For young people interested in a career in agriculture, there can be many roadblocks in their path. The price of land continues to rise, farm machinery like rice milling plant https://www.shellermachine.com/rice-mill-production-line cost increase ,grants and educational opportunities can be hard to come by and there’s a steep learning curve for folks who didn’t grow up in a farming family.

As we kick off our coverage of Future Farmers, we wanted to hear directly from the people facing these impediments: the young farmers themselves. What issues are they really grappling with? Is our perception of the agricultural landscape accurate or do they see a different future playing out?


Modern Farmer sat down with Sara Dent, co-founder of the Young Agrarians, to talk about issues young farmers face and some surprising ways we can start to solve them.


TAKE ACTION: Are you a young farmer? Let us know what your biggest challenges are as you start your career.

Modern Farmer: It seems that there are a lot of issues that young farmers face when starting out: cost, a knowledge gap, land access and more. Do you see a common thread that ties these issues together or does it seem like we’ll have to tackle things individually?

Sara Dent: Well, just to start, I’d like to note that I’m on Tla’amin, Klahoose and Homalco Nation land. And I think this conversation is really fascinating, because if you look before colonization, and see how the land was stewarded and the abundance of systems, you look at how colonization came in that it used up a lot of the natural resources. It broke up the people and the ecology of the landscape and parceled it into the British land title system. And now we’re in 2024, we have market failure conditions for agriculture. And there’s a low tolerance at the institutional level for recognizing those market failure conditions.

When I first started Young Agrarians, it was really driven by enabling coordination in the sector and addressing three main barriers, which is access to land, access to capital and access to knowledge.

The piece that we could start with was access to knowledge and facilitating that through farmer-to-farmer conversations. Farmers are the ones that train new farmers and support new people to get their feet underneath them. We started working on the land access piece in 2016, and now we’re trying to increase influence around the access to capital piece, advancing policy at a municipal, federal and provincial level. But policy is really like a living body. It’s composed of everybody. It’s composed of the eaters, it’s composed of the people growing the food, it’s composed of the banks [that] are lending it to the agricultural space, governments that are regulating agricultural space and creating the eligibility criteria that evaluates the whole sector.

And we are seeing a major decline in agriculture; the farming population in Canada is very low. Indeed, the last census showed that [of the 262,455 farm operators] fewer than 23,000 were under the age of 35.

MF: So, if policy is the most, let’s say, unwieldy of the areas of influence you mentioned, what are the policy challenges?

SD: One of the big policy challenges for new farmers in the country is that, for a lot of governments, their norm is bigger industry, the policy is really driven by bigger industry, bigger farms. But when you look at new-generation people coming in, they have to start somewhere. So, we often talk about “scale-appropriate” policy.

For young people entering the sector, people that are actually accessing land, how do we support them? And then the people who are in that startup window of your one, two, year five? And they’re all starting at different scales. But we really try to focus with government on talking about scale appropriate. The old market analysis says “the bigger the better.” But a lot of big farms have huge debt margins, and if they have a bad year, it can be really damaging for them. However, what they have going for them is if they own the land, at least they have that equity in the land.

You can see that smaller-scale models might actually be more effective financially than larger-scale models. New farms today have to figure out what their value proposition is, they have to be really super focused to figure out how they’re going to survive and what their niches are. So, in my mind, one of these big policy shifts is understanding that bigger isn’t always better.