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 started way back in the 2000s and has snow-balled the last 10 years. And it’s not just farmland. There are investment funds of the rich who are buying up forests and vast tracks of land around the globe as investment properties for long term holding.
This started way back in the 2000s and has snow-balled the last 10 years.
It was pretty common back in the '90s.
My family was approached several times by people representing foreign corporate buyers trying to buy our farm.
A few older farmers sold because they were getting too old to keep working and their kids had no interest in farming.
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.
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.
This was a punchline in Kurt Vonnegut’s Jailbird
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. ☠️
They misspelled “utterly fucked over for corporate profit.”
edit: Real estate is now unaffordable for an entire generation - thanks to “investors.” They’ll not only do the same to agriculture, but consequently to agricultural products. Expect to see artificial shortages, increased prices, declining quality, and occasional outbreaks of horror (the current discrepancy between Canada and the US for H5N1 will be erased, for instance).
But it’s all worth it in the end, because some billionaires will get incrementally richer.
This kettle is going to overboil so hard and fast…
Hard? Yes. Fast? Maybe not. They keep juggling the kettle between burners to keep it boiling but not quite spilling. It is a matter of time before it spills and burns but I bet they’ll keep finding new ways to juggle it until getting burnt is the only option.
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/.
Cna we please severely limit what investment companies can do?
Investment companies should not be able to buy hospitals, farms, houses, schools, sports teams, infrastructure, parks, forests, transit and transportation companies, pensions, saving funds, none of it.
A structure where an investment company can help a person to buy a farm and build something up while paying off that investment company within a reasonable time for a reasonable cost sounds fine, but we already have banks and it’s hard not to make those squeeze us.
So fuck off with investment companies, let them burn to the ground. They should be prohibited altogether
Short answer no, this country is run by banks, and oil. It will never do anything that is not in the interest of those two sectors.
Slowly returning to feudal share cropping
