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.
This is happening with hospitals in the US.
It’s happening with vets, it’s happening with restaurants, with contractors, utilities, with anything and everything. Anything that can be bought, will be bought, and it will be squeezed relentlessly.
The rich will not be happy until they’ve wrung every cent of value out of us, and even then they won’t stop. They can’t stop. They don’t even understand how they could stop any more than a tumour might understand why it shouldn’t grow uncontrollably/.