Most of the land on Amherst Island is used for agricultural purposes. It's generally too expensive to raise crops and send them off-island, so most of the crops are used to feed farm animals (and deer and birds, alas), which concentrates the crops into meat, milk and wool. Even these products become less competitive due to the transportation costs, to the point where agricultural land on the Island is quite inexpensive. I think it fair to say that the necessity of using the ferry for everything the farmer consumes and produces has and will continue to make farming marginal. Aside from the cost of the ferry tickets - now up to $16 for anything larger than a pickup - there's the wait, load restrictions and occasional delays that end up costing the delivery people regardless of how cheap the tickets may get.

As I write this, late in 2007, there are only a handful of families actually making their living farming. Let's see - there's Caughey's dairy, Miller's dairy, Mark and Cherry's sheep farm, Topsy sheep farm. There's some beef cattle kept, but I'm not sure that translates to a family making their living keeping them. Over the last 20 years that I've been coming to the Island hardly any improvements, like installing field tiles, have been made to keep competitive with mainland farms. There are other farms on the Island, but I think almost every other farming family has some other income, some other provider of benefits. Still, the extra income will certainly help all the farmers, and may be enough to maintain viability. On the other hand, if there's a loss of property values those farmers with land to sell stand to lose a great deal.

While there might be a small number of people who would prefer to let the Island return to nature, I've never met any. For myself, I'd prefer to keep agriculture going. But the ferry isn't the only problem. The deer, coyotes and birds enjoy large areas of refuge, from where they go out and feed on the farmers' product. Milkweed is nice, providing a home for Monarchs, but it is a real problem for the farmers. Certainly the existence of all the nature-lovers around the shoreline is not completely compatible with the fields in the middle.

I don't have a real answer for this, except to make two observations. First, the Township, by the way it has set the ferry fares, doesn't seem interested in making the farmers' lives any easier. Second, I doubt the income generated by the turbines will save agriculture on the Island, in the sense of enabling future families to continue earning their living from farming.