Our best ecological farmers are burning out and selling up. The answer is not a braver hero.
Over the past few years I have watched, with real sadness, some of the finest ecological farmers I know walk away from the land — or at least from the idea of making a living on it. They were extraordinarily good at a game that was built to consume them from the inside out.
The exit of our heroes
Tarrah Young and Nathan Carey built Green Being Farm into one of the places the rest of us pointed toward: diversified vegetables and livestock, a CSA, interns learning the craft, mentorship and business incubation. You can still watch them in To Make a Farm, a documentary that sold a hopeful vision of a new generation returning to small-scale ecological agriculture. What looks successful from the outside hides something underneath: twelve-hour days, Nathan juggling his full-time off-farm job while farming every hour that was left. When the first child was born, the farm had no slack. Eventually the couple stood before a bitter choice: farming or family? The baby boy did not create that choice; he simply revealed a structural skeleton that could be hidden away before. With Tarrah and Nathan, the movement lost a gifted educator and a charismatic leader.
A few weeks ago, Sideroad Farm, near Markdale, was posted for sale. Over fourteen years, Amy and Patrick built a mature local food operation: certified organic land, stacked enterprises including a CSA box program, farmer’s market stands and online orders, a flower business, a farm store with a café. All of that requires lots of infrastructure: greenhouses, irrigation, cold storage, a store building with a certified commercial kitchen. Any farmer would spend a decade to assemble this! And yet, the asking price for the farm is no more than the land and the house would fetch. Without the business. Fourteen seasons of building a thriving food hub, and the market pays nothing more than the value of the hard real estate. Experience, expertise, workflows, thousands of customers, the infrastructure — the market values none of that at a single dime. Nor does it compensate the owners for the hours away from their children, the strain on their marriage, the wear on their bodies.
These two stories are no exception. Many colleagues my age, in their early fifties, deal with arthritic hands and bent backs from over-exhausting themselves. The lucky ones keep a happy marriage. Many others barely see their partner all day, and fall into bed in a coma — too tired for intimacy, for dance, for whatever once connected them.
I can no longer un-see this pattern. Ecological farming has become quite good at caring for the soil. We have gathered real insight into rebuilding organic matter — feeding microbes, keeping living roots in the ground, trading control over nature for something more like orchestration. Meanwhile we have been far slower to notice how much we still extract from the farmers themselves: from our bodies, from our closest relationships. We regenerate the land while exhausting the people who do the work. A farm that leaves the soil healthier while it depletes its human operators regenerates part of the system by sacrificing the other. This is not regenerative!
Our movement may call this a succession crisis. Organizations reach for an obvious solution: find a worthy successor for the farm, keep it alive, pass the torch, help ease the financial burden of a purchase. I have come to think that instinct is wrong — the road to hell was always paved with good intentions.
I believe that we are misreading what actually fails. I have written before about the broken contract between eaters, growers, and the land; that is one part of it. And of course, the lack of food infrastructure and services (distribution, abattoirs, sheep shearers, etc.). But something else is failing us that is as old as the Tale of Gilgamesh: our bet on the hero who will lead us to salvation.
Still taling Gilgamesh
In Canada the ecological farming movement is perhaps fifty years old, and in that half-century we have built an entire aspirational culture around a single figure. Our organizations, our documentary films and our funders all circle the same person: the visionary owner-operator who works impossibly hard, innovates at night, scales up, teaches and coaches, and somehow carries the whole movement on their back. And every time that back gives out, we act surprised.
A farm built around a hero is a farm designed for a single point of failure. Any ordinary shake-up of human life — a baby, an illness, an aging back, a strained marriage, or simply the wish for a free Sunday — gnaws directly at the legs of our farmer hero. What we admire in these farmers, their sheer heroic effort, leaves their farms brittle. As farmers we are well trained in terms of production resilience: we diversify our crops and our enterprises, we spread our income. Yet as long as we still feel young, we rarely count our own bodies, our own possible collapse, as part of that resilience. And when life finally reveals to us that inevitable wall, we run ourselves into the ground, or neglect the people we love, or abandon the farm.
Today’s farmers are viciously independent. We distrust organizations and governments, and would rather rely on ourselves. Many of us started farming to prove that another agriculture is possible — one that protects biodiversity, regenerates soil and the water cycle, leans on minimal industrial inputs, and contributes to healing the climate. And we want to prove ourselves through the recognized symbols of success: scaling to a serious size, taking speaking gigs, appearing in films, writing a book, sitting on a nonprofit board. Success against the odds makes a story that moves people, draws customers, and lubricates the farmer’s strained bank account. This tale is pulling in a new generation, eager to repeat these supposed triumphs of deep sustainability. Yet it also replicates our heroic failure.
