Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
If you’ve ever contemplated walking away from the day job, selling your house, and jumping headfirst into farming, Renaud Gagné’s story will sound familiar.
Hitting 40 and looking down the barrel of the next 20 years, Renaud and his wife Anna-Marie took a hard look at where things were heading for their family of six, and decided to sell their house, and moved to an 80-acre property in Eastern Ontario to start a pastured chicken operation.
It’s the quintessential first-generation ag story: bootstrap the business, manage risk, learn as you go, and build a farm from the ground up. Gagné says they chose chicken production to start their farm, Lindisfarn, as a low-capital entry into food production. They chose to lease instead of buy land in order to focus what capital they do have in the business and not take on too much debt.
There’s just one problem: Because Renaud and Anna-Maria lease — not own — their land base, Chicken Farmers of Ontario says they are ineligible for the Artisanal Production Program, a program meant to be a means of entry into larger-scale chicken production for new producers.
For Renaud, leasing made responsible, risk-managed sense in order to get a farm business going. "Do I take on a huge amount of debt and risk that in order to bootstrap a farm, when a more responsible approach would be... I'm going to lease, reduce my cost, and build up this income so that eventually I can own a farm?"
But now, the lack of land ownership is preventing them from scaling up from up to 300 broilers per year to 3,000 birds per year outside the traditional quota system as allowed under the Artisanal License.
In an email to RealAgriculture, the Chicken Farmers of Ontario says, "Chicken Farmers of Ontario (CFO) requires that applicants must be the beneficial owner of lands and buildings suitable for the production of broiler chickens to be eligible for a CFO Artisanal Chicken licence."
However, in reviewing the policy documents available online no such requirement is listed under the artisanal section.
A follow up request for an interview was not answered.
For a program explicitly designed to act as an on-ramp for smaller-scale and entering producers, the land-ownership requirement feels like a door slammed shut on the very people it’s meant to help, says Gagné.
"It’s a chicken and egg problem," he says. "You have to have a farm in order to pay for the land, but now you need the land in order to build a farm."
What makes the roadblock frustrating is that other supply-managed sectors (such as dairy) have pathways allowing producers to lease facilities to get off the ground. Concerns around biosecurity, long-term premises control, and food safety are completely valid, but as Renaud notes, those can easily be satisfied through long-term lease agreements, site inspections, and standard auditing.
For now, Renaud and Anna-Maria are navigating the formal appeal process with CFO, and will present their case at an official hearing, hopefully before the application window closes for the upcoming season.
Website: realagriculture.com
#farming #food #agriculture #newfarmer
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If you’ve ever contemplated walking away from the day job, selling your house, and jumping headfirst into farming, Renaud Gagné’s story will sound familiar.
Hitting 40 and looking down the barrel of the next 20 years, Renaud and his wife Anna-Marie took a hard look at where things were heading for their family of six, and decided to sell their house, and moved to an 80-acre property in Eastern Ontario to start a pastured chicken operation.
It’s the quintessential first-generation ag story: bootstrap the business, manage risk, learn as you go, and build a farm from the ground up. Gagné says they chose chicken production to start their farm, Lindisfarn, as a low-capital entry into food production. They chose to lease instead of buy land in order to focus what capital they do have in the business and not take on too much debt.
There’s just one problem: Because Renaud and Anna-Maria lease — not own — their land base, Chicken Farmers of Ontario says they are ineligible for the Artisanal Production Program, a program meant to be a means of entry into larger-scale chicken production for new producers.
For Renaud, leasing made responsible, risk-managed sense in order to get a farm business going. "Do I take on a huge amount of debt and risk that in order to bootstrap a farm, when a more responsible approach would be... I'm going to lease, reduce my cost, and build up this income so that eventually I can own a farm?"
But now, the lack of land ownership is preventing them from scaling up from up to 300 broilers per year to 3,000 birds per year outside the traditional quota system as allowed under the Artisanal License.
In an email to RealAgriculture, the Chicken Farmers of Ontario says, "Chicken Farmers of Ontario (CFO) requires that applicants must be the beneficial owner of lands and buildings suitable for the production of broiler chickens to be eligible for a CFO Artisanal Chicken licence."
However, in reviewing the policy documents available online no such requirement is listed under the artisanal section.
A follow up request for an interview was not answered.
For a program explicitly designed to act as an on-ramp for smaller-scale and entering producers, the land-ownership requirement feels like a door slammed shut on the very people it’s meant to help, says Gagné.
"It’s a chicken and egg problem," he says. "You have to have a farm in order to pay for the land, but now you need the land in order to build a farm."
What makes the roadblock frustrating is that other supply-managed sectors (such as dairy) have pathways allowing producers to lease facilities to get off the ground. Concerns around biosecurity, long-term premises control, and food safety are completely valid, but as Renaud notes, those can easily be satisfied through long-term lease agreements, site inspections, and standard auditing.
For now, Renaud and Anna-Maria are navigating the formal appeal process with CFO, and will present their case at an official hearing, hopefully before the application window closes for the upcoming season.
Website: realagriculture.com
#farming #food #agriculture #newfarmer
Find us on our other social media platforms:
X/Twitter: twitter.com/realagriculture
Instagram: instagram.com/realagriculture
Facebook: facebook.com/realagmedia
