Yukon Agricultural Association: Fill & Download for Free

It might surprise you how far north you can grow food.There is the Yukon Agricultural Association and the Northern Farm Training Institute, to account for two of our territories. There are also many greenhouses operating in Nunavut, where much of the landmass definitely falls into arctic tundra territory.I would argue that it is technically possible to grow enough food as long as you’re sub-arctic. The limiting factors are how much space you can dedicate to your farm, which crops you choose to grow, and the 3–4 month growing season. If you can knock down fifteen acres of trees for your farm then I have no doubt you’d be very successful!I’ve personally seen very successful gardens as far north as 62 degrees in Faro YT, which actually gets quite lush and green during the summer.

It depends on which part of the country you are interested in. Prices can vary depending on the climate/province/location. The climate can vary quite a bit from location across the country. In the Canadian Prairies temperature can dip down below -40 degrees celsius in the winter time vs more milder climates like on Vancouver Island where it hardly freezes & snows. Canada has a lot of options for farming or even ranching, east to west Canada stretches over 6000 Kms (3700 miles) coast to coast. Dairy operations are within most of the provinces, and usually are regulated in an established quota system. Typically dairy farm operations are valued on the basis on the land replacement value ( so much per acre of the area, the value of the livestock (per animal), the equipment and buildings, and the actual value of the Quota license. Each of these components can be individually bought or sold. As far as I understand you need all of these to successfully operate a legal dairy farm within the Quota system.Canadian Dairy Information CentreAn important question to ask is are you a Canadian resident? In Canada ownership of agricultural land is restricted in some provinces in Areas. Which means this would be a factor that could limit your choices. As far as I am aware British Columbia and Ontario allow for foreign ownership with minimal restrictions with agricultural land. Alberta my home province has limited foreign ownership to around 15 acres (last time I looked, there are some exceptions to those rules… but you have to dig in to the actual legal stuff). It would be extremely challenging to have a 200 head Dairy farm on 15 acres….This is important to recognize because depending on how you plan to sustain your Dairy herd, most have a grazing area pasture/ paddocks to keep the feeding costs down. You need to have the right size and capabilities for your herd size. Most areas have calculators for how many acres per animal. Where my parents Ranch/farm in Central Alberta we can usually manage 4 acres per animal for the season for Beef Grazing ( so you will have to research it for Dairy). So my rough math 4 acres x 200 animals would translate into a farm size of around 800 acres.Land can vary in price quite a bit per acre, but general rule of thumb the further north the cheaper it becomes. The trade off is a shorter growing season, and typically a more colder potentially harsher winter. Ball park its challenging to find decent farm land for less than $1500- 2000 per acre. On the other side of the scale prime farm land in nice micro climate areas ( Okanagan Valley British Columbia, Fraser Valley Lower mainland British Columbia, Vancouver Island British Columbia.) that land is more expensive probably in the $6000 to $10,000 per acre range. Usually the bigger the land tract the better/lower cost per Acre.Here is an interesting examples:If money is no limitation I would highly consider this operation!One of the nicest climates in Canadahttps://www.bcfarmandranch.com/advanced-search/all-properties/property/398-1821-anderton-road-comox“1821 ANDERTON ROAD$17,500,000Images (52)MapStreet“Google PlacesOverviewDetailsRequest a ShowingSend to a friend3 Title 582+ Acre Farm with 3 homes in the heart of Comox! Certified Organic Land is primarily Class 1 & 2 and would support a wide variety of agriculture uses including Blueberries and vegetable production. This is top producing land that fully irrigated from natural springs and water rights on nearby creek. This former dairy farm offers multiple outbuildings, barns and milking equipment still intact. Call today for a complete information package.”In Saskatchewan with an existing quota and livestockNicolai Dairy, Vanscoy Rm No. 345, Saskatchewan S0K0J0$5,800,000MLS® Number: SK729727“Turn key dairy located on 2 quarters of land only 20 minutes out of Saskatoon on pavement. 111 kg daily milk quota. Approximately 120 head of Holstein cows and 110 head of young stock. Permit in place for up to 300 cows. Main barn was built in 2010 with 96 free stalls, drive through feed alley and double 6 herringbone milk parlor. 60x40 heated shop and large calf barn. All outbuildings in very good condition. Very nice 1500 sq ft bungalow with newer windows, shingles, kitchen and attached garage. 2 modular homes in good condition. 