A farm that offers work and a home for mentally challenged adults could be set up next year near Saskatoon.
A group is working on raising funds and creating a board of directors for the venture, which is based on a concept that originated in Montana in 1981.
The U.S. project took eight years to move eight developmentally challenged adults out of an urban group home, but the model has since been recreated, said founder Lowell Bartels of Helena, Mont.
“My wife, Susan, and I came up with this concept by the grace of God to involve the developmentally disabled in the community.”
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Bartels said studies have shown the mentally challenged do better in a rural setting where they can work with plants and care for animals. To test the theory, he and others opened a farm near Kalispell, Mont.It worked well and is still in operation.
It, like four more farms in Montana, Pennsylvania and Krygyzstan, tries to be as financially self-sufficient as possible. The one in Helena has a greenhouse that grows flowers and tomatoes, a U-pick raspberry patch and pigs and chickens from which meat and eggs are sold.
Other farms have rabbits, a petting zoo and vegetable patches to help raise money. In the winter, they manufacture dog biscuits and fire starters.
Bartels calls the concept Farm in the Dell.
He said the Montana government has been helpful in transferring the residents’ living allowances to the farm. While the farms are restricted to housing eight in one group home, the Helena location is building an apartment to house another 20.
Some farms employ the disabled by busing them from their nearby urban group home every day.
Bartels said his organization’s farms provide a living for fewer than 100 developmentally disabled people, but the need is greater. There are about 3,000 such people in the state who need accommodation in either group homes or with their families now that institutional living has been rejected.
“There’s not enough tax dollars to take care of everyone.”
Bartels said the other advantage of the Farm in the Dell concept is that the residents aren’t isolated from the rest of the population.
“People come out to buy their farm products. They (the developmentally disabled) have more interaction than in town. Schoolchildren want to tour the farm. The children can see the developmentally disabled are different but good people.”
Bartels said the farm residents are paid by the hour. Residents who work in the greenhouse are diligent in planting the thousands of seeds one seed at a time.
“To you and I it’s tedious and boring, but they love it.”
Bartels said one disabled man who was unhappy and segregated from the others came to the Helena farm and began taking care of the sheep.
“Four to five hours a day he would sit with them in the field, pet them, talk to them. He lived with us for five years before he died. His brother said they were his happiest years. He had found a place where he fit in.”
Bartels is encouraging the setup of a farm in Saskatchewan following a chance meeting last year with a woman while he and his son were fishing at Besnard Lake.
Lynette Zacharias, who works in the province with the mentally disabled, invited Bartels to speak in Saskatoon about the Farm in the Dell concept. She is now working on getting a farm group home going near the city.
For more information, call Bartels at 406-449-9394, Zacharias at 306-477-3919 or visit www.farminthedell.org.
