EVENT RECAP: Virtual Business Support Session

Thank you to everyone who joined in with such awesome questions and discussion and to Nyree Marsh, the BBA Agricultural Specialist, for co-hosting! Below you’ll find a few of the questions and helpful resources we discussed in the session and a few more that came to mind after that we just wanted to share!

I’m a new farmer, can you please share a business plan template that we can start populating?

In addition to these links, Young Agrarians has a whole page dedicated to business tools for new farmers on the YA Business Tools directory. Futupreneur offers from Cash flow templates. Kwantlen Polytechnic University has also produced some great enterprise (or cost of production) templates for common crops. If you’d like to explore some software tools for digital recording keeping, this list is a great place to start.

Young Agrarians offers 2-5 hours of free business plan support and access to templates tailored for new farmers and land seekers participating in the BC Land Matching Program. Community Futures also offers some templates and business planning support, workshops and programs.

If you’re within the Columbia Basin region, through the Basin Business Advisors Program (BBA), Nyree supports and inspires entrepreneurship and builds economic capacity in Basin agricultural communities by strengthening and supporting existing businesses and agriculture producers. BBA provides free, one-to-one, confidential business advisement and assessment services to commercialized businesses.

I am struggling to buy a small piece of land to start working with. How can Young Agrarians help me in this aspect? The land prices are very high and unaffordable.

We hear you! If you’re not in the position to buy land, Young Agrarians offers land matching support in BC through the BC Land Matching Program and in Alberta. This free support to land seeking farmers helps to find land for farming and negotiating sharing agreements, like leases, that don’t require purchasing the land.

YA also produced a BC Transition Toolkit for Non-Family Farm Transfer, which holds a lot of helpful information about creative ways to transition land from one landholder to another.

When leasing land, what is the average cost per acre? I know it varies a lot due to all the possible variations that lease contracts might have, but what would a middle ground number be? If I as a landholder I can provide the equipment and infrastructure to the farms I lease land to, would that allow me to lease my land for a higher price?

Per acre lease rates will vary depending on multiple factors, including but limited to production type, state of the cultivable area, location, demand/supply of land locally, infrastructure and tools available, soil quality, production needs… the list goes on!

Furthermore, landholders interested in leasing their land are interested in different things in exchange, which could look like a yearly dollar amount per acre or even a box of veggies every week in exchange. If you’re curious about leasing land, get in touch with the land matching team at land@youngagrarians.org.

Buying land is something I am looking to get into with partners; to be able to achieve such a goal do you have any pointers for me? Is there a forum or a sharing web-space where I can connect with possible partners for purchasing farmland as a coop or partnership incentive?

Young Agrarians started a group for collaborative farming and community connections on Facebook. For more info on co-ops you can also check out Cooperatives First, Agricultural Cooperatives: a Start-Up Guide and the BC Co-op Association website.

THANK YOU!

The Columbia Basin event series is made possible with funding from Columbia Basin Trust.