Agriculture · Leading & Selling
Farmer: what the job actually is
Running a farm as a business: deciding what to grow or raise, doing a lot of the work, and carrying the risk when the weather or the price turns.
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The work
What this job actually is
- Running a business that happens to be made of land, animals or crops, machinery and weather. The farming is only half of it; the other half is money, paperwork, repairs and decisions.
- You are the one who decides what gets planted, when, what it is fed, when it is sold and who buys it. Nobody hands you a schedule. The season, the animals and the market do.
- Farms differ completely from each other. A dairy barn is a twice-a-day, every-day machine. A cash-crop farm is two frantic seasons and a lot of waiting. A fruit or vegetable farm is people, timing and picking while it is ripe. Liking one tells you very little about the others.
- Most of the income depends on things you do not control: the price at the elevator or the processor, the rain, the frost, the cost of fuel and feed. Good farmers are mostly people who plan for the bad year.
- Many farms are family farms, which means the job comes bundled with a parent, a sibling, a spouse, a succession plan and everyone's opinion of all of them. Plenty of farmers also have a second job or a partner with one, because the farm does not pay every month.
A Tuesday
What a normal day looks like
Not a good day or a bad one. The ordinary version, which is what you would actually be living.
- 5:30 — Up before it is light. Check the animals or the weather, whichever is the thing that cannot wait today.
- 6:00 — Chores. Feed, water, look at every animal and notice the one that is standing wrong. In a field operation this is checking the equipment you will rely on all day.
- 8:00 — Breakfast, and a phone call to the person who was supposed to deliver feed, seed or a part yesterday.
- 8:45 — The main job of the season. Planting, spraying, haying, picking, calving, milking, moving animals. Whatever the calendar and the sky have decided it is.
- 12:00 — Lunch, standing up, with the weather forecast open for the fourth time.
- 13:00 — Something breaks. It is always the thing you needed in the next hour. Fix it yourself, because the nearest dealer is a long way off and busy too.
- 15:30 — Back to the main job, or the second job: moving a trailer, sorting animals, or the tractor work you are racing the rain on.
- 18:00 — Evening chores. The animals do not know it is supper time for you.
- 19:30 — The office part. Invoices, records, a program application, a quote for next year's inputs. This is the part nobody grows up imagining.
- 21:00 — Check the barn or the sky once more. Tired in a way that is hard to explain to somebody who has not done it.
Honestly
Who loves this, and who should not do it
The second list is the useful one. Nearly every careers page leaves it out, which is why nearly every careers page reads like an advert.
- You would rather be outside, working with living things and machinery, than in an office, and you mean it in February as well as June.
- You like being your own boss and you understand that it also means being your own accountant, mechanic, planner and problem.
- You can make a decision with incomplete information and then live with how it turns out, because most of the big ones on a farm are that.
- You are patient with long cycles. You plant now and find out whether you were right months later.
- You like the idea of building something that lasts, a herd, a soil, a business, a name on the road.
- You need your income to arrive on a fixed date. Farm income is lumpy, it follows prices you do not set, and a bad year can come straight after a good one.
- Weather makes you angry. It decides your whole season, you cannot argue with it, and sometimes it takes a year of work in an afternoon.
- Animals dying would break you. Calves, lambs and piglets are lost, animals get sick, and sooner or later you are the person who has to make the call to put one down.
- You do not want to work evenings, weekends and holidays. Livestock does not take them and a crop does not wait for a long weekend.
- You need other people around. A lot of farm work is done alone and a farm can be a long way from your friends.
- You are uncomfortable with big debt. Land, equipment and buildings cost a great deal, and starting without family land usually means borrowing against it.
- Family pressure would weigh on you. In a family farm you can be expected to take over, can be second-guessed by the person you take over from, and a falling-out is a falling-out in the house as well as the business.
The route in
How you actually get there in Ontario
There is no licence, and no one required path
Nobody has to certify you to farm in Ontario, and many farmers learned growing up on one. That is both the good news and the trap: nothing is handed to you for finishing a programme, and the learning is on the job. Some activities do have their own rules, for example pesticide use and handling livestock, and you pick those up as you need them.Learn it before you bet on it
Work on somebody else's farm first. A summer or two of real work for a farm that is not your family's tells you more than any brochure, and a good employer is a better teacher than a classroom. If you did not grow up on one, this step is not optional.A diploma or degree is optional and useful
Ridgetown Campus of the University of Guelph runs a two-year associate diploma in agriculture, with electives you can lean toward crops, livestock, business or resource management, plus an optional paid summer co-op term. The Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph offers a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture, with nearly thirty areas of study. Neither is required, and both can lead directly into running or managing a farm.Register the business once it is a business
In Ontario, farm businesses that gross $7,000 or more a year are required by law to register with Agricorp under the Farm Business Registration Program. You will also want a good accountant who understands farms, because the tax rules for farm income are their own world.Buying in, taking over or renting in
Most people who start without a family farm rent land, work for an operator and build toward partnership, or take over from a farmer with no one to hand it to. Buying a farm outright with no equity is very hard. Talk to farmers who did it the slow way before you decide you can do it the fast way.
