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Welcome to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s podcast series that explores the freshest ideas in agriculture and food. Each episode explores a single topic in depth—digging deep into new practices, innovative ideas, and their impacts on the industry. Learn about Canada’s agricultural sector from the people making the breakthroughs and knocking down the barriers! Farmers and foodies, scientists and leaders, and anyone with an eye on the future of the sector—this podcast is for you!
Heather: For farmers, the hard work, dedication and sacrifice of the generations that came before you is literally written into the landscape around you. And yet we find transition planning is one that farmers hesitate the most about. And I think it's because all of a sudden we're talking about the people side of the business, and we have to enter into conversations with family members that we weren't taught how to do that.
And yet we find when we enter into these conversations on transition, it opens up the world to the rest of business management. Ultimately we realize, you know, this farm is going to transition on one way or another. So it's thinking about how can we gracefully pass this farm, our blood, sweat and tears on to the next generation in a way that that helps everyone out.
Kirk: Farm transitions aren’t just business decisions, we can see that. They can be emotional, deeply personal moments — because even though there’s tax and legal work involved, it’s usually the people side that creates the real complexity.
Marie-France: And all of this is happening at a important moment for the sector Kirk. According to Farm Credit Canada, almost 40% of Canadian farmers are expected to retire by 2033.
Kirk: And fewer new farmers are entering the sector to replace them. Which is adding pressure to already-complex transitions, and creating a need for new ideas, innovative programs, and fresh ways of thinking about this thing, how farms change hands.
Marie-France:: But like so many challenges in agriculture, when a problem becomes clear, this sector rolls up its sleeves. Smart, motivated people put their heads together and they are able to figure things out. For todays episode we spoke with two leaders whose teams are addressing different pieces of the transition puzzle with innovative approaches and great success.
Kirk: Yeah, I spoke with Heather Watson of Farm Management Canada. Their work is transforming how farm families talk about the future — helping them navigate the roles on the farm, their legacy, their hopes, the fears, and address the communication barriers that so often making the transitions complex.
Marie-France: And I spoke with Sara Dent, co-founder of Young Agrarians. Her team is reshaping transition from the other direction — creating pathways for new farmers to access land, mentorship, and community.
Kirk: You’ll hear why the hardest part of transition is often the people side and how new models and new ideas are opening doors for the next generation of farmers, it’s pretty exciting.
Marie-France: And we will point you to practical tools and supports that exist from Farm Management Canada, Young Agrarians and Farm Credit Canada to help people start the transition process on solid ground: Welcome to The First Sixteen, a podcast about innovators and innovation in Canadian agriculture. I’m your co-host, Marie-France Gagnon.
Kirk: And I’m your other co-host, Kirk Finken. Marie-France, let’s jump right in. I first asked Heather Watson to introduce her organization.
Heather: We are a national, non-profit, non-government organization, and we're really dedicated to the business side of farming. I round it out by saying helping farmers find the path to prosperity and peace of mind.
Kirk: Prosperity and peace of mind? And yet farm successions are not easy. They can be down right scary. What makes them so challenging for farm families?
Heather: Farming is incredibly unique, we're working with the same people that changed our diaper or that we, you know, fought over a toy with. And then just the nature of agriculture, high risk, hopefully high reward.
And it's interesting because when we talk to the generations and we say, you know, mom and dad, for example, like, what's your greatest fear? Well, I'm just afraid the kids are going to get the farm and sell it. But on the other side, when we ask, okay, next gen, what's your greatest fear? And they say our biggest fear is losing the farm, our biggest fear is being the generation that failed our family and the people that came before us. It’s an incredible feeling and culture and something to be so proud of but it’s and incredible amount of pressure.
And if we're not careful in, in understanding that this is a real crucial part of the conversation around farm transition, we can come up with all the technical solutions in the world. But if your family is not in a place to even start thinking about that, it it's just not going to work.
Kirk: You mentioned the pressure the next generation feels. Can you talk more about what that looks like?
Heather: Yeah, Certainly the next generation is…it doesn't want to be the generation to lose the farm. That's the kind of the resounding thing. The big piece is uncertainty and so, you know, even going to college or university for agriculture, getting their diploma degree, coming back to the farm and not really knowing, do I have a place on this farm and will there be enough of this farm to go around? And, you know, if those conversations aren't happening, you start thinking, well, you know, like, is this the right choice for me? Or should I be looking at something else?
In agriculture. A lot of people don't like it. But we talk about sweat equity. And so you've got, you know, 1 or 2 of your children who are always there by your side helping milk the cows or helping, you know, feed the cattle and there comes a time where you have to look at, okay, so what they've put into the farm, what value is that going forward, and how do we measure that value against those that aren't interested in farming and have gone on to university to become dentists or doctors or teachers or whatever the case may be. And, and so I think is the next generation. It's this fear that, um, you know, this could all slide out from under me.
