the closing of farms at Joyceville and Collins Bay Penitentiaries in 2010, and who have since become advisors on the long road to reopening.

Freshly cleaned pens surrounded the shiny new milking parlour at the farm. A herd of black-and-white and red-and-white cows munched contentedly in two large enclosures. Some moved closer to enjoy the visitors' attention, who happily provided snout scratches and pats. Others preferred the automated brushes that provide a gentle scratch and massage whenever a cow takes a fancy.

Farm manager Tiffany Babcock, who works for the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC), explained that each cow is fitted with a collar that the milking machine detects as the cow takes her place. The milking machine analyzes the milk, and through an app on her phone, Babcock can get real-time information from production data to health alerts. For example, two cows in a separate pen showed signs of mastitis. She explained that they were kept separate to prevent spreading the infection to the herd.

In another barn, calves are cared for in a nursery with separate pens. Gerretsen laughs as he receives some licks from two calves at once. And the little group of visitors finds it hard not to say "Awwww."

In the rear of the building, about a dozen men in blue coveralls, inmates of the institution, are cleaning the bedding packs where the cows sleep. One man operates a tractor, while the others use shovels to collect the manure and dirty bedding. Around two dozen heifers (young cows who have never had a pregnancy) are penned to keep them out of harm's way.

A heifer with an ear tag number 15 is named Nicole, according to Detlef Fischer of CORCAN, a special operating agency within the CSC. In collaboration with other sectors of CSC, CORCAN delivers the Employment and Employability Program to federal offenders who are serving their sentence. Nicole is all ready to move out to Collins Bay Institution's farm, Fischer explains.

The whole farm is warm and cheery despite the grimly grey and chilly day, and it is easy to see from the animated conversations that the guests are happy. But to comprehend the importance of the little inspection tour, it is vital to understand the number of years it has taken to get to this point.

As a result of the federal government's 2009 Strategic Review process, the CSC closed its six federal penitentiary farms, including the two in the Kingston area. At that time, Collins Bay Institution's farm operations comprised dairy milk and egg production. The Joyceville Institution farm operations included a feedlot, meat processing plant, field crops, greenhouse, and composting.

In 2016, under a new government, CSC launched a feasibility study to review the 2009 decision, the results of which were released by CSC in November 2016 (the study could not be found online). Most of the 6,000 participants in public consultations said they supported bringing back penitentiary farms.

A volunteer prison farm advisory panel was established in May 2017 to provide non-binding recommendations and advice to CSC about potentially reopening the penitentiary farms at Joyceville and Collins Bay Institutions. Its members lent their expertise in business, agriculture, and employment opportunities to offenders.

Jeff Peters and Diane Dowling --- two names very familiar to the prison farm conversation locally --- were among the farmers on that advisory panel, and they were invited to join Gerretsen’s inspection of the new Joyceville facility. Kingstonist caught up with them this week to hear their thoughts on the newly opened dairy facility.

Peters, who has been farming since the age of nine, is now 73. “So that's enough time on a farm” to know what he’s talking about, he guesses.

“I blame my father for giving me the bug to keep farming. It takes a stubborn person to keep up with the challenges of farming,” he says.

Meeting Peters, it is easy to see what he means. Soft-spoken but determined, he was arrested three times protesting the closure of the prison farms.

“Fourteen of us got arrested in 2010 when we tried to block the truck from taking the cows away [from Collins Bay's prison farm]. And we all ranged from teenagers to a couple of 87-year-old grandmothers, ministers, farmers. We had quite a cross-section of people who disagreed with closing the farms. A lot of journalists called us a ‘motley crew,'” he recalls.

“We were not trained government pundits hired to influence the government or big business; we were just a bunch of regular people,” he continues. “We went to court. We got charged with criminal mischief.”

He says that working with animals, especially cows, teaches an important lesson: “empathy and how to deal with another living creature.”

“Many of the inmates were [incarcerated] because they couldn't relate to other people… and we heard lots of stories. It was incredible. They called it the ‘miracle farm,’ which turned the lives around for many inmates, and they became productive members of our society,” he relays.

Fourteen years later, Peters is still annoyed with the Harper government’s reasoning for the closures.

“They had a tough-on-crime agenda, and they didn't like the thought of inmates being out in the fresh air,” he speculates. But the thing that really burned, he says, is that “I don’t think they respected farming … They didn't think inmates could learn any ‘meaningful skills.' [Those were] the key words they used: ‘meaningful skills.’”

The minister responsible for prisons at the time, Vic Toews, declared the farm programs ineffective at rehabilitating prisoners, telling reporters at the time, “Less than one per cent learned any skills that were relevant.”

“No meaningful skills in working on a farm?” Peters scoffs. “Of course… all of us related to farms know well that farming has taught kids how to work as a team, and to put in a good day's work, be on time, to work with other people. So we knew that was the case,” he remembers.

“And everyone that heard about it, they just knew closing them didn't make sense. Those [offenders] were paying their way --- like restitution --- through agriculture.”

