Interesting story from up north:

Pushed out by large-scale farms, suburban encroachment and soaring land prices, Ontario’s Mennonite and Amish communities are making the migration from Canada’s largest province to its smallest. In PEI the land is cheap, and the province accepts their desire to live apart from mainstream Canadian society, rejecting things like government-run secular schools, voting, carrying drivers’ licences or paying insurance.

Small-scale farms in Ontario are increasingly out of reach. The province has lost 20% of its farmland in the past 40 years, much of it to a growing urban population, new residential developments, and industries such as aggregate extraction that have gobbled up huge swaths of farmland.

I don’t have anything smart to say about this, except to point out that gentrification always disrupts traditions. Sometimes, on balance, that’s actually a good thing. But oftentimes, it’s just richer people claiming what used to belong to poorer people. It can even happen to Mennonites.