Venison, elk and bison at Bearbrook Farm
As you turn off Dunning Road, a sign tacked to a post says playfully “Buffalo Boulevard” just across from two young bison munching hay. The long driveway then runs past open fields about as far as you can see before it veers left to the Bearbrook Game Meats retail store.
A family operation now decades old and in its third generation near the village of Navan, Bearbrook raises some very big livestock on their property – bison, elk and deer – but the route to today’s farm was a much longer and more winding one than the current driveway, according to owner Heidi Clement.
“My grandparents were farming in Germany in 1928. They came to Canada in 1962 and bought a 200-acre dairy farm in Leonard. My parents, Walter and Inge Henn, bought their own farm in 1969 on Frank Kenny Road and raised hogs and geese. They then bought the dairy farm on Russell Road in 1973 and expanded its range to exotic livestock and turned it into a tourism business.”
The Henns bought the property on Dunning Road in 1979 and started Bearbrook Game Meats in 2009.
Over the course of his career, Walter Henn launched a number of entrepreneurial pursuits in addition to farming: selling refurbished refrigeration equipment around the world including to the Soviet bloc, working real estate markets (including developing an on-farm hotel), helping establish the Ottawa farmers’ market, and launching a petting zoo and the agritourism venture.
