The sixth edition of Mackinnon Brothers’ Back to the Farm, and first under COVID restrictions, has come and gone with Sunday’s festival.
This year’s lineup featured nine Kingston area artists before welcoming the headliners of Terra Lightfoot and Matt Mays to the stage.
The festival sold out all 4,500 tickets and had an overall cap of 5,000 including volunteers, food and beer truck employees and kids who were admitted free.
Chris Morris, artistic director for the festival, says he’s looking forward to some much needed rest after the team finished roughly “8 months of planning in 6 weeks” to get the festival underway this year.
Morris said they felt confident with their planning done alongside public health, and added that check ins by both public health and police throughout the day were satisfactory.
He said all the performers were excellent, and the biggest highlight to him was just how much attendees enjoyed the return of live music after such a long absence.
“It was really nice to see how much the crowd appreciated the live music,” Morris said.
“There were more people situated in front of the stage this year I think as a percentage than there has been in the past. There was a bit less to do this year sort of by design, but just to see how much the crowd really loved it and I think they were giving it back to the musicians and the musicians were feeding off of it.”
Morris said at this point they don’t feel like there were any major issues, but as far as improving the festival he would like to find a way to reduce the amount of waste on the grounds.
“We thought the big orange bins were pretty obvious, but after a couple you get lazy or forgetful,” he laughed.
“It’s a working farm so when I was back there this morning to see that amount of trash was disheartening.”
The brewery was closed today in order to clean the grounds of the overwhelming amount of trash left behind.
Nicholas Lennox and Timothy Seier of The Wilderness said it was “unearthly” to be back on stage and playing in front of so many people.
Lennox added he’s tried to use the time through the pandemic to hone in his practicing, but there’s no substitute for live performance.
“I guess we’ve just been looking forward to doing this again,” Lennox said.
“It’s hard to get around that this is a missing piece of the puzzle. You can write all you want but without getting up there and doing the thing, even with the livestreams, it’s not quite the same thing.”
The brewery doesn’t have too many plans for other shows at this time, with Dan Mackinnon saying ahead of the festival that they’d love to but they’re still trying to hold a number of weddings and events that have been postponed through the pandemic.
The venue will however be hosting a show on September 5 featuring The Blue Stones and The Wilderness.
