How to become an organic farmer

A new generation of people want to farm. Their parents are more likely to have been nurses or teachers or plumbers or engineers, but they are more interested in working the land than working for the man. Across Canada, farming is capturing the imagination of a growing group of men and women who have no recent ancestral connections to agriculture. These are the people who will likely play an important role in a new food system and make the idea of local food possible in Canada.

Farm internship programs are rising in popularity, like the Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training in Ontario. CRAFT matches aspiring farmers with organic farms in the hope of strengthening the organic farming community in the province. Applications for their two dozen internships have risen into the hundreds in the last few years. The international organization called WWOOF - World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms - which facilitates volunteering on farms, has a Canadian membership that is growing exponentially, primarily with people in their twenties. John Vanden Heuvel, the founder of the Canadian chapter, said young families are starting to take their kids to work on farms in the summer too. Across the country, training programs are being launched for those drawn to agriculture but who don’t have a farming background. The non-profit Agricultural Research and Extension Council of Alberta is starting courses to train future farmers because of the high demand for this service in the West. And they are basing their program on the work of yet another organization, FarmStart, in Ontario, that has been helping new farmers move into agriculture since 2002.

FarmStart, based in Guelph, was founded by a woman named Christie Young who had worked with farmers as well as in the community-food sector for years and saw a huge gap in the food system between aspiring farmers and the reality of farm life. She saw that there was little support for people who wanted to learn how to run their own operation. There wasn’t an apprenticeship program like the ones for electricians or carpenters, in which someone at the beginning of their career works closely with a more experienced person to learn on the job before starting their own business. So she founded the not-for-profit FarmStart to help put more farmers into the fields with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed.

Their focus is not only on getting new farmers out there growing food for Canadians. Christie Young wants to help the new inductees rethink agriculture in Canada and help them to create a more ecologically, and economically, sustainable way of farming. Those who register for the FarmStart courses tend to be people with university degrees, many from the environmental sciences, who are not only ideologically committed to sustainability but have a practical side that makes them good business managers. Young is hopeful that interest from this new segment of society can radically change the way food is produced. “Ecological agriculture is thinking about the farm as a whole system, basing it on soil health and looking at it differently,” she said. “We’ve done some pretty serious things to the land. But I’ve seen farms turned around by someone who is concerned with building their soil.”

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Excerpted from Locavore: From Farmers' Fields to Rooftop Gardens - How Canadians are Changing the Way We Eat, by Sarah Elton. Copyright 2010 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced except with permission in writing from the publisher.



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