Where this comes from: Agricorp — Farm Business Registration · Ridgetown Campus — Associate Diploma in Agriculture · University of Guelph OAC — Bachelor of Science (Agriculture) · Ontario — Specialist High Skills Major, Agriculture
The money
What it pays in Ontario
Job Bank's own figures, quoted rather than summarised, with the period they describe — so you can tell how old they are and go and check them.
- $20.19
- Low (hourly)
- $31.25
- Median (hourly)
- $96.15
- High (hourly)
Ontario, NOC 80020. Reference period 2023-2024, last updated by Job Bank on 19 November 2025. Wages vary a lot by region inside Ontario and by how long you have been doing it — the low figure is roughly where you start, not what the job is worth.
Where it is heading
The outlook for the next three years
Job Bank publishes a three-year outlook for every job in every province. It is the closest thing to an honest forecast, and it moves, so read it as a weather report rather than a verdict.
Good4 out of 5 stars
- Employment decline will lead to the loss of some positions.
- Several positions will become available due to retirements.
- There are a small number of unemployed workers with recent experience in this occupation.
What that rating means: how many openings Job Bank expects in Ontario for this kind of work against how many people are likely to be looking — not whether it is a good job. A “limited” rating means more competition for each opening; it does not close the door, and it can change before you are ready to walk through it.
- 33,650
- people work in this job in Ontario
- 28%
- are women (48% across all jobs)
- 79%
- are self-employed (15% across all jobs)
Source: Job Bank — Managers in agriculture job prospects in Ontario (NOC 80020). Outlook updated by Job Bank on 10 December 2025; read by us on 5 October 2026.
Before you leave school
Things you can do now
- Ask your guidance office whether your board offers the Specialist High Skills Major in Agriculture. It is nine Grade 11 and 12 credits including co-op, plus sector certifications, and your diploma carries a seal for it. Not every school offers it, so ask about neighbouring ones too.
- Join 4-H if there is a club near you. Members can be up to 21, there are projects from livestock to woodworking, and the one that matters here is the one where you raise something, keep records and stand up and explain what you did.
- Get a summer or weekend job on a farm that is not your family's. Pay attention to the days you did not want to stop, and the days you did.
- Take the business, maths and science courses seriously. The part of farming people underestimate is the books, and the part that fills the pages of a farm's year is agronomy and animal science.
- Go to a local fair and ask three exhibitors what they would change about their operation if they could. Farmers talk if you ask something real.
Test it
Do this before you decide anything
Reading about a job tells you almost nothing. This is designed to be done alone, this week, for free.
Spend an evening inside a farmer's actual decisions
About 90 minutes- Watch an online livestock auction or a grain-price report for thirty minutes. Write down one price and one thing that would make it go up or down. You are finding out whether a number you do not control is interesting or maddening.
- Pick one crop or animal you could imagine and look up, on an Ontario government or farm organisation page, what a single season of it involves. List the five decisions that would be yours.
- Phone or message one farmer you know, or the manager of a farm market or stand near you, and ask one question: what is the worst part of the year, and why do you keep doing it? Write down the answer exactly.
- Do one chore on purpose: get up at 5:30 and spend an hour doing physical outdoor work for somebody who will let you, a neighbour's garden, a relative's yard, a local community garden. Note how you feel at 6:30 and at 7:30.
What it tells you. If the price-watching held your attention, the answer from the farmer made you want a second question, and the early hour felt like a fair trade, farming may suit you and the next step is paid farm work. If the market made you anxious, the worst-part answer sounded unbearable, or the early start felt like punishment, that is a useful answer too. It means you may want agriculture without being the one holding the risk.
Better than any article
Questions for somebody who does this job
Most people say yes to a teenager who asks good questions. These are the ones that get real answers rather than encouragement.
- “What is the part of this job nobody told you about when you started?”
- “How many days a year do you actually take off?”
- “What happened in your worst year, and how did you get through it?”
- “How do you decide when to put money into something and when to hold back?”
- “What did it cost to get started, and who lent it to you?”
- “What would you tell a 17-year-old who did not grow up on a farm?”
- “What do you like about this that you would not trade?”
Could you own one of these?
The part other career sites never mention
This one is a business almost by definition: most farmers are self-employed and the farm is the business. The hard part is land and equipment, which cost far more than most startups, so most people begin by renting, working for an operator, or starting small with a specialty product. Ontario farm businesses at a certain size are required to register with Agricorp.
Not sure this is the right list to be reading
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Parent of a teenager weighing this up? Career coaching for teens gets them talking to people who do the work, anywhere in Ontario.
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Wages and training requirements change. Every figure on this page is linked to the body that publishes it, and the review date above says when we last checked. If you find something out of date, tell us and we will fix it.