Alberta Land Access Guide

Feature image above: Photo Credit: Kevin Kossowan // Location: Lady’s Hat Farm, Castor, AB

The Young Agrarians team and our contributors have been working hard at creating the first edition of the Alberta Land Access Guide. It’s a toolkit for new farmers like YOU.

It’s a collection of stories of wins, losses, and everything in-between. We hope you can use these experiences to guide you through this big, rather intimidating step in your career path as a regenerative farmer. (Don’t worry, we’re here to walk you through it, step-by-step). For land seekers, it will give you ideas to explore when you are looking for land. For land holders, it will give you context around what new farmers are looking for.

The Alberta Land Access Guide is a one-of-a-kind guide that can help you envision the future farm that you want to create.

What you can find in the guide:

• Leasing land: benefits, options, and reviewing your terms of agreement, and more
• Purchasing land: strategies for building equity and more
• Resources for finding farmland
• Attributes to consider when assessing potential land opportunities
• Tips for designing your own business plan
• The many types of farm businesses, broken down. (Think: sole proprietor, partnership, corporation, cooperative, etc.)
• Community farms and land sharing
• Case study examples

Best of all, it’s FREE. We believe in breaking down the barriers to ecological, organic and regenerative farming. Get your copy of the Alberta Land Access Guide here. (We’re not even going to make you sign up for a newsletter or anything, but you can here if you’d like.)

Acknowledgements:

Thank you to all of the farmers, organizations, collaborators and funders who participated in the development of this guide. Thank you to Blake and Ang Hall, Eric and Ruby Chen, Jianyi Dong, Moira Watson, Jodi Van Nistlerooy, Melanie Villeneuve and Thomas Fournier, Kye Kocher, and Jenna and Brett Hauck for sharing your insights, stories, and the heartful and sometimes hard learnings from your journeys into organic, regenerative and ecological farming. Thanks to Byron L. Whitford of Torry Lewis Abells Lawyers LLP and Chireen Chick of KBH Chartered Professional Accountants for reviewing this document. 

This guide has been adapted to the Alberta context in partnership with Organic Alberta and with financial support from the Alberta Real Estate Foundation.

Young Agrarians recognizes the unresolved Indigenous land title and rights in the diverse territories in what is today called Canada. As we live and work in the context of and in response to a colonial system of laws and policies, it is important to acknowledge the historical and ongoing impact of agriculture and land enclosure on Indigenous lands and food systems. In this context, we acknowledge our collective responsibility to position Indigenous Peoples and their experiences with colonization in mind, working towards a narrative of reconciliation that places ecology, land stewardship, and Indigenous land title and rights at the forefront – if we are to sustain the Earth’s ecosystems in today’s rapidly changing climate.

Our deepest hope is that the future of our food systems is diverse, interconnected, and resilient, embraces people of all walks of life and sustains the water, plants, and creatures in ways that benefit and work alongside Indigenous Peoples and narratives and ways of knowing and caring for the land.

The farms mentioned in these stories, like many others, are surrounded by agricultural cultivated land, uncultivated land, Indigenous people and voices from non-settler walks of life. We encourage everyone to build relationship with the land and community that surrounds the place where you will be learning.