By Melisa Luymes

In 2019, Ronaldo (Rony) Lec and Myriam Legault moved from Guatemala to Ontario with their two young daughters. All they knew was that they needed to farm. While there is plenty of farmland in the province, gaining access to it is another story. 
Rony is a permaculture farmer and teacher born in Guatemala. He studied anthropology in the U.S. and returned home to put Mayan agricultural techniques into practice on a piece of land near Lake Atitlán, in Southern Guatemala.  With much of the country’s land owned by just a few families and used for export crops, palm oil production, mining, or for developing resorts near the lake, all he could access was an area that was prone to flooding. But for Rony, it was the perfect place to build a system of canals and raised beds, creating a farm that was self-sustaining, diverse and interconnected. Rony traveled the world connecting with other farmers, learning permaculture and other agro-ecological techniques, founding the Instituto Mesoamericano de Permacultura (IMAP) in 1996 and training people near and far in ecological farming.
Myriam was born and raised on the outskirts of Sudbury and set out for Guatemala in 2010. A friend had recommended she study at IMAP after Myriam had developed a love for ecological agriculture in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia. 
As love would have it, she stayed for eight years. 
She worked with IMAP and she and Rony had two children before they decided they needed to leave Guatemala. A changing climate has meant disease and water quality concerns for the area, and corruption can make it a dangerous place to raise a family. So, they researched ecological farming in Canada and decided to head for the Guelph area. They immediately found a like-minded community and stayed there for a few months before moving up to Grey County. Myriam worked at a Durham-area school and Rony worked with local ecological farms. Still, they dreamed of having their own farm someday.
That someday came quickly. At just the time they were looking for land, Amy Stein was looking for ecological farmers to join her in a co-ownership model. 
Amy Stein now homesteads near Durham, but in a previous life she spent a few years as a Toronto-based investment banker. With an MBA from Wharton, she has a keen sense of numbers but also a passion for community and the environment. She later worked for non-profits and was instrumental in establishing Toronto’s Evergreen Brick Works, which converted an abandoned brick-making factory in the Don Valley to a sustainable LEED-certified public space for local food, art, and community events. 
Eventually, upon returning from two years in rural France, she and her husband Michael bought an old farm in 2014, restoring and expanding the old farmhouse and building a new barn and shed, fencing for livestock, a small greenhouse, and a sprawling vegetable garden. With their daughters gone off to university, the couple moved there full-time in 2019. After Michael sold the shares in his business, they had a sizeable amount of money to invest and when an opportunity to help a friend access land came up, they realized how they wanted to invest the money to make a positive impact.
As farmers know, buying land is a pretty safe bet for appreciation, but Amy also wanted to support ecological farmers in a more meaningful way. She worked with a lawyer to develop a co-ownership model that would allow farmers on the properties to have security and the ability to build equity, without a big down payment or high interest costs. 
Simply put, the agreement is a limited partnership (LP), in which the farmers gradually increase their ownership percentage, either by directly buying out Amy and Michael’s units (shares) or through capital investments in the property. The LP has nothing to do with the farming, only with the real estate, and it signs a 20-year renewable lease with the farmer-partners (because a land lease of more than 20 years in Ontario is deemed to be a disposition). In effect, this is like a rent-to-own agreement at a pace that farmers can afford, and if they want to leave the partnership, they can sell their units to an incoming farmer or back to Amy and Michael.
Though simply renting to farmers might have been “easier”, Amy says she resists being a landlord (or offering private mortgages) because structurally, it puts the two parties’ interests at odds with each other.  “Through co-ownership, the farmers and I have a much better chance of our interests aligning, and maintaining a good relationship,” she says. In this model, Amy approves the high-level operating plan, but after that it is basically hands-off the business side of things. 
Amy says another option would have been to form a non-profit organization to hold the land title, but then the farmers would not be able to co-own the property. “The goal is to put these farmers on equal footing as others who have lucked into owning land,” she says, meaning those who have inherited a farm or been able to buy one without a big mortgage. “That still leaves them with all the same annual costs, and tough spending decisions on infrastructure upgrades,” she adds. 
By now you’re probably wondering where the catch is. For Amy, investing isn’t about a monetary return, but about creating a different kind of value, for community, local food, and for the environment. Like many of us, she doesn’t like to see old buildings, trees and fencerows taken out for large swaths of cash crops; she prefers to see the natural areas preserved and the properties used by farming families. 
“This is all about trust and generosity,” says Amy, “and kindness.” To her, generosity is not just about money, but it is a spirit that people can either align with, or not. She had completed two agreements and was looking for partners for a third property when she met Rony and Myriam; it was the perfect fit. “We just trusted her,” they said, and jumped at the opportunity of co-ownership. 
