Maple Syrup

Iwanna Farm 

On December 1, 1922, Levi Shufelt purchased the farm, which neighbored his own.  In 1940, Frederick and his brother Guy bought this farm from their father.

The dairy barn and house were built in the 1840's and the farm has always had dairy animals (mostly Ayrshires) and a large sugar bush.

Continuing in their father's footsteps, Frederick and Guy milked cows, tapped maple trees and ran the Shufelt family ice cream business.  They also were the bottling and distributing agents for EZ orange drink.  Many artifacts from these businesses, as well as the buildings still remain.

In 1937, Frederick married Lela P. Webb.  They had 2 children, David and Gary.

Fred's brother Guy left the Shufelt farm and moved to Cowansville to further the ice cream business.

Frederick purchased another neighboring farm, which is still part of the operations today.

The first bulk tank was installed in 1967.

During the time that Frederick and Lela owned the farm, Lela was diagnosed with cancer.  In order to pay for the chemotherapy, Frederick was forced to cut down a large part of the sugar bush to pay for the treatments.

In 1963 David married Martha Hurley and bought the house next door to the farm.  They had 2 children, Geoffrey and Serena.

David worked for the Provincial government in agriculture for many years.   He purchased the family farm in 1979, after his father Frederick fell ill.  He had been operating the farm for four years before he purchased it.

In 1999, Steve Neil and Serena Shufelt purchased the farm.   Steven retired from being mayor of our town (Brigham) in 2013.  He was mayor for 14 year, elected for the first time when he was 32 years old.  Steve works off the farm as a captain on a challenger jet, but spends all his spare time working on the farm along side his lovely and delightful wife Serena (guess who wrote this text!!), father Douglas, father in law David and Steve and Serena's three kids, Adahlia, Lilliah and Leevy.

In 2010, pipeline was installed in a large section of the sugar woods.  In 2011, the dairy barn was converted to a free stall barn with a fully automated milking robot.  It seems that were the only farm in Canada equipped with a milking robot and cows that had access to pasture 24/7 during the summer. In October 2014, a fully automated pig weighing and sorting scale was added. The piggery is now one big pen which houses 800 pigs!  A little intimidating when they reach 300lbs!  That's a lot of bacon!!!!

Up until recently, he farm has three productions, milk, pork and maple syrup.  We also have a few chickens for their eggs!

In the summer of 2018, we made a big (BIG) decision, we decided to sell the milking herd. The milk industry has been so challenging in the last few years that we decided we just couldn't handle the uncertainty.  So things have changed but somehow we seem to be as busy as always.  We replaced the milking cows with a mix of Black Angus, Simmental and Blonde Aquitaine beef cows, 75 to be exact!  We had our first baby beef calf born January 3, 2019.  

We've always been environmentally  conscious, we never used herbicides, pesticides or chemical fertilizers.  Although the plan was to become certified organic but after completing the initial steps we discovered the the cost of doing so was not worth the investment.  So even if we don't have a biological certification, we are always proud to say that we do things as biologically as we can.  Our kids can run barefoot through our fields and woods without anything to worry about!  Heck so can the cows!!

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If you're ever in our neck of the woods, feel free to stop by.