For the month of February, Metro’s Workology section will be focusing on some delicious food-related careers. Check back every Wednesday for a new feature.

Canadian farming is heading for a disaster as fewer and fewer farming children continue the family business.

“In the next ten years, about 80 per cent of the agricultural assets in the country are going to be transferred,” says Christie Young, director of Ontario’s Farm Start. “We’re going to have a massive crisis in the agricultural sector because we don’t have the infrastructure set up to get people into farming.”

Conversely, that means it’s a great time to get into farming. Farm Start, a Guelph, Ont.-based organization, helps people from non-farming backgrounds get into the industry. Some come with university degrees in agriculture and others are second-career farmers.

Farm Start begins with a four-day explorer course. “It’s a time for people to think really critically about whether this is the right career for them and what it means to be a farmer,” Young says.

People are drawn to the physical, meaningful work and are often passionate about raising livestock. They want to be their own boss and enjoy the diverse daily tasks.

“They have to be self-motivated,” she says. “You can’t just focus on one piece of the puzzle if you want to be a farmer. You have to think about your growing system as part of a bigger eco-system, your business model as part of a much bigger food system.”

The best way to learn is to do, she says, so Farm Start helps organize farming internships and runs an incubator farm. Courses in business-planning, crop planning and soil-health management round out the training.

Norbert Kungl runs the organic vegetable farm Selwood Green on the shores of Nova Scotia’s Minas Basin. He’s from a farming area of central Germany, but his family did not farm. He studied agriculture before moving to Canada and working on a farm for four years. In 1987, he started his own farm.

“I’m an entrepreneurial person who needs to do his own thing,” he explains. He loves being his own boss on a large piece of land where he lives and works. He sells his produce at farmers’ markets around Nova Scotia, including the Halifax Farmers’ Market.

Like Young, he recommends non-farmers do an apprenticeship. “If you come from a farm, go out into the world and work on a variety of other farms or even other jobs to really know this is what you want to do,” he says.