Priced Out of the Land, Regulated Out of Farming

There is a strange contradiction at the heart of the conversation about the future of farming in Ontario.

We keep hearing that farmers are getting older, that succession is becoming a serious problem, that food security matters, and that we need more young people and new families willing to enter agriculture.

I agree with all of that.

The difficulty is what happens when someone actually tries.

My wife and I are first-generation farmers. We did not inherit land, buildings, equipment, or an existing farm business. We sold our home, moved our family to Eastern Ontario, and decided to build something ourselves.

We also decided to lease.

That was not because we were less committed to farming. Quite the opposite. It was because buying a house and farmland before proving production, customer demand, and whether the business could actually work seemed like a very poor way to manage risk.

We have off-farm income and always knew the farm would take time to build. We were never under the illusion that a few thousand chickens would suddenly replace a full-time income in our first year.

But even with outside income, the cost of buying a home and agricultural land in the current market is enormous. Unless someone is earning well into the six figures, already has substantial capital, inherited land, or is willing to take on a very large amount of debt, the ticket of entry is simply very high.

And you have to commit that capital before you really know anything.

Before you know whether you can produce consistently.

Before you know whether customers will come back.

Before you understand your actual costs.

Before you know what infrastructure you really need.

And, as we have now discovered, sometimes before you even know whether the regulatory system will allow you to grow the business.

So we leased.

The idea was fairly simple. Start small, learn, build the equipment, develop a customer base, make our mistakes while the mistakes are still affordable, and slowly prove that the farm could become something more.

Then, perhaps one day, when the business could actually justify it, buy land.

That still seems like good business sense to me.

The obvious next step

At Lindisfarn, we raise pasture chickens fed organic feed. We own our poultry equipment, built our brooder, manage the birds ourselves, keep the records, handle biosecurity, move the chickens across pasture, and arrange processing and sales.

We are still very new at this, and we are learning constantly.

But we are farming.

And, importantly, we have customers.

More customers, in fact, than we are currently allowed to supply.

Under Chicken Farmers of Ontario’s Family Food Program, we are limited to 300 chickens per year.

For a first season, 300 birds is not necessarily a bad place to begin. It gives you enough scale to learn a great deal without making your first serious mistake with several thousand living animals.

But it is not enough to build much of a farm business.

The obvious next step for us was CFO’s Artisanal Chicken Program, which is intended for small-scale farmers raising between 600 and 3,000 chickens annually.

For a first-generation farmer, that kind of scale makes a lot of sense. It is still small enough to operate without the enormous infrastructure of conventional chicken production, but large enough to begin creating meaningful farm income, serving more customers, and reinvesting in the next stage of the business.

We thought this was exactly where we were supposed to go next.

Then we learned that we did not qualify.

Not because of our husbandry.

Not because of the chickens.

Not because of the land itself, the equipment, our customers, or our ability to meet inspection requirements.

Because we lease.

The deed

Chicken Farmers of Ontario has told us that an applicant to the Artisanal Program must own the land.

Their Community Programs Manager eventually put it very plainly in writing:

“Unless an application comes in indicating you are the owners of the land, and we request a copy of the land deed as proof, our hands are tied.”

He also told us that the Board has directed staff to refuse applications involving leased land outside certain family arrangements.

That is where I started having trouble understanding the logic of the rule.

We can have a long-term lease. We can have the full support of the landowner. We can own the chickens and the equipment. We can be responsible for every production decision and every regulatory obligation associated with the flock. We can provide access for inspection and comply with whatever reasonable safeguards CFO requires.

But if our names are not on the deed, we cannot move forward.

Which creates a rather literal chicken-and-egg problem.

We need farm income to eventually afford the land, but we need to own the land before we are allowed to grow the farm.

That may sound like a small regulatory detail when written on a form.

For someone trying to enter agriculture without inherited land, it is anything but small.

Leasing is supposed to be a way in

Leasing is not some strange loophole invented by people trying to avoid becoming real farmers.

It is one of the most obvious ways for someone without inherited land to get started.

You lease land because land is expensive. You establish production before taking on the mortgage. You find customers before committing hundreds of thousands of dollars to real estate. You learn whether the business works and whether you are actually any good at it.

Then, if the farm becomes strong enough, maybe you buy.

That is a fairly normal way to build a business.

The difficulty comes when agricultural policy treats land ownership not as something a farmer might eventually achieve, but as the starting point.

There is also a distinction here that I think we have started to blur.

Owning agricultural real estate and farming are not the same thing.

Someone can own 100 acres and never produce a pound of food from it. Someone else can lease ten acres, spend every morning caring for animals, improve pasture, repair fences, haul feed, keep records, sell food to neighbours, and lose sleep when something goes wrong.

One is certainly a landowner.

I would argue the other is still a farmer.

Farmland has become its own economy

This would probably matter less if agricultural land were inexpensive.

It is not.

A first-generation farmer today is not simply looking at an acre of land and asking how many bushels, cattle, chickens, or vegetables it might produce. That acre also exists inside the wider real-estate market. It has value as property, investment, development potential, and a store of wealth.

The farming calculation and the real-estate calculation are not always the same calculation anymore.

You can run the numbers on poultry, cattle, grain, vegetables, or almost anything else and eventually arrive at an uncomfortable question: how much agricultural production does the land have to generate simply to justify the purchase price?

