2025 Year In Review

Letter from the President

Greetings! We hope your season ended well this year. 2025 was a difficult season for many with extreme droughts and flooding depending on your region. The NFU-O has been working on your behalf this year to advance small-scale meat and egg production in the province, continuing to build land access resources and opportunities, supporting our partners in delivering new farmer training, and delivering HR workshops for small and mid-scale farm employers. We also supported members with various issues including challenges navigating the farm class tax rate, supporting NFU-O representation at planning process meetings, navigating tax processes, and provided guidance around the FBR process for new members. If you would like to discuss an issue, or to bring forward a resolution to the AGM, please contact us at office@nfuontario.ca.

Sincerely, 

Max Hansgen

President, NFU-O

2025 Highlights

Education & Resources

NFU-O’s Land Access Program produced Fields of Opportunity: A Guide for Alternative Farmland Access to offer information on creative land access models, and guidance on how to adopt a new land access approach tailored to your needs as a farmer.

Through collaborative work with the NFU-O and EFAO’s Land Access Coalition, Rooting For Tomorrow: An Equitable Land Access Policy Framework for Ontario’s Next-Generation Farmers was also produced to provide a framework for land access policy action.

We ran another series of free HR workshops addressing topics like hiring and incentives, HR fundamentals, interpersonal dynamics, retention, farm financial tools and more. You can still access these free recordings on our NFU-O Youtube channel!

Events

NFU-O Locals held 10 events this year, with topics like farmland co-ops, ecological farming, soil health, Bill 5 mobilization, farming as a parent, farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing around tools and equipment, farm research and development, and connecting with the local farming community over a shared meal.

Policy

Member meetings were held in the winter of 2025 to discuss small-scale meat production and non-quota egg policies. We listened and received your feedback on key challenges and policy opportunities, and have been busy discussing those concerns and ideas with organizations like the Chicken Farmers of Ontario and Egg Farmers of Ontario to discuss better pathways forward for small-scale farmers.

NFU-O demanded the withdrawal of Bill 5, a bill that would expand and accelerate the government’s power to hive off parts of Ontario to be run as private wealth extraction zones at the expense of the people, land, sacred Treaty relationships, and the future of  Ontario.

Looking forward to 2026 

Education & Resources

We have begun work on a new toolkit for non-family farm transition. Keep an eye out for a farm succession planning meeting in your area! If you can’t make a meeting, please take a few minutes to complete our short survey and let us know what is most important to you when considering transitioning your land to the next generation of farmers. Take the survey here: Non-Family Farmland Succession Survey or give us a call and we can go through it over the phone with you. Your input will help shape our farmland succession support programs moving forward!

We have also received funding to provide financial guidance to equity-deserving farmers (women, Indigenous peoples, persons with disabilities, racialized communities, and 2SLGBTQIA+ people) around applying for opportunities like grants, loans, and public land applications. We have welcomed three Farm Finance Mentors to the team, including Fianna Dirks of It’s Giving Farm, Jacqueline Dwyer of Toronto Black Farmers Collective, and Tina Gokstorp of Good Food Farms, who are planning some exciting workshops and mentorship opportunities beginning in Winter 2026 to support this project. 

This project is funded in part by the Governments of Canada and Ontario under the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership, a federal-provincial-territorial initiative.

Events

Another round of our free HR workshops will run in 2026 to share best practices with small and mid-scale farm employers. Register here for Cultivating Best Human Resource Practices on Small and Mid-scale Farms.

Farm Business Registration is Just Around the Corner!

VISIT https://www.agricorp.com/en-ca/Programs/FBR/Pages/Overview.aspx 

CALL Agricorp at +1 888-247-4999 

EMAIL contact@agricorp.com 

Select the NFU-O as your farm organization to join thousands of passionate, innovative Ontario farmers working for a food system that is better for farmers, eaters, and the land.