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Alberta

High costs putting farming out of reach for young people, affecting all Canadians

Published

2 years ago

7 minute read

MONTREAL — When Myriam Landry started raising goats for their meat in 2018, she started small — because she had to.

She opened Chèvrerie aux Volets Verts, in St-Esprit, Que., with two goats; she couldn’t afford a large herd and chose animals small enough that she could handle on her own while pregnant with her third child.

“I should have started bigger … but then I would have needed more money, which I didn’t have,” Landry, 33, said in a recent interview from her farm 50 kilometres north of Montreal. 

“It’s really hard for young people to start … I don’t even have land, I don’t have tractors, even my goats (I paid for) on loans.”

The rising cost of land is making it harder than ever for young farmers to enter the business. And those barriers come at a time when a growing number of older farmers are planning to leave the industry. Organizations promoting farm succession worry that if young people are unable to enter the industry, only the largest companies will endure, reducing the diversity of crops and livestock and widening the gap between Canadians and their sources of food.

“The main challenge right now is really the cost of agricultural land,” said Benoît Curé, co-ordinator of ARTERRE, a program that pairs aspiring farmers with landowners and farmers planning to retire.

Curé said multiple factors are contributing to rising prices, including real estate speculation — especially near Montreal suburbs — and strong competition for the best soil in a province where only around two per cent of the land is suitable for farming.

Last year, the price of agricultural land rose by 10 per cent, which isn’t unusual, he said in a recent interview. “Over the last 10 years, we’ve had annual increases of about six to 10 per cent.” The average dairy farm in Quebec is now valued at almost $5 million, he said, almost double what it was in 2011. 

With 20 per cent down payments usually expected for farm purchases, “you have to almost be a millionaire before starting your agricultural business,” Curé said. If young people can’t afford to get into farming, then most rural communities risk being left with two or three large farms, he lamented.

Landry, like more than half of the aspiring farmers who have worked with ARTERRE, is renting her space. Her small operation is located on a former dairy farm that’s now used for hay and cereal crops. Her farm has now grown to 40 female goats and a handful of males for breeding. There’s enough space in her barn for 60 females, she said, but she has enough demand to support 100. 

And while starting small has allowed her to open a farm, it has also come with its own challenges. Goat meat, she said, is uncommon in Quebec, and financial institutions are hesitant to lend to money for an operation they aren’t familiar with. 

Lenders, she said, “don’t want to finance it, because they don’t know it, and that makes it really hard.”

Farming has always been a capital-intensive industry — with high costs for land, equipment and inputs — but prices across Canada have risen above the revenue that can be generated from that land, said Jean-Philippe Gervais, the chief economist of Farm Credit Canada, a Crown corporation that lends to farmers.

“The relationship between the price of the land and the revenue that can be expected from the land — that ratio is the highest we’ve ever seen,” Gervais said in a recent interview. “So we’re really at prices that are the highest we’ve ever seen, not just in absolute value in dollars per hectare, but also relative to what can be generated in income.”

It’s now rare for farmers to turn a profit from land they buy just by farming it, he said, adding that most farmers only make their money back when they sell. Large, established farms can fund the purchase of more land from the revenue generated on land that’s already been paid for, he added.

But even large farms are challenged by high costs. A survey of more than 3,600 farmers released last month by Quebec’s farmers association found that 11 per cent are thinking about closing over the coming year. The Union des producteurs agricoles found that costs on Quebec farms rose by an average of 17.3 per cent in 2022 while revenues rose by an average of 14.7 per cent.

A report released in early April by RBC found that 40 per cent of Canadian farm operators planned to retire over the next decade and that 66 per cent didn’t have a succession plan. 

Julie Bissonnette, the president of an organization that represents young Quebec farmers and promotes farm succession, says there are many young people interested in agriculture.

“Sometimes you hear there’s no one to take over, but it’s not true, there are a lot, but we need to make sure they’re able to set up,” Bissonnette, with the Fédération de la relève agricole du Québec, said in a recent interview. “It’s so much money.”

Urban sprawl and the influx of people moving to rural areas to work remotely is putting increased pressure on Quebec’s arable land, Bissonnette said.

Landry, meanwhile, said she’d like to see more small-time farmers because they tend to build close relationships with local residents. 

“We need to reconnect the public to what they do three times a day, which is eat,” she said. “Know where your food is coming from. If you can’t grow it yourself, find someone who does it the way you would do it.” 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 7, 2023. 

Jacob Serebrin, The Canadian Press

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Alberta

Sylvan Lake high school football coach fired for criticizing gender ideology sends legal letter to school board

Published on September 18, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The letter on behalf of Alberta high school volunteer football coach Taylor ‘Teej’ Johannesson mentions ‘workplace harassment’ while demanding his job back.