“Yeah, so that was way back then,” he continues, “and we hope things have changed now. More people are thinking of rehabilitating people that are in for addiction... It’s not about the serial killers. We don't want them back on the street. So we're not really ‘con lovers’; we want people to come back and join society more productively.”

Peters was impressed by the new dairy farm facility at Joyceville, praising the "very dedicated staff."

“We are pretty pleased with the barn. It's so animal friendly, and it's state of the art... I just hope it can continue for years. They've sure got a neat facility, and it's making money now… the milk is being sold,” he shares.

Asked about how the milk sales works, Peters explains, “There are two quotas in the system, one is for regular farmers, and one is… quota tied into doing research, and they did research at different prison farms... like the experimental farm in Ottawa and down in McGill. That research quota isn't available for regular farmers because they don't really have the right facilities that the research people want.”

“That's the good thing, because we didn't want to take quota away from new farmers wanting to step into farming,” he qualifies.

“So this [research] quota became available because a couple of places closed down, and it didn't affect the regular farmers.”

All of the milk being produced is being sold to researchers, Peters says.

Historically, however, the milk from the prison farms was used exclusively in the institution cafeterias, he explains.

“But that system closed, and then it became challenging to use the milk without getting quota. You could make cheese with it, but CORCAN doesn't like competing against regular businesses, you know? Yeah, so that's why they had to have quota," says Peters.

He notes that, originally, CSC had thought about having goats, since a quota doesn't need to be applied in goat milk production.

“But there was a lot of resistance to goat farming, and we [in the advisory group] didn't like it either, because goats are not as easy to deal with as the cows,” Peters explains.

"So, we're very happy,”

Diane Dowling, another member of the advisory panel, is also impressed. She says she is “very pleased to see our Pen Farm Herd Co-op cattle and their offspring in the prison farm herd.”

On the tour, Dowling recalls, “CSC said 40 to 45 per cent of the herd can be traced back to the prison farm herd dispersed in 2010. That continuity is important and symbolic to the people who supported the Save Our Prison Farms campaign and those who became members of the co-op to buy some of the herd in 2010."

The Prison Farm Herd Co-op, a group Peters says spawned in the courtroom while he and the others awaited their fates, bought 23 of the original cows.

“We formed a co-op of 200 people, which I'm the chairman of,” Peters says, “and the cows that we own, we lent them out to farmers in the area. Seven or eight different farmers have kept the cows since that time, and so we got to keep the heifer calves. And so that's how we continued the genetics of that original herd.”

This was important because those cows were bred specifically for the prison program, Dowling explains.

“You can see how friendly the cows were [at the farm we visited on Friday]. Those that we kept the genetics for were all partly bred for their friendliness --- it's called docility. So those cows were always friendlier than the run-of-the-mill cows.”

Peters, too, says, “It was satisfying to see the cows that we had connections with.” Amazingly, one of the cows at the Joyceville barn seemed to recognize Peters, licking his hand and happily receiving pats. He said her name was Dorothy.

He explained that those 23 cows and their offspring were named for the protesters who were initially arrested and those who kept it going, “The Sisters of Providence were a big factor; they organized a campaign. They gave us one of their staff, who was very good at organizing people... There was a vigil, after the arrest,” he said, and that was followed by “a group of people [who] met every Monday night at the Collins Bay Prison [entrance].”

Cows were bred specifically for the prison program. “[The cows] that we kept the genetics for were all partly bred for their friendliness --- it's called docility. So those cows were always friendlier than the run-of-the-mill cows,” Peters explained. The cows' collars are high-tech IDs that interface with the farm computer systems. 

“Every single Monday night for seven or eight years,” Peters marvels. “They just didn't let the campaign die. We call them the 'vigil keepers' and named quite a few animals after them… Dorothy was named after one of the key vigil keepers.”

Dowling agrees, saying, "The legacy of the prison farm campaign is the restoration of the prison farms in the Kingston area, providing meaningful work and skill building for participating inmates.“

“The legacy is also the lasting friendships and connections among the people who supported the campaign, which resulted in personal and community value in many other ways," she continues. "And it stands as an example of persistent commitment and creative action behind a cause that was right and just."

A release from CSC calls this a new beginning for the penitentiary farm program, which incorporates various agriculture activities representing a broad scope of the Canadian agriculture sector: “The program offers meaningful opportunities that support offenders in their rehabilitation and reintegration, helping CSC achieve our mission of actively encouraging and assisting offenders in our care to become law-abiding citizens.”

Gerretsen enthusiastically participated in the inspection tour, saying, "I am deeply grateful for the unwavering dedication and hard work of our local farmers and activists. Their relentless efforts have been instrumental in bringing the prison farm to its current state of operation. This achievement is a testament to the power of community and the positive impact we can make when we work together. Thank you for your commitment to sustainable agriculture and for being the driving force behind this remarkable initiative."

Peters got the chance to speak to some of the offenders working on the farm when they were taking a break.

"It was really nice to see; they each had a favourite animal, especially the baby ones, that they like to give special attention to," he shares.

"People talked about that 15 years ago, and it's still the same. So it's working. You know, that's the key thing. It's working."