Integrated new farmer centres in each Province / Territory
Integrated models linked to a range of government, business, farm and civil society actors are needed in each province. A long-term integrated approach is required because succession will always be an issue.
Although Canada's 8 agricultural faculties might be seen as an obvious location for these things, the irony of most agricultural programs is that a majority of undergraduates do not come from farm families, and are not necessarily interested in farming. Instead, they are interested in employment in the agri-food sector outside the farm. Partly in response to this, agricultural faculties have scaled back or eliminated their farm diploma programs, practical and shorter programs that historically focused on students from farm families who wanted to take over the farm. Some community colleges have retained these more practice oriented programs. Most university degree programs are not, in fact, that helpful if you want to farm. Fewer still are programs that focus on new and beginning farmers wishing to learn sustainable farming, Fleming College in Ontario being an exception.
Founded in 1988 and providing services beyond new farmers, the Intervale Centre in Burlington Vermont provides a potential model for such integrated centres (for details, see Juncos, 2021). A non-profit social enterprise managing over 300 hundred acres of ecologically sensitive land (mostly under conservation easements) within the Burlington boundary, sustainable farming and gardening is the main land use on about 100 acres (above average size in Vermont). It offers or hosts multiple services to new farmers (including new Americans) with a food hub and farm land lease program (which included for many years a farm incubator), an aggregating distribution service including a CSA, training and farm business planning advisory services (including a Beginning Farmer Business and Coaching program), a farm equipment co-op and a Farm Link Program. It sells or brokers transactions among some 300 actors within a 10 km radius. It operates on a budget of about $US3 million with half coming from service provision and sales, about 35% from donations, and 15-20% annually from government grants. It collaborates with many municipal and state government officials on matters related to farming and conservation, including local extension and conservation services.
Most of its clients are small to medium enterprises and a centre would need to address wider scales in a number of Canadian provinces. They also do not have livestock, and livestock present financial and logistical challenges at larger scales for farm incubators. The centre could also be attached to a different delivery, administrative or governance model depending on the realities of the P/T (including many that already exist), including universities (such as the Kwantlen Polytechnic University approach), colleges of food system related institutions with space for a farm incubator. Universities are potentially more viable for livestock related new farmer training and development as some already have facilities for animal research and a suitable land base. A key financing feature that creates flexibility for the integrated model is multi-source private and public funding streams, more viable at this stage with changes to the Income Tax Act (see Goal 1 Equitable access to food retail, Substitution).
As is done with much government tendering, each provincial government would need to tender the proposal to establish such a centre with common parameters and review criteria agreed to across the country to assure some consistency of service provision. It would only make sense for collaborations of existing service providers to bid on tenders. Training could be provided provincially, but with collaboration across the training organizations on content. New farmer advisory services could be linked with Transition Advisory Services (see Goal 5, Sustainable Food). It might make more sense for a farm link program to be regional, rather than solely provincial, e.g. BC, Prairies / Peace, Ontario, Quebec, Atlantic. An integrated centre could have multiple locations, provide services in multiple communities and do some work remotely. Following the Intervale Center model, funding could be a mix of service fees (advisory services, training, rentals), government funding and private foundations.
Cross-compliance: the farmer can retire, but not the farm
Cross-compliance is widely used as an incentive and compliance measure in Europe, less so in Canada (see also Goal 5, Sustainable Food). However, by the Redesign Stage, this tool will be widely in play and should be applied to issues of farm protection. If any form of state support has been received by the farm from any jurisdiction (and it would be the rare farm that had not), the farm must continue although the farmer(s) must be supported with retirement. This can be facilitated with required easements, or restrictive zoning (see Goal 3 Reducing corporate concentration, Substitution). In exchange for certain kinds of support, the farm must take an easement to assure its existence in perpetuity. The measures proposed at the Efficiency and Substitution phases would assure succession. Obviously, business failure as we think of it today, would not be a viable scenario.
An exception would be made in the limited case of a farm that, based on historical problems with biodiversity, really needed to be fully returned to native habitat.
