Some problems must be solved before they become problems. For Canada, a question that will soon require an urgent answer is, who should own our farmland?
There’s a whole world full of things that you and I can disagree about. One thing we can’t, though, is that farmland is an increasingly precious commodity whose management is crucial to humanity’s ongoing health.
Oh, and there’s another thing we can’t disagree on too. COVID-19 is a warning. The serious economic disruptions caused by the virus actually began long before the first human got sick. (For more insights into just one aspect of this, read Scott Garvey’s excellent “Where’s your tractor” from our Feb. 15 issue.)
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The point is, our infrastructure was already inadequate and under-resourced before COVID-19 arrived. Similarly, our workforce was growing increasingly out of alignment with our economic needs.
In a world that operates closer to the edge, we are never much more than a few steps from major dislocation.
A reader wrote the other day to say “Corporations who own the land just because it is going to increase in value, and whose only business obligation is to maximize profit for their shareholders, are not going to do ‘good’ farming.”
I’m not normally a fan of government intervention, but she has a point.
It doesn’t mean any corporation owning any acre is bad. After all, many farms are incorporated, a fact I’ll come back to in a moment. Also, different corporations own and manage land in different ways. Should we really outlaw corporations from owning land and renting it back to bona fide farmers on stable, long-term contracts?
Still, if we believe it is generally a good thing for farmers to own the land they farm, and in many cases a very good thing, shouldn’t we be talking about it now?
Yet it has fallen almost completely off our radar. This isn’t exactly scientific, but I just sent a query out to a personal list. No one on it can remember hearing the issue discussed in the recent past.
Part of the reason I’m concerned is because, increasingly, it may be difficult to legally differentiate the farmers who should own the land from the investors who maybe shouldn’t, especially as agriculture gets more generations into incorporation and, I suspect, into vertical integration.
Do we want to rule out the farm down the road because, when Mom and Dad died, one of the non-farming kids retained shares?
If farms need to be structured according to the rules in order to qualify for land purchasing, that might very well be okay as long as they know up front. It would be serious, but “serious” may be exactly the word for the potential for damage to the land if no steps are taken.
By the way, can we please stop saying farmland prices no longer reflect its productive value? No, you can’t pay for it with one year’s crop, but the long-term belief that we will need what it can produce is what justifies its price.
There’s so much more to say, which mainly boils down to this: This country is lucky in its farmers.
Are we getting it right? Let me know at [email protected].
