KENILWORTH – In a remote area of Wellington County consisting largely of Mennonite families selling summer sausage and maple syrup is the unexpected home of a small-scale halal and organic chicken farm.
Shaheer Abha is the owner of Chicken Thika Farm on Sideroad 2 East a short drive from Mount Forest which now produces about 3,000 chickens over the summer as a side job for Abha who works full-time at Honda in Alliston and lives in Orangeville.
He believes it is Wellington County’s only small-scale certified halal and organic farm which he said can serve the growing Muslim community he sees in the area, particularly in Shelburne and Orangeville.
Abha’s story begins in his childhood in Kenya where his grandfather was a farmer.
“I spent a lot of time with him, growing up he used to have broilers (chickens) and cattle and he did a lot of cash crops,” Abha said. “He had probably about the same size (farm as me) about 50 acres.”
When he later came to Canada at 26 years old in 2001, first settling in Mississauga and later Orangeville, he admired colleagues who had small properties where they could keep chickens.
Abha later got his chance to do this in 2018 when he bought the land where the farm is now, first intending to grow vegetables for personal use and as a future retirement spot.
“But then I said, I might as well keep growing my own meat birds, why not? I have the land, it’s something to do in the summer as well,” Abha said.
From there, it was why not try a small business by selling halal and organic chicken.
“How am I going to make sure somebody trusts my product? I need to make sure it’s certified,” Abha said.
This would be done through the Halal Monitoring Authority and Canadian Seed Institute, but Abha learned it was unusual for a farm his size to get certified.
He explained for meat to be halal, it needs to be hand slaughtered while a blessing is spoken to each chicken but there’s no difference in raising it. He uses a Mennonite abattoir in Elmira where it is done first in the morning while the equipment is clean.
“You basically have to segregate, you cannot have cross contamination between organic or halal (and standard meat),” he said.
An auditor inspects him from time to time to make sure he stays to the standards of halal and organic.
While he noted there is a trend of Muslim people moving away from Toronto and the GTA to smaller towns, most of his clientele is not Muslim.
Abha knows he’s different from other farmers in the area but has always felt welcomed by his neighbours, mostly Mennonites, and credited their help with getting him out of difficult situations in the early days and in an ongoing matter such as borrowing a forklift a few times.
“He doesn’t charge me anything for it but he helps me out … I’ve been stuck multiple times with my tractor broken or my truck stuck in the mud,” Abha said. “He came over, over and over again … I’ve learned to live in this land, things to avoid, things not do but at the beginning I was literally leaning on him a lot.”
He doesn’t do it entirely by himself, his wife Bahaar Luhar and his three sons have been a big part of this.
He can often be found at the Wellington North Farmers’ Market which runs from June to September on Saturdays and his wife at the Orangeville Farmers’ Market also on Saturdays.
With his fifth year of farming behind him, Abha has considered expanding to other animals but isn’t quite ready to commit.
“I want to make sure I’m good at one job before I do another,” he said.
