OLA Speakers Series with Christina Suffel December 2020

Christina Suffel

I live in the small farming community of Inkerman in North Dundas Township with my boyfriend and 6 children. I own a small hobby farm that is a 3 acre severance from my family’s dairy farm.

I am surrounded by farmers’ fields and adjacent to the CP railroad with less than a handful of neighbors.

I have owned my little hobby farm almost 7years now and have owned animals since I moved in. My boyfriend and I put up a building for our birds which we had been working on for a year; the new bylaw officer jumped at us saying they received a complaint about a building being put up. A week later two notices came in the mail:

• one for a building permit and
• one that said we had a complaint about our animals and to remove all livestock from our property as I did not own the required 5 acres as per the bylaw.

I lost my mind, I wasn’t backing down without a fight, this broke me mentally and emotionally and during a pandemic at that! I fought like hell and had a lot of supporters and I am proud to say I WON!!!

I did not pay a dime to the township, I did not get a building permit and I did not remove my animals. It took a lot of time, research, tears and stress on me and my family of 8 but I proved the employees at the township office to be liars. Don’t mess with a farmgirl!