There are options available for those looking to get into farming or expand their acres.
Alberta’s 50 million acres of farmland are productive, beautiful…and increasingly pricey. For those who own their acres, land appreciation now often contributes more to the farm businesses’ overall value than any commodity those farms can produce. For farmers who would like to enter agriculture or expand farm businesses, however, the often out-of-reach price of land has become a major stumbling block.
Between 2010 and 2021, the cost of agricultural land in Alberta more than doubled, rising from an average of just over $1,500 per acre to nearly $3,200 per acre across the province, according to Statistics Canada. The increase is particularly impressive when framed on a provincial scale: across the entire province, farmland and buildings increased from a total value of $38.9 billion in 2001, to $118.3 billion in 2016, to a whopping $160.9 billion in 2021 — a quadrupling of value in two decades.
This past June, the University of Alberta’s Parkland Institute released a new report detailing how investors’ interest in farmland, which has increased dramatically since the 2008 financial crisis, is impacting rural Alberta and fundamentally changing how farmers farm. As the report’s author Katherine Aske explains, “The new reality is that many farmers purchasing land in Alberta cannot pay it off in their lifetimes just by farming it.”
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