I know of one escape route, and exactly one farm near me has taken that path. Brent Preston and Gillian Flies first built The New Farm as a mid-scale wholesale operation, carried along by beneficiary concerts and book sales and celebrity chefs. When their kids showed no interest in taking over, the couple turned it into a philanthropic charity, a training centre that bridges food and culture and offers secure jobs with benefits and winter wages. The system works and is genuinely admirable — even enviable, whenever I think about our own winter income, wonder how to pay the dentist, or, God behold, dream of a vacation. But inadvertently, The New Farm holds up a mirror to our movement of where we are at – and not a map of where we should go: the centre runs on a proximity to wealth, builds on unlikely marketing skills and cultural capital that almost no other farm can reproduce. The lesson that The New Farm teaches: if you want to make a struggling farm financially sustainable, go find yourself celebrities and philanthropists. Hard work? Forget it.
My wife and I took a less ambitious route. Kristine grew up on a farm and learned as a child how farm ambition will devour a family until someone reins it in. The farmer will always have another idea, another enterprise, a bit more land, another market that would add real value. Yet a happy human needs other things too: time and energy. For children, for a partner, for community, for dance, for practice of mastery, for watching a snake devour one of our myriad of frogs, for gazing at the stars. There is a limit to what a human can do, and that limit depends enormously on the community that the person or business is embedded within, the infrastructure and securities that the community offers. The hero tales rarely mention these supporting pillars — the wife who tends the children while the husband pulls an all-nighter in the shop or writing a book; the friend who opens a door to wealthy supporters or a television feature.
As new immigrants, our own pillars were few. So we kept the farm deliberately small and reined in our ambition, especially once our children were born. We poured real effort into building collective infrastructure — quite successfully, until the post-COVID slump dissolved it again. At home, we are proud that our soil can absorb and hold five inches of rain without a sign of erosion, and that we have counted half a dozen snake species and more than fifteen amphibian species in our field. Just last week a customer sent us a photo of a little tree frog hiding in her lettuce (she released it then). We have proven to ourselves that we can heal the land and improve production at the same time — no small feat in our more-than-human predicament and agriculture’s strong role in it. But by society’s markers of success — scale, reach, income — we remain modest.
Kristine, especially, has gotten good at saying no. But it would be a pretense to call our smallness a systemic answer. It is really just another maladaptation to a broken system. Staying small protects us farmers for now, and leaves a little room to care for ourselves and our relationships. It does not give us financial freedom today, nor does it enable us to save for the day our bodies can no longer work. Restraint keeps us small heroes from destroying ourselves — but it builds nothing that will outlast us.
Our movement, and the people who cheer it on, still love the hero story — even expect it. When we once told a customer that we stop work early on the hottest days to protect our health, her disappointment was unmistakable. We love the lone couple standing against the industrial food system. We love the image of the tired, beautiful farmer lifting their kids up onto the tractor to finish the job after dark. Witnessing dedicated idealistic struggle moves us. And it is quietly killing the very people we hold up as proof that another world is possible. Every time we put a young new farmer on a magazine cover, we put another person into an old role — knowing full well that the role’s casualty rate is almost total.
What we need is not a better hero — not one who is braver, sharper, more idealistic yet more focused, and more able to endure. We need a different kind of story altogether. Not another hero’s tale, but a story about community.
Another tale altogether
One province east, in Quebec, a farm has been living a community story for twenty years. Ferme Coopérative Tourne-Sol, near Montreal, began in 2004, when five young farmers met through collective training (the CRAFT internship network, since folded). Their decision to work together ought to be famous: instead of each running a separate heroic operation, they would run one farm together, as a worker cooperative. Today, roughly a dozen worker-members grow organic vegetables and seed on land they partly own and partly lease, and feed hundreds of families. On Friday afternoons they stop work early to eat together — a detail that sounds trivial to city ears and like miracle in the ears of another farmer.
Let’s briefly examine the structure these members choose to submit themselves to. They discuss all big decisions, vote on options, and then they surrender themselves to the majority. To join, a person buys a modest share, which is returned to them when leaving. So anyone can become part of the coop and depart again without breaking the farm organism. Labour is spread across enough people such that a family emergency — a new baby, an injury, a separation or death — can be absorbed by the others. And because the founders deliberately built the cooperative to outlive them, succession is not a cliff anyone has to walk off; the structures are already laid out to ease changes that, at a personal level, remain hard. And that is the whole point of the arrangement: Tourne-Sol farm is not held up by any single person.
