A BRIEF HISTORY

In 2009-2011, Canada’s prison farms were dismantled. The Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) said prison farms “did not reflect labour market demands of today and of the future.” In 2016, Prime Minister Trudeau committed to restore prison farms in Kingston Ontario to provide prisoner “training.”

In 2018, the federal government allocated $4.3 million over five years for CSC to establish an industrial goat dairy operation. The decision was later amended to include a small cow dairy operation. The prison milk will be sold to consumer markets for the first time in Canadian history.

The former prison farms fed prisons. In the new program, prisoners will factory farm thousands of goats to supply infant formula for the Chinese market. While the goat farm has been delayed by multiple failures, a small herd of cows has been added to be milked under a research contract with McGill University. Milk from the prison research program will be sold commercially through the Dairy Farmers of Ontario.

As of February 2025, at least $33 million had been spent on the attempted prison farm rollout, although the cost of full implementation may exceed $50 million.

Since 2016, Evolve has proposed alternative ethical prison farm models. Since 2018, Evolve has opposed the new commercial prison farm program.

In January 2021, Evolve published the academic report “Canada’s proposed prison farm program: Why it won’t work and what would work better” exposing details of the prison farm plan and flagging potential harmful impacts on prisoners, staff, and surrounding communities.

In March 2021, CSC announced the temporary pause of its industrial goat farm, maintaining that the goat program “will resume” once their financial situation stabilizes.

In March 2022, CSC quietly commenced construction of a cow barn and manure lagoon at Joyceville Institution under a $10.48 million contract. By the time the barn was scheduled to be completed in October 2023, construction was only mid-way, and costs had risen to $16.69 million. By October 2024, the barn costs had reached $19.5 million ($13,195,143 + HST + $4,589,045 in consultancy fees). As of March 2025, the barn was still unfinished, but milk production had begun, with all of the prison research milk being pooled with commercial streams sold to the public.

In July 2024, Evolve published a comprehensive report detailing the full story revealed through eight years of investigation and 38,000 pages of government records: Prison Farms Exposed: Revelations from Access to Information. A second edition is in development for publication in 2025.