50 gallon per minute well. Equipment in listing includes bobcat, payloader, 2 Case tractors, liquid manure tank and mix wagon. Other equipment is available if buyer wishes to purchase. This dairy produces all of it's own silage and there is a 1 year supply currently on hand. Feed price to be negotiated. $5,800,000 MLS”Check out this listing on REALTOR.caHere is another operation in the Okanagan Valley (more of a milder winter, lots of Dairy in the Valley/longer growing season)4147 Hwy 97 Road,, Falkland, British Columbia V0E1W0$4,498,000MLS® Number: 10143228“Rare opportunity to purchase an operating dairy farm in the Okanagan/Shuswap. Currently milking 125 head with barn capacity for 180. This very clean and well maintained farm offers modern buildings with approximately 180 acres of irrigated crop land. Milking parlour is a Boumatic double 10, parallel/rapid exit partnered with a 3000 US gal milk tank. The main freestall barn is a 114ft x 176ft drive thru, divided up for milking, dry, close up heifers along with 4 comfortable calving pens. Manure is scraped daily into slots at the end of each alley and flows by gravity to the concrete 100 ft x 14 ft lagoon. Baby calves start out in bright and airy 30 stall barn graduating by similar sized groupings onto covered sawdust packs. Silage is stored in twin concrete bunker silos 56 ft x 120 ft with 10 ft walls and dry hay & grain is stored in a 3 bay, 36 ft x 56 ft Commodity shed. The land is made up of several terraced fields and is irrigated under licence from Salmon River and deep wells. Alfalfa and corn for silage are produced on the farm and delivered to the cattle via TMR wagon. Current milk production average is 33 litres at 4.3 % BF. Cows and milk quota are available for sale at current market prices in addition to farm purchase. There are 2 homes on the property, main home is 1700 sq ft, 5 bed/ 3 bath and is in good condition, second home is a 12ft x 64 ft mobile home with 3 beds/ 1 bath plus addition. Located 20 mins from Vernon. Click on the film icon to view a video”Check out this listing on REALTOR.caBased on my quick research and digging around you are looking to probably spend a couple of million Canadian dollars for a turnkey operation. As for building your own, I am not 100% familiar with those costs but they would be in a similar ball park maybe a 25% reduction or more depending on the location….but Quotas are hard to come buy and typically they sell fast when on the market. Usually bigger operations who want to expand there production limits buy them up.Depending on your age, stage, status, wealth there are other options. If you have more time and willing to put in sweat equity there are some places in Canada where you can homestead land, for minimal costs. As far as I know the Yukon is still offering these possibilities and for any enthusiastic person who wants to build a new life around farming/ranching could essentially do it for less costs than buying a turnkey operation. I am not sure what the Dairy regulation or quota would be in that territory, but chances are it would be minimal allowing for an easy way of obtaining a regulated license, which will be very valuable as time goes on.Want to move to Yukon? Canada offering land to homesteaders - Farm and DairyEnergy, Mines and ResourcesBest of luck with your endeavours and if you choose to go down this path contact a Dairy Association as well as good farm realtor who may specialize in this area.Interesting resources to watch would be :Rural, Recreational and Investment Land for Sale in BCBC Farm & Ranch Realty Corp.

I analyzed the 6 answers before me looking for something. It doesn’t add up.Religion (2 answers) - Spain and France were/are Catholic countries and always accounted themselves respectably in warfare.Corruption - It doesn’t help, but again, Spain and other powers have managed to be corrupt and militarily effective.Population distribution (away from the battles) - Ha! And where was the US population? Much further away.British common law - Well, the matter was hardly settled like a property dispute in a court. We took land we wanted (more on that in a minute).Series of Coups - Bad luck that. Or … do you suppose that instability shares an underlying cause?Degree of Industrialization - then what is the reason for that?The Central American populations, though attaining some significant civilizations, did so only briefly, and were historically unstable, not lasting as long as Middle Eastern, Far Eastern and European civilizations. And not obtaining writing (only some mathematics, which was a precursor to writing in the Middle East).It’s possible that irrespective of the ills or benefits of Spanish rule, the Central American populations were not as politically mature and stable, and a crash course in European political systems was insufficient to mature them. Still is.They certainly had no overriding sense of destiny driving them. The region is famous for cities abandoned without obvious reasons. Perhaps these peoples once had a great vision, but it had been lost thousands of years before.What would be the cause of that? Don’t know for sure, but among my leading candidates would be lack of genetic diversity from repeated migrations (farthest from Africa). That certainly made them susceptible to smallpox. But my number one guess is climate.The Americans had what they called Manifest Destiny, the belief it was their right and destiny to expand westward. By whatever means necessary:With this lady out front, you might lose some battles, but you are going to keep coming. Believing it is your destiny.But that alone is not sufficient. Climate was on the side of the Americans.When you have both winters and a growing season, you become industrious or die. You have to employ energy technology in the winter. And again in the growing season to store up enough food. Factories with their heat engines are more tolerable in a colder climate. But not so cold everyone was frozen all the time.This theory has been put forward before and called racist. Well, I can’t help that climate affects eye and skin color. Northern and Central Europe, the US and China are all in temperate zones that favor industry. Russia is in the same zone as Canada, too cold, though they did passably at the point of Stalin’s gun. The warmer countries need a siesta. They can do agriculture, but none