From then, it all moved fast. Rony and Myriam went to look at farms with Amy and they fell in love with the second one they saw. It was a brick farmhouse and bank barn, south of Desboro with 100 acres, over half of which is forest and wetlands that are now protected by a conservation agreement with the Escarpment Biosphere Conservancy. The rest of the farm is managed in line with an ecological agreement that was written by Rony and Myriam themselves. 
They moved onto the property May 2021, and have already done improvements to the barn and installed fence infrastructure to do rotational grazing of their Corriedale sheep, supported with cost-share funding from the On-Farm Climate Action Fund (OFCAF). They used permaculture no-till mulching techniques to create raised beds, growing corn, beans, and squash together according to Indigenous farming techniques and many other vegetables for seed production. 
Rony and Myriam named the farm Luna Mia, after their daughters’ names, and Spanish for “my moon.” They homeschool and often have global volunteers working there with them; their household is a beautiful mix of Spanish, French, English and Kakchiquel, Rony’s first language. They remain rooted in Central America, working with Central American plants such as amaranth here in Ontario, which was the focus of a series of seed trials in partnership with the Ecological Farmers of Ontario. They now offer organically produced seeds, fiber products, permaculture workshops, and farm tours. 
With land prices as they are currently, I think it safe to say that if Rony and Myriam had not met Amy, Luna Mia Farm would not exist today.  
Farmland access is a growing concern in Ontario, but also around the world. It is a question that Richard Bloomfield is taking a serious look into. A graduate of Ivey Business School, and raised on a farm himself, he started an urban farm and social enterprise in London and is now working on a PhD at University of Western Ontario examining farmland ownership, planning and policy, as well as ways that new farmers can access farmland. 
Ontario’s farmland is the most expensive in Canada and prices rose quickly, around 20 per  cent a year in 2021 and 2022, slowing to only 11 per cent last year, according to Farm Credit Canada.  While this is great news for those that bought land a while back, this is now a huge barrier to entry for new farmers. Essentially, farmland can only be purchased by those that already have substantial farmland equity, or by wealthy investors. 
And while farm receipts have also increased over the years, it just isn’t keeping up with the price of land, says Richard. While Ontario’s farmland values rose over farm income in 1988, they stayed relatively on par through the 90s, according to Statistics Canada. Farmland prices started to really outpace cash receipts in 2001 and, since then, cash receipts have roughly doubled while farmland values more than quadrupled.  
All this leads to consolidation, with larger farms but less farmers. Between 1996 and 2021, Canada lost 121,000 farm operators – that is 32 per cent. And while 20 per cent of farmers were under 35 years old in 1996, it was half that in 2021, for a total decline of 66 per cent of Canada’s young farmers. 
While many argue that there are some benefits to efficiency at a larger scale, Richard believes that economic efficiency is too narrow of a view. There are also risks when things get too big, not only for the environment or health, but for the economic diversity and resilience of rural communities, connection to the land and for farming know-how. Richard suggests federal, provincial and municipal policy recommendations that could support new farmers, such as CRA tax breaks for those selling land to new farmers, allowing smaller severances and on-farm diversification, or reconsidering land use around urban growth boundaries. 
Both Richard and Amy envision a future in which there are more farmers, not less. 
But farmland prices aren’t the only barrier to farming. And perhaps Amy knows that better than anyone, because she has walked alongside several prospective farmers with her offer of co-ownership. At the outset, she says, all some people could see was the one obstacle of the farmland price, but once she removed that obstacle for them, then they started to see all the other issues and got cold feet. Whether it was because they didn’t trust the viability of their business plan, saw the volatility of the market, or changed their mind about the low-earning, physically demanding work, Amy has spent time working with several farmers that have backed out of the opportunity. 
Now a few years into co-ownership, Amy, Rony and Myriam still believe they made a good decision. While Amy believes agreements are important, she prioritizes relationship and alignment on ecological farming. “At best, legal agreements protect financial interests, but they don’t protect you from the emotional wear and tear of a relationship gone sour,” she adds. While she set up the agreement in such a way as to preserve a good relationship between all parties, it still requires their (voluntary) time and work. She meets with farmer partners a few times a year to discuss financial updates, but the rest of the time they connect just because they like each other’s company, and to keep building their friendship. 
And Amy isn’t done. She is currently working with a fourth property near Dornoch which aims to have several families living side by side in a village setting on a larger acreage, called Neighbourly Farm. Land access may always be an issue when it comes to farming, but there is something to be learned from Amy, Richard, Rony and Myriam. Through out-of-the-box thinking and hard work, surprising solutions can emerge, taking root here in our own community. ◊