Kirk: You’ve obviously been in the room for these conversations. And I guess you’ve also done some research, too right?
Heather: We did a national study on kind of trying to understand the connection between mental health and, farm business management. As part of the study, we asked, you know what, what are your greatest stressors? Open question, you can say anything. And the number one was uncertainty. When we looked at women and young farmers in particular, they had higher levels of stress in those areas and two more stress areas. Maintaining family and farm team harmony and farm transition. And so again, I think it's this uncertainty. What am I doing all this for? So not having these conversations early, like we talked about before, can help save a lot of stress and anxiety.
Kirk: So speaking of these conversations. You’ve shown how much pressure sits under the surface when families aren’t talking. Farm Management Canada runs workshops specifically to help families start those conversations. How did those workshops get going?
Heather: So it was actually the Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture out on the east coast, and they had come up with this incredible concept to put together a workshop to encourage farm families to participate together. We heard about this and hear wonderful things. So we, we asked, you know, would you mind if we took this concept and expanded it into some workshops across Canada and, you know, East coasters being East coaster they said yeah.
So that’s where we launched the concept of our Bridging the Gap Farm Transition Workshop for farm families. And what's unique about them is, you know, oftentimes in agriculture, you go to a trade show or you go to any workshop and it's maybe one person from the farm, and oftentimes it's the person that has the most free time. So it's often not the next gen and often not the women. And so with this workshop, we are very conscious that farm transition is a family process involving everyone because it's the future of everyone's livelihood, And so, you know, getting mom and dad and daughter and son and daughter in law and son in law etc. in the same room to learn together, but more importantly, to understand each other's hopes and fears and to try and make meaningful progress with that.
Kirk: That’s really powerful — especially the idea of getting everyone in the same room and actually hearing and understanding each other. Do you have an example of what that looks like in a real workshop?
Heather: I remember in one instance there was a mother and father and they would have been in their kind of mid 70s, and there was the daughter-in-law and the son. And it was interesting because we did this transition assessment. And the mom and dad are going through it and they're like, oh yeah, we have that, we have that. And the daughter-in-law is like, “Where though?” Because her assessment looked a lot different. It's like, oh my gosh, we don't have anything in place. And my parents are like, “Yeah we do..” The daughter and inlaw was saying, “where is it”? Oh I am sure it’s around somewhere. You know they worked with an advisor 20 years ago. I'm the daughter in-law, and I haven't been the daughter-in-law for 20 years. So, you know, can we have a conversation about that? But it was it was neat because there were one of the families that stayed after, and it was like at least an hour long conversation. And afterwards the daughter-in-law was just like, this conversation would have never happened without this workshop. And yeah, mom and dad didn't really want to come because they kind of said, been there, done that, been all the workshops, you know, like you can you can spit and you can probably find a farm transition workshop. But a lot are focused on the technical side -- wills, estate planning -- which are super important, but most families aren't there yet. What tends to happen is they're like, “Oh, we did a will or estate plan. We're done our transition.” Not realizing it's not just about the assets, it's about the knowledge, the skills, the trust.
Kirk: That’s a great example thanks for sharing that. So what I am hearing is this conversation needs to happen early and often.
Heather: Yeah, you are right one because it's just it's incredible what it does to open the conversation to say, you know, one day we would like to pass the farm on. Are you interested and not just asking once and one is done.
There's advisors that that talk about and help producers with like a family business rules book or governance. There's one that we have brought into the workshop to kind of tell their story, and they have a rule where, you know, after you graduate college or university, you can't come back to the farm for five years because they want you to get that outside experience of working for someone else. Like, maybe you're working in agriculture, or maybe you're even working on another farm, but just getting that outside experience and not kind of pigeonholing yourself into just that farm. There's these kind of rules that are laid out that give everyone a sense of kind of general timelines and things happening because it might be, you know, go to school and study whatever the heck you want to. If you do end up interested in farming, there could be a place for you. But also here's what it takes.
But I'll go to my friend Matt Loblaw in the UK and he studied something called the succession effect. And the succession effect works both ways. So the way that it works well is when you have identified a successor whether they actually end up being the person or not. It changes the way you think and act. And so I'm going to continue to invest in equipment upgrades and infrastructure upgrades. And I'm going to maybe take a risk and buy that piece of land because, um, you know, I see the future of the farm in this person or these people, you continue to run the business effectively.
On the other side of that is, as we naturally age we think and act differently about our future. And so, you know, if you're 60, you might be taking less risk. You might think, oh, do I need to really upgrade that equipment or will it do? And so you kind of start unknowingly backing away from investing in the farm. And then if you turn around and say, hey, hey, kids or kid, um, I want you to take this over. That puts them in a very difficult position, all of a sudden it's like it's like getting a used car and then you realize, oh my gosh, the brakes need done, they need new tires, you need a new battery, etc.. So they're looking at this as this is a lot of work. You know the succession effect says if you are thinking about this in advance the transition is a lot smoother.