became industrial powers. The jungle countries even less so, and Central America has some of that.Update 9/18/2020: A recent study on the regions that humans normally inhabit by temperature and rainfall illustrates the climate advantage of temperate North America:Note that not only is the total area of optimal habitable climate less in Mexico, substantially less, but that it is mountainous making transportation difficult, and it is scattered into 4 widely dispersed and erratically shaped regions, none of them adjacent to oceans. The US has two areas adjacent to oceans and the Mississippi River, also useful for transportation, cuts through the middle of the largest region. The west coast US region is actually valleys between mountains, not the mountains themselves.Looking to Central and South America, in the region shown (through Brazil, except for southern part) the most habitable region roughly corresponds to the Inca Empire, giving further support for the climate theory, or at least a correlation with climate:from Map - gods in Inca civilizationNow look at the Mayan Empire:Most of this area is currently not optimal. The areas that are optimal are mountainous and were not sites of major Mayan cities (as far as currently known). The leading theory for the sudden decline of the Mayan empire is drought, see Ancient Mud Reveals an Explanation for Sudden Collapse of the Mayan EmpireJared Diamond, biologist (not a sociologist - both disciplines are really needed) has written a somewhat controversial book Guns, Germs, and Steel attributing success of human societies to “a complex combination of agriculture, geography, population density, and continental orientation”. (There are both positive and negative comments on the book at the link) By including agriculture and geography, Diamond indirectly includes climate. Climate of course directly affects agriculture. Climate history indirectly determines geography, e.g. rainfall erodes mountains into plains, a fact extremely obvious in the western US. Diamond also mentions the obscure factor “continental orientation” which is related to our observations on contiguity or fragmentation of optimally habitable regions, and adjacency to transportation routes such as navigable oceans and rivers.It is also well known that writing and large cities arose in places where great rivers provided reliable water for agriculture:Notice these are not ALL the great rivers by any means. They are in a narrow latitude band. Rivers that were too tropical (Amazon, Congo, Mekong) developed civilization when improved tools (something beyond stone tools) allowed reclamation of the surrounding jungle. This is still going on in the most tropical rivers (Congo, Amazon) aided by fire, much to the objection of environmentalists. Here is a simplified map of great rivers:The Yukon, Mackenzie, Lena, Yenisey, Amur and most of the Ob are too far north, and all but one of them empty into oceans that are not reliably navigable. Energy and transportation technology were necessary to exploit them, a process still going on, one which will accelerate if global warming makes the current temperate rivers less desirable, while making the arctic ocean navigable (just an observation, not an endorsement).You may well be asking, what about the Mississippi? It appears to be in the correct place. If this region was so advantageous to the US, why was there not an early civilization here?But there WAS … Mississippian culture - WikipediaThe building materials were not stone, there was not enough of it available. The genetic diversity and disease immunity, due to the migration history of the inhabitants, was not sufficient to survive contact with Europeans in the mid second millennium. Only the very first European explorers saw any of it, and others could not find the reported cities. The greatly reduced number of inhabitants returned to the forests, their wooden structures washed away, and only mysterious earthen mounds remained.One of the comments asks about Argentina, which would seem to have a suitable region on its Atlantic coast, amounting to around 10% of the country or more. However, a climate discussion states:The geographic and geomorphic characteristics of Argentina tend to create extreme weather conditions, often leading to natural disasters that negatively impact the country both economically and socially. The Pampas, where many of the large cities are located, has a flat topography and poor water drainage, making it vulnerable to flooding. Severe storms can lead to tornadoes, damaging hail, storm surges, and high winds, causing extensive damage to houses and infrastructure, displacing thousands of people and causing significant loss of life. Extreme temperature events such as heat waves and cold waves impact rural and urban areas by negatively impacting agriculture, one of the main economic activities of the country, and by increasing energy demand, which can lead to energy shortages.It seems to me that the circumstantial evidence for the association of optimal habitation and geography conditions with civilization is compelling, if hard to absolutely prove. Further, the demise of large predators, probably through technology (bow and arrow hunting, which arose in South Africa 70,000 years ago, not in one of the river civilizations) may be a necessary geographic feature. Can you imagine civilization arising in the age of dinosaurs? I cannot. As climate has changed and continents drifted, tiny windows of land and time have opened to permit the development of civilization. It is likely much more fragile than we imagine. The idea of humans thinking they understand this process well enough to tamper with it scares me nearly to death. It is like a baby rearranging a China shop.