When asked if young, aspiring farmers ever inquired about buying his farm, Marcus Collinson just laughs.
“No young farmers are buying farms,” he said, adding it’s why he sold his four properties southwest of London, Ont., to an investor in May and June 2020.
The Toronto-based company that bought them is Bonnefield, Canada’s first and largest farm real estate investment corporation. It holds more than $1.4 billion in assets across seven provinces, representing 140,000 acres (nearly 56,656 hectares) of farmland, according to its website.
According to Ontario land registry records, Bonnefield shows up as the owner in 464 premises identification numbers (PIDs), from northern to southern Ontario. Each PID is linked to a specific parcel of land rather than a business or a person.
Makes sense this is how capitalism will grow - once you’ve refined and streamlined things as best as possible and maximized your market, your next way to continue to grow is to buy up more companies (or farmland) or expand their operations into more sectors so line goes up.
Seems like we need to figure out a way to prevent this from becoming a race to the bottom in terms of quality (and a race to the top for company profits), or turning into mega-corpos only.
Opening up the tools for becoming competitive in the market would be a good start. Crazy that it’s harder to start your own farm or restaurant than to build your own web service company or open your own online clothing brand.
I think the number one factor there is real estate. You can’t start a farm out of your apartment and restaurants can’t easily exist out in the boonies where rent is cheaper.
A handful of years ago, I read an article which concluded that unrestrained capitalism will inevitably result in an entire industry sector being controlled by roughly three companies, working as a collusive oligopoly.
If you’re a plucky startup in any industry whatsoever, expect to get bought or buried as soon as you’re big enough to be noticed.
If you happen to remember or find that article I’d be very interested in reading it!
Believe me, if I find it again I will bookmark it, download it, and probably even print it. (Same as I did with Umberto Eco’s 14 Common Features of Fascism.) And I’ll let you know.
This was a punchline in Kurt Vonnegut’s Jailbird