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.
Small(ish) farming operations have been disappearing for decades. It’s just accelerated now, with greedy investors caring more about a cash grab than the fact farms feed us all.
One reason an analyst explained to me is that modern farming has become capital intensive. It takes larger and larger farms to make things more profitable.
They’re right. To add to the shitstorm, Harper sold off the Canadian Wheat Board to a US corp and Saudi investment fund … which undermined the farmer collective from guaranteeing farmers received the best price possible for their product.
The following is a great article about the fallout.
https://www.nfu.ca/2020-hindsight-ending-the-canadian-wheat-board-was-an-economic-tragedy/
I remember that. ☠️