For someone who inherited land, that question looks one way.

For someone arriving with nothing but income, savings, and a willingness to work, it looks very different.

This is why I think leasing matters so much for the future of farming. It separates the question of whether someone can farm from the question of whether they can already afford agricultural real estate.

A policy that requires the second before allowing someone to meaningfully pursue the first turns access to capital into a farming qualification.

I am not convinced those should be the same thing.

A strange moment for this conversation

The timing of all of this is interesting.

Ontario is currently considering Bill 109, the Protecting Ontario’s Food Independence Act, 2026, which has passed second reading and been referred to the Standing Committee on the Interior. The bill speaks about strengthening the resilience and competitiveness of Ontario agriculture and improving the way the sector is governed.

That broader conversation makes sense to me.

Food security ultimately depends on people being willing and able to produce food here.

But protecting farmland and protecting farming are not necessarily the same thing.

We can preserve every acre of agricultural land in Ontario and still make it extremely difficult for a person without inherited property to become the one actually farming it.

That is the part of the conversation I think we are missing.

If the next generation cannot afford to purchase the land, then leasing, partnerships, succession agreements, vendor financing, and other ways of gaining secure access to farmland become increasingly important.

The alternative is a system where the people most able to begin farming are simply the people who already own agricultural assets.

That does not seem like much of an entry strategy.

Where is the requirement?

There is another part of this that we are now trying to understand.

We reviewed CFO’s current Artisanal Chicken Policy No. 268-2024.

It defines an Artisanal Chicken Farmer as an independent person growing a small number of artisanal chickens who has been issued an annual licence. It says a “qualified person” may apply, and it says the licence is issued in respect of the premises advanced in the farmer’s business proposition.

What we have not been able to find in that policy is an express statement that the applicant must own those premises or have their name on the land deed.

The policy does contemplate the premises. It does not expressly say the farmer must own them.

We therefore contacted the Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission and asked whether CFO had filed any direction, order, regulation, by-law, policy statement, or other document establishing the ownership requirement.

The Commission sent us Policy 268-2024.

We have gone back and asked whether there is any other filed document establishing the deed requirement.

Maybe there is.

If there is, we would genuinely like to read it and understand the reasoning behind it.

The ownership requirement itself is not entirely new. An older CFO Artisanal application from 2017 expressly stated that the lead applicant had to own the land.

What we are trying to understand is why that requirement exists, what current authority establishes it, and why secure long-term control through a lease cannot accomplish the same regulatory purpose.

We are not asking to avoid regulation

This is probably worth saying clearly.

We are not asking for free quota.

We are not asking CFO to ignore food safety, animal welfare, biosecurity, inspection requirements, or record keeping.

Those things matter.

What we are asking is why ownership of the underlying real estate is necessary to accomplish them.

If the concern is stability, require a sufficiently long lease.

If the concern is inspection access, require landlord consent.

If the concern is accountability, keep the licence and regulatory responsibility with the farmer.

If the concern is people renting or transferring licences, prohibit that directly.

If there are biosecurity requirements, inspect the premises and enforce them.

All of those seem like reasonable things to ask of us.

What is harder for me to understand is what the deed itself proves about our ability to responsibly raise chickens.

A farmer can sell an owned property.

A lease can run for ten years.

Ownership is certainly an easy administrative proxy for permanence, but an easy proxy is not necessarily the same thing as the right test.

So we asked for a hearing

We have now formally requested a hearing from Chicken Farmers of Ontario and asked the Board to reconsider the requirement as it applies to a legitimate long-term leased farming operation.

I hope it can be resolved there.

If it cannot, Ontario has an appeal process through the Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Appeal Tribunal.

I do not particularly want to spend our first years in agriculture arguing about administrative law.

I would much rather raise chickens.

But this question has become bigger for me than whether Lindisfarn gets to raise 3,000 birds next year.

Because the more I look at it, the more I wonder how many people never even get this far.

How many look at the price of farmland and decide farming is impossible?

How many would happily lease five acres, ten acres, or a barn from an older farmer but cannot find a regulatory path that recognizes them as legitimate?

How many potential succession arrangements disappear because our idea of a “real farmer” is still tied so closely to whose name appears on the deed?

If you did not inherit a farm

When I first posted about this, roughly 20,000 people saw the video.

The number surprised me.

The response interested me much more.

Farmers wrote to us. People trying to get into farming wrote to us. People whose parents farmed wrote to us. Retired farmers wrote to us.

Some disagreed with me. Many had suggestions. A surprising number had stories of their own.

But again and again, the conversation returned to the same question.

If you did not inherit a farm, how are you supposed to get in?

I still do not have a complete answer.

Maybe we eventually buy land. Maybe we find a retiring farmer interested in succession. Maybe someone has a few acres they are willing to sell on reasonable terms. Maybe the policy changes. Maybe the solution ends up being something we have not thought of yet.

We are still at the beginning of this ourselves.

But I am increasingly convinced of one thing.

If Ontario genuinely wants another generation of farmers, there has to be a path into farming that comes before land ownership.

There has to be room for the person leasing a few acres while working another job. For the person buying used equipment and learning as they go. For the person with a few hundred chickens and customers asking for more.

They may not own very much yet.

But they may already be farming.