There is no cookie cutter for the solution. I think that's what makes farm transition difficult. But what also makes it, you know, kind of exciting because there's always a way forward.
Kirk: And well I imagine some of that way forward could be very different? Sometimes, though, even with the best conversations, transition isn’t always the right outcome. How do you talk about that with families?
Heather: Sometimes the best thing for you is to walk away. Is to not force people's hand into transition. I don't want this to come across that, you know, either farm transition or it's failure. Because sometimes the answer that makes the most sense is actually, um, not going through the farm transition. I remember we had the Ottawa Valley Farm Show in March, and I was talking to a couple, and for them it came down to keeping the farm or keeping the family, and they've managed to make progress so that both are reality.
I know our conversation today has been about family farms and family dynamics. But there’s also a whole world out there for producers who are looking to transition their farm to the right people with the skills and the competencies, and people they like. There are some really great programs where there’s matchmaking between older generational farmers and new farmers who want to come in. I just want to give a shout-out to all that great programming as well, because I believe there’s a place for everyone in agriculture.
Kirk: Marie-France that’s such an important point — because for many producers, the next generation isn’t in the family.
Marie-France: And that’s exactly where our next guest comes in Kirk. Sara Dent, co-founder of Young Agrarians, has been building programs that match landholders with new farmers and create entirely new pathways into the sector. So Sara, when people ask what Young Agrarian is, how do you explain it?
Sara: A lot of people will ask me, like, just what I do for a living, and I'll tell them that I farm farmers. And so basically the organization now is approximately 30 staff, we’ve got staff now in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario and we are a farmer to farmer organization. So every single one of our programs, we're running about six programs right now are all built on a farmer-to-farmer model. We're moving into year 15 and we have grown so much. And clearly there's like really a demand for supports in programming for new and young farmers today.
Marie-France: Speaking of those programs — and since we’re talking about farm transitions — can you tell me about your land-matching program and how it works?
Sara: We started to lean more into this question around access to land, which is generally characterized as the number one barrier for new and young farmers today. Because of the exponential increase in the cost of farmland. We ended up talking quite a bit with Quebec. I got to meet the start up people for the land bank program in Quebec, which is now called Larterre. And they are actually the first province to demonstrate an uptick in new farmers and that they produce half of what they consume in terms of vegetables for Quebec and so they've really invested in farm renewal.
And so I brought all these ideas back to the BC Ministry of Agriculture. And the end result was that we adapted Quebec's program from French into English. We brough one of their leadership up here, they trained up some initial people in land matching, and they walked us through what it meant to do this type of program service delivery. And we piloted it in the Metro Vancouver Fraser Valley area, the most expensive farm land in the country, and then with the support of the province of British Columbia through the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture and other awesome funders like Columbia Basin Trust and Cowichan Valley Regional District we were able to launch provincially.
We have seven staff that work on the BC land matching program, and it's a free service. Basically we work with people who hold land, and then we work with people who are looking for lands, and we do, uh, like a coordinated matchmaking where we, we want to we're basically de-risking land matches. At this stage we have done 413 land matches we have new matches every week. The whole reason why we're offering our land matching program is because people have such a challenge locating a new successor. And so, like within the work that we're doing, we're building up a pool of people that want to start new farms or transition existing farms.
Marie-France: What kinds of farmers are you seeing come into the program?
Sara: So new people, young people are in a position today where buying the land and paying a mortgage might bankrupt them, like in year one. And so leasing the land might be the only financially viable option for a new farmer today. Of course that doesn't deal with the equity side of things like new and young people being able to build equity. And so that's also part of our programming work is helping people around what does it mean to build equity in your farm business.
And we have had some folks in the program that actually sell their farms and transfer leases over to new people that will take over an established farm business setting and establish lease. We've helped people that have been in farming for a long time, that we're in a position where they were going to lose land and they needed new property, or just the state of the land, they needed some new grazing.
So there's lots of nuanced ways that our program works. And we're lucky we've got some pilot money in Alberta. So we'll be starting in Alberta with our first Alberta land matcher. And of course, there's interest across the country. But land matching is the most complex service delivery that we offer, and it needs a really dynamic funding support base in order to be able to operate.
Marie-France: That’s amazing — and I imagine many of the people coming into the land-matching program are also looking for support as new entrants. Can you tell me about your mentorship program and again how it works?
Sara: I was hearing a lot from people about needing mentorship and support while they were in startup. And that's when we developed the Business Mentorship Network program.
So again, it's a farmer-to-farmer program where we pay experienced farmers to mentor new farmers and startups in their specific area of farming.
