In January 2020, the NFU-O in collaboration with the Ontario Farmland Trust (OFT) piloted five succession planning workshops across Eastern Ontario, which made a few things abundantly clear:
1. Farmers are searching for successors outside of their family;
2. Farmers want to be an active player in their farm’s succession;
3. Certain areas of the province are being more heavily impacted by the farmland succession crisis;
4. Farmers want to know more about farmland loss and conservation; and
5. Young and new farmers cannot access land.
New and young farmers are critical to maintaining Ontario’s agricultural prosperity and land access is the #1 challenge in between the next generation of farmers and their dreams. And with farmland prices skyrocketing across the province, and with less than 10% family farms equipped with a succession plan, the risk of farmland being gobbled up by developers is an ever present threat.
Our land-linking workshops started as a way to bring people with land (“land-holders”) together with people looking for land (“land-seekers”) and to explore what it means to share land to grow food. As the series has grown, the workshops have become a means to support farmers in the start-up and throughout their careers, and serve as resources to help farmers get on the land.
With thanks to the McLean Foundation and the Gosling Foundation, the NFU-O and the OFT have now held 10 workshops, on a variety of topics, some of which you can watch recordings of below:
Are you looking for farmland? Do you have farmland to rent? This questionnaire is for you!
The NFU-O is looking to gather information from land-holders and land-seekers that will help us identify potential farmland matches and help us understand the demographics we are serving.
Click here to complete the questionnaire. We won’t share your information without your permission.
Contact
Interested and want to know more? Contact Sunil Puri, NFU-O’s Land-Linking & Young Farmer Support Specialist at [email protected].