The design is reflected by the cooperative’s enterprises. Alongside the vegetables, Tourne-Sol grows and sells seed — bred to its own ground, sold retail and wholesale. Its members run workshops, teach, and have written more than a dozen books between them. Compare that with the Sideroad listing: what a contrast. The owner-operated farm can do little but sell off. The coop keeps making more of what it has and is handing it on.
What is the role of our farm organizations?
This brings me to our farm organizations that were conceived to help young farmers and connect them with farmland. This is when I grow uneasy. As more and more farms come up for sale, our land trusts and farm organizations are facing a wave of Sideroad Farms. And the reflex I see worries me: to broker a transaction, to sell the farm on to another farmer. Even when land trusts can bring the price down (somewhat) by protecting some acres with easements, the deeper problems remain untouched: our food system was designed against local food, and our culture lifts ecological farmers up as superheroes and then watches them destroy themselves. Even with an easement, farmland prices still sit far above anything the land can actually earn (compare . That may save the farmland from a subdivision for now, but it builds neither a robust farm enterprise nor a healthy farmer. One more heroic young couple might carry the million dollars of debt for a while — until their family’s needs force them into retreat. And then what, exactly, have we solved?
Cooperative farming requires learnable skills
Cooperation is not a disposition you are simply born with or without. It is a set of skills — skills that can be learned, embodied, and practiced. Most of us know the obvious ones by now: non-violent language that separates a need from an attack, consensus-oriented decision-making, facilitation that makes room for the thoughtful but quiet person in the room, the discipline of deep listening. Above those sit the design skills — ownership and enterprise structures, decision processes, community agreements.
Beyond these mechanical and legal skills lies the deeper embodiment of cooperation, the part most of us never developed, or had actively drilled out of us in our competitive upbringing. A work bee — a dozen neighbours repairing a barn or filling a root cellar in an afternoon — teaches a joyful respect for people we may not agree with politically. I felt something powerful of this kind recently, in a Brazilian circle dance that uses body percussion and song. Here a group co-creates music and movement at the same time. The form is designed, quite explicitly, to ease our competitive reflexes and shame, and replace them with embodied synchrony and joy. That joy in each other’s differences — whether a person is racialized, queer, neurodiverse, or simply less quick and half-taken-in by some Fox News conspiracy — has to come before the tribal urge to draw a protective line around our own and defend our identity. To embody cooperation, we need continuous exposure and practice; our nervous systems need far more than a single afternoon’s course. We thrive on daily reminders and steady repetition.
The first step is to name and accept the competitive confusion we absorbed while growing up. For the most part, Western schooling and work life has trained cooperation out of us — with same-aged cohorts ranked with grades, leadership awards, an economy that rewards elbowing past each other, a culture that glorifies to the self-made man, and through students and customers who are drawn to teachers who project mastery rather than admit that they, too, are still learning. But what was trained out can be trained back in – cooperation is a skill that grows with methodological practice.
Experienced cooperatives remind us over and over: that re-training collaboration skills is a core reason they prevail, much more than the exposure to stressors. To shift a farming culture from heroic to collaborative, farm organizations should be teaching these explicitly. This starts with self care – yoga, smart lifting, ergonomic workplace design. Then methods for group decision making, non-violent language, and creating safe spaces where everyone feels at ease – racialized and queer people but also the less educated folks who have been influenced by Fox News. Going deeper, embodiment skills connect us nonverbally and build trust without invoking rational thought: partner dance, square or circle dance, work-bee. If we want a movement that can own land together, decide together and weather storms together, we will first have to relearn how to trust each other.
When the Elves left Middle-earth in the Lord of the Rings, it was palpable how an age was ending. Since farmland prices have skyrocketed, I feel something similar happened in farming: Our heroes are leaving us one by one. And we have lost the ability to become heroes ourselves: buying farmland is no longer financially viable, at least not with farming income. Europeans have lived in this new age for decades, relying on community mechanisms to acquire farmland that is out of reach for individuals. In Canada, this new age is still unfamiliar to us: aspiring farmers and farm organizations are only slowly living up to this seismic shift that just happened. This shift changed our farming context: how we own land and how we pay for it, how we safe for retirement if land and real estate appreciation no longer is bankable, how our individual self relates to the commons, and how we orient our egos and identities. An age has ended, and we are only waking up to a new reality!
I have come to welcome the end of the Age of Heroes as a blessing. Let us not go hunting for tougher, more charismatic people to replace them. Let us admit instead that we should never have needed heroes in the first place — and start building and celebrating a new farming culture. Let us love ourselves and each other as much as we love nature and soil, because we all deserve it.
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