It's a year-long program. People get support in January, February, March — that's where most of the focus goes in. We look at what systems they have set up or don’t have set up. We also have a whole financial literacy webinar series, and we do a coordinated process with their mentor. We make sure the mentorship is working out.
Then they’ll have calls during peak season, when people are dealing with challenges on the farm. And then there’s a wrap-up at the end of the year. We found one of the most helpful things we've seen is the emotional support that they are getting from their mentors in those early startup years. And the program measures impact through increases in revenues, volume of food produced, and land in farming.
I would be remiss if I don't bring up one of the biggest challenges for farm transition is the communication side. It really does boil down to how ready a new farmer is to communicate, um, with, either a landholder or a landholders, also a farm operator, and also how ready a farm operator or a landholder is to transition, like to do the communication work to build an agreement with the new farmer. And it's the communication piece that will make or break the type of relationships that are needed for farm succession.
Mare-France: I think it’s a brilliant initiative. Can you give us an example of what a strong non-family match looks like — when it all comes together?
Sara: I mean we've had farmers from other countries that have come here and been able to access permanent residency, be able to take over like a berry operation on Vancouver Island. I can give the example of a dairy farm, a small dairy farm in the Fraser Valley came up. We were able to work with that dairy farm to figure out what would it look like to bring in new operators onto the land to operate the business. And then we were able to actually do a transition there.
So basically, people who are operating existing farms, the land matcher will be in there and they will be asking a whole bunch of questions. Some of the questions might be questions that people don’t have answers for right away. We light to tell people the minimum amount of time we can make a match is 6 months but a year is more likely.
The land matcher might be there to facilitate preliminary conversations, but then it might transition over to lawyers and accountants, depending on the extent of the legal agreement between parties, cause Young Agrarians we have lawyers that review our lease agreements, but if we're doing a more extensive like land transition process, land of like farm transition process, so it's going to be a lot more parties that have to be involved with that. We did develop a toolkit for non-family farm succession.
Marie-France: That’s a great way to move to what resources you have. Can you tell me about those.
Sara: There are a lot of amazing tools on the Young Agrarian website. If you're in Ontario, if you're in Alberta there are land access guides and toolkits, we offer free lease and license templates on our website that have been legally reviewed. We've even done a land access guide for New Brunswick. And so this is all part of building tools and resources, educational resources for people who are looking to navigate access to land.
Marie-France: I understand that your organization runs very hands-on programs, but you’ve also been moving more into policy work. Can you tell me why was that important, and how does policy help new farmers get established?
Sara: Yeah, I've always been like a boots on the ground kind of person. And then at a certain point in time, I started talking with the BC provincial government. And over a long window of time, we've seen the provincial government establish a new entrance strategy, have a dedicated new entrant agrologist in the position to support the strategy and build out programming. Like BC now has a new farm business accelerator program where people can either engage business planning experts or they can pay themselves to write their business plans.
So what I've seen now, like at this stage, like again next year is year 15 that I've been working on this is that when you work with government and get strategy going and they're able to put some committed staffing time and resources into supporting next generation farmers, then you now have a policy pathway, to enable that resourcing. So we are working on those policy pathways in other provinces.
And you know every five years there’s the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, and we’re trying to prioritize access to land and capital for new farmers into the next framework and that requires us to work provincially and federally. The policy work is fascinating. it’s political, its relational and Young Agrarians is really coming at it, driving forward that we need policy for new and young farmers to make sure that we have future generations on the land.
Kirk: Hearing from Heather and Sara, one thing becomes clear: transition isn’t something you wait on. It’s something you plan for. So if you’re listening and wondering where to begin, there are great resources out there. Farm Management Canada offers tools, guides, and their “Bridging the Gap” workshops — all focused on helping families talk openly about expectations, roles, and the future of the farm.
Marie-France: And Young Agrarians supports new entrants from another angle. Their land-matching program connects landholders with new farmers, and their mentorship network pairs new growers with experienced producers. They also have a non-family farm succession toolkit that walks you through different models and agreements. And on their website, you’ll find lease and licence templates and land-access guides for several provinces.
Kirk: And for anyone looking for more direct guidance, there is always Farm Credit Canada provides a free transition advisory service. You don’t have to be an FCC customer. They meet families exactly where they are in the transition journey, and they’re not there to sell you loans or products. The advisors focus on the people side — helping you clarify goals, surface concerns, prepare for conversations, and map out next steps. So between Farm Management Canada, Young Agrarians, and FCC, there’s a whole ecosystem of support — whether you’re keeping the farm in the family, finding a new successor, or exploring new models entirely.
Marie-France: And we’ll have links to all these resources in the show notes. I’m Marie-France Gagnon.
Kirk: And I’m Kirk Finken. Thanks for listening — and as always,
Marie-France: Try something new.
Kirk: Yup, try something new, thanks.