Swarms of Instagrammers force a Canadian sunflower farm to ban all visitors

If you’re on Instagram for long enough, you start to notice certain patterns emerge around types of photos: pictures in the same hot locations, framed in the same way, with the same vistas. One farm in Canada was unlucky enough to become a local Instagram obsession recently, and the increase in attention got totally out of control.

As The Globe and Mail reports, Bogle Seeds in Hamilton, Ontario had to close down its fields to all visitors following a viral image that lead to a massive increase in foot traffic of people shooting pictures of its sunflower fields. In late July, the farm was open to everyone, with the owners charging an entry fee of $7.50 to people who wanted to visit the brightly colored flowers. At first, the crowds were manageable, but by July 28th, everything had changed. After pictures of the farm went viral, an estimated 7,000 cars lined up on the roads leading to the farm. Here’s The Globe:

By noon, the hordes were coming from all directions. People were parking as much as a kilometre away. The crowds started ignoring the overwhelmed farm staff, strolling into the fields without paying. Police told the Bogles that parents were crossing four lanes of traffic with strollers, people were getting in fender benders – one driver had his door ripped off by a passing car. One officer told the family they would be fined.

The Bogles tried their best to ward off the trespassers. “We asked one guy to leave, and he said, ‘Make me’ and wanted to fight,” Brad says.

The police ended up shutting the whole thing down, and the farm had to put up a number of “No Trespassing” signs up. The Bogles are also worried that the pandemonium might have hurt the sunflowers, which are a sensitive crop. People continue to trickle in, of course, many hugely annoyed at the turn of events after traveling far and wide to take a picture of the 1.4 million sunflowers. As of now, though, the farm is closed — unless of course you’re there to buy products like bird seed, in which case they’re still open for business.

Thanks to social media, incidents like this happen regularly: crowds taking pictures have killed wild animals (if not gotten killed by those wild animals), and previously unknown natural wonders are slowly getting overrun by people looking to impress on Instagram.

“I used to love these flowers, now I can’t stand ‘em,” farm proprietor Marlene Bogle told The Globe.