You can agree with him or disagree, but I bet you’ll remember what Allen Lash says: “By 2030, it’ll be all over. Most of the land will be owned by a handful of producers.”
Lash says today we’re seeing the beginnings of change on a scale that we’ve never seen change before. The consolidation of farms in the past generation is nothing. At most, it’s been a trial run for the real thing, which is just getting started now.
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As Lash told associate editor Maggie Van Camp, “By 2020 we won’t recognize crop farming.”
I expect your reaction is the same as mine, halfway between being bemused and indignant. We’ve seen these huge farms get big before, but we haven’t seen very many of them stay big.
In fact, it’s not bad to take a bit of attitude with you when you plunge into Maggie’s “The Big Challenge” (page 12) because you may need a bit of help to keep your confidence up along the way. Lash may be wrong, but he’s no fool. Already, he points out, the top 5,500 farms in the U.S. produce an average $15 million each in gross sales, and he sees no reason why they should stop doing what they seem to be successful at doing now.
Plus, we know that there is another level of truth here. Regardless of whether Lash’s numbers are right or wrong, we can be sure that a host of farms across Canada will be looking for the upper threshold. In fact, they would be testing it now if there was more land on the market.
Probably there will be multiple thresholds, depending on the type and structure of the farm. Still, farm sizes will shock us, whether they end up being in the millions or only in the tens of thousands of acres.
Agriculture is undergoing changes now that it will be very hard to undo. How you could take some of the farmsteads that have been set up in the past few years and break them into smaller units is hard to see, just as it’s hard to see how you could take some of the farmsteads that have stopped investing in land and equipment and grow them into viable farms ready to take on the next decade.
The hardest question is, will this growth be a good thing? Partly, it’s a hard question because we also have to ask, “good for whom?”
I firmly believe that Canadian agriculture will never be all one way. There will be no single standard that every farm is aiming for. There will always be aggressive young farmers starting up, and families who will make a go of it with an unshakable combination of brains and dedication.
So my bet is that we are going to see more fragmentation than we have ever seen. Ultra-large farms will control huge swathes, as will very large family farms. But there will always be small farms and smaller family farms, ready to pounce when conditions are right.
Ironically, stability in crop prices is leading to instability in our farms themselves. Let me know what you think. I’m at [email protected],
or you can reach me at 519-674-1449.
