Exploring Your Farm Dream is designed for anyone thinking about starting a farm venture – whether your goal is to run a profitable farm as your primary livelihood, develop a farm-based side business alongside off-farm work, or grow food as a collaborative community project.  Inspired by a course run by the New England Small Farm Institute (NESFI) and then by FarmStart here in Ontario, this program helps aspiring farmers explore what it takes to start and manage their own farm dream, imagine what it could look like in practice, and identify the key questions they still need to answer.

Course participants will be guided by two skilled facilitators and Ontario farmers over four two-hour sessions, to set personal and farm goals, assess available resources, determine what type of farm business is a good fit, and develop an action plan to guide their next steps. They will end the course with a farm business backgrounder document that they can use to guide their next steps. 

Each participant that completes the course and the farm business backgrounder will receive free access to all 2026 EFAO summer programming, including any webinars and field days. They will also be connected with a farmer in their region for a one-hour conversation or visit.

If you are a farmer or aspiring farmer living in Northern Ontario, please use code farm26dream to register for free!

Course Outline:

March 24: Introduction, Visioning & Goal-setting

March 30: Markets & Enterprises

April 7: Finances & Resources

April 14: Putting It All together

About the course facilitators:

Rav Singh supports the coordination of the BIPOC Farmers Network and winter education programming at EFAO. She is a young farmer and runs Shade of Miti, an ecological farm that specializes in growing South Asian vegetables. Rav studied Environmental Science at the University of Guelph, and worked as an environmental educator before becoming a farmer in 2021. She centers advocacy, youth engagement, climate action and food sovereignty in her work on and off the field. Outside of EFAO, you can find Rav reading, hiking or sketching.

Angie Koch‘s passion for vegetable production is rivalled only by her passion for spreadsheets and profitability analyses – a point of both pride and discomfort. She is excited by the potential to better understand the factors that contribute to farm viability and financial resilience. Angie also keeps her fingers in the world of seeds, coordinating Seeds of Diversity’s Seed Library and hosting EFAO’s Seed Demonstration Garden at her farm Fertile Ground.

This webinar is supported by funding from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Northern Ontario.