A Sylvan Lake high school football coach who was fired for sharing his views opposing transgender ideology on social media in a video discussing his Christian faith sent a legal demand to his former school board demanding he get his job back.

H.J. Cody High School volunteer coach Taylor “Teej” Johannesson, as reported by LifeSiteNews, earlier this month was fired by his school’s principal because he spoke out against gender-confused youth who “take their hatred of Christians” to another level by committing violent acts against them.

School principal Alex Lambert fired Teej, as he is known, as a result of a TikTok video in which he speaks out against radical gender ideology and the dangers it brings.

In a recent update involving his case, local media with knowledge of Johannesson’s issues with the principal at H.J. Cody High School in Sylvan Lake, Alberta, confirmed a legal demand letter was sent to the school.

The letter reads, “From his perspective, this opposition is consistent with the Alberta government’s position and legislation prohibiting prescribing prescription hormones to minors and providing care to them that involves transition surgeries.”

In the letter, the school board’s “workplace harassment” procedure is mentioned, stating, “Any act of workplace harassment or workplace violence shall be considered unacceptable conduct whether that conduct occurs at work, on Division grounds, or at division-sponsored activities.”

The legal demand letter, which was sent to school officials last week, reads, “Given that Mr. Johannesson’s expression in the TikTok Video was not connected to his volunteer work, the principal and the division have no authority to regulate his speech and punish him by the Termination decision, which is ultra vires (“beyond the powers.)”

Johannesson has said, in speaking with local media, that his being back at work at the school as a volunteer coach has meaning: “It’s about trying to create some change within the school system.”

He noted how, for “too long,” a certain “political view, one ideology, has taken hold in the school system.”

Johannesson has contacted Alberta’s Chief of Staff for the Minister of Education about his firing and was told that there is a board meeting taking place over the demand letter.

According to Teej, Lambert used his TikTok video as an excuse to get rid of someone in the school with conservative political views and who is against her goal to place “safe space stickers” all over the school.

Teej has been in trouble before with the school administration. About three years ago, he was called in to see school officials for posting on Twitter a biological fact that “Boys have a penis. Girls have a vagina.”

Alberta’s Conservative government under Premier Danielle Smith has in place a new policy protecting female athletes from gender-confused men that has taken effect across the province.

As LifeSiteNews previously reported, the Government of Alberta is currently fighting a court order that is blocking the province’s newly passed ban on transgender surgeries and drugs for children.

Alberta also plans to ban books with sexually explicit as well as pornographic material, many of which contain LGBT and even pedophilic content, from all school libraries.

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Alberta

Parents group blasts Alberta government for weakening sexually explicit school book ban

Published on September 17, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

The revised rules no longer place restrictions on written descriptions of sexual content.

Some parental rights advocates have taken issue with the Conservative government of Alberta’s recent updates to a ban on sexually explicit as well as pornographic material from all school libraries, saying the new rules water down the old ones as they now allow for descriptions of extreme and graphic sexual acts in written form.

As reported by LifeSiteNews last week, Alberta Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides of the ruling United Conservative Party (UCP) released revised rules outlining the province’s ban on sexually explicit content in school libraries.

The original ban included all forms of sexually explicit as well as pornographic material. However, after a large public school board alleged the ban applied to classic books, the government changed the rules, removing a clause for written sexual content that has some parental rights groups up in arms.

Tanya Gaw, founder of the conservative-leaning Action4Canada, noted to media that while she is happy with Premier Danielle Smith for the original book ban, she has deep concerns with the revised rules.

“We are very concerned about the decision that no longer places restrictions on written descriptions of those acts, which is problematic,” she said in an interview with The Epoch Times.

Gaw noted how kids from kindergarten to grade 12 should “never” be “exposed to graphic written details of sex acts: incest, molestation, masturbation, sexual assaults, and profane vulgar language.”

According to John Hilton-O’Brien, who serves as the executive director of Parents for Choice in Education, the new rule changes regarding written depictions “still shifts the burden onto parents to clean up what should never have been purchased in the first place.”

He did say, however, that the new “Ministerial Order finally makes catalogs public, and what we see there is troubling.”

Alberta’s revised rules state that all school library books must not contain “explicit visual depictions of a sexual act.” To make it clear, the standards in detail go over the types of images that are banned due to their explicit pornographic nature.

As reported by LifeSiteNews in May, Smith’s UCP government went ahead with plans to ban books with sexually explicit as well as pornographic material, many of which contain LGBT and even pedophilic content, from all school libraries.

The ban was to take effect on October 1.

The UCP’s crackdown on sexual content in school libraries comes after several severely sexually explicit graphic novels were found in school libraries in Calgary and Edmonton.

The pro-LGBT books in question at multiple school locations are Gender Queer, a graphic novel by Maia Kobabe; Flamer, a graphic novel by Mike Curato; Blankets, a graphic novel by Craig Thompson; and Fun Home, a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel.

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