A remote job in Canada includes free land and a sense of community. 50,000 apply.

WHYCOCOMAGH, Nova Scotia — When a land-rich family in sparsely populated Cape Breton wanted to attract workers for its understaffed country store, it offered free land to anyone who would come and work for five years.

The family expected a few dozen responses; more than 50,000 poured in — and the calls keep coming.

"I expected a response, just not one as huge as this," said Sandee MacLean, a woman with multiple tattoos and copper red hair, who came up with the idea with her sister.

Of course, Canada has a lot of land, but not a lot of people, and economically sleepy regions like Cape Breton in Nova Scotia have steadily leaked population. The island, a scenic 4,000-square-mile patch of rolling forest and farmland jutting into the northern Atlantic Ocean, has only about 130,000 residents and has been losing well over 1,000 people a year for the last two decades.

As Cape Bretoners become increasingly frantic about stemming the tide of outward migration, giving away land just might be a solution.

[Russia looks to populate its Far East. Wimps need not apply.]

"It is validation that land is an attraction," said Chris van den Heuvel, president of the Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture. He hopes the strong response to the giveaway will help his group's effort to create a land bank that would make farmland affordable and bring newcomers to the province.

Several economically depressed communities in the United States have tried the same idea in recent years, including towns in Iowa, Kansas and Minnesota.

There is a long history of giving land away. European powers that wanted to populate their New World possessions, as well as Canada and the United States in their youth, gave land to anyone who would settle on it and make improvements.

But in Nova Scotia, the overwhelming response is also a measure of how many people, unmoored by the global economy, are hungry for a sense of community. To many, the proposal seemed to present a connection to a famously rich regional culture full of Scottish fiddling, community suppers and square dancing.

All of that was far from mind when Jim and Ferne Austin decided to turn their store over to their daughters this year. For the two women, MacLean and Heather Austin Coulombe, the most immediate concern was where to find employees.

"We were in a panic, we were so short staffed," Coulombe said.

The Austins opened the business, the Farmer's Daughter Country Market, in 1992 in Whycocomagh, Nova Scotia, after a life spent dairy farming. The combination bakery, produce market, ice cream parlor, fudge factory and gift shop now occupies a collection of barn-red buildings along the side of the road on a quiet stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway.

Austin's father, also a dairy farmer, had amassed more than 600 acres; after sell-offs, about 200 acres remain. The land that is left is mostly mountain woodland — pretty to see, but not of much value unless it were logged. No one in the family wants to shave the hillsides for that.

By the end of this summer, the country market was down by three full-time workers, making it difficult to meet a local grocery chain's demand for baked goods from the Farmer's Daughter. The baking business helps the operation stay afloat in the bleak winter months.

MacLean and Coulombe tried hiring locally, but said capable and dependable hands were not available. The visa process for foreign workers was too cumbersome, too.

That is when they came up with the idea of giving away land.

The women put together a questionnaire that emphasized commitment and values and made it clear that the land they were giving away was remote and well off the grid.

Around 10 p.m. one Sunday in late August, the sisters posted a gentle appeal on the market's Facebook page under the title, "Beautiful Island Needs People."

In about 500 words they offered a job, community and two acres of land to anyone who would come and work at the market for five years. They have since raised the offer to three acres to allow for a septic system.

By morning, the appeal had been shared 200 times. By afternoon, a local radio station had called for an interview. Soon national radio and television stations were calling and the land offer was the top trending news story on the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.'s website. When the report was picked up around the world, the floodgates opened.

The sisters had already zeroed in on several candidates well before their appeal went viral. Within a week of the original post they had interviewed the people they eventually hired.

The newcomers consist of three families: the Andersons, the Walkinses and the Taits, who arrived in time for Canada's Thanksgiving on Oct. 10. The Austins, the parents of the sisters who are taking over the store, invited them all to their home for a traditional feast, the biggest Thanksgiving dinner they had ever put on, they said.

Over plates of turkey and turnips and local condiments like the Farmer's Daughter Cape Breton chow (a relish made with green tomatoes), the families appeared to blend effortlessly.

All three families said that it was the promise of community in a simpler, beautiful place that was the biggest attraction. Each parcel of land is worth only a few thousand Canadian dollars, and Cape Breton has plenty of land for sale.

"I never even asked about the land," said Sonja Anderson, a former mortgage banker who drove nine days across the country from Vancouver, British Columbia, with her 10-year-old daughter and two dogs.

Micah Tait said that he and his wife, Trish, had long dreamed of making such a move. "Everything was exactly what we were hoping to work toward and we just took a sort of shortcut," he said.

Both said they missed the "feeling of belonging" in their life in Vancouver, where they worked as security guards.

When Brett Walkins lost his job in British Columbia as a project manager building wastewater treatment plants, he and his wife, Kerry, sold their house, bought a truck and a camper-trailer and headed down the North American coast.

Months later, having traversed the continent with two children and two dogs, they were on Prince Edward Island, west of Cape Breton, biting their nails over bidding on a new house.

"An hour after we found out someone else had bought the house, I saw the Farmer's Daughter post," Kerry Walkins said. Brett Walkins emailed that day under the subject line, "community opportunity."

"That's what spoke to me," he said. "To be welcomed into what we could tell was a close-knit family."

Brett Walkins has already walked on the land, accessible by a muddy logging road, looking for a building site, while his wife has taken up her duties baking pies and making fudge. The couple plan to construct a solar-powered, self-sustaining home.

The new arrivals have challenges ahead. They arrived in the midst of Cape Breton's beautiful fall foliage display, but a long frigid winter and then the region's famous black fly season await.

Along with an uptick in business, the publicity has had other consequences for the Farmer's Daughter. A local couple have offered the sisters 42 acres they do not use. Television producers have called to talk about a possible reality show or, more to the sisters' tastes, a documentary series tracking the newcomers' integration into the community and their development of the land.