The rising cost of land is making it harder than ever for young farmers to enter the business
“The main challenge right now is really the cost of agricultural land,” said Benoit Cure, co-ordinator of ARTERRE, a program that pairs aspiring farmers with landowners and farmers planning to retire.
With 20 per cent down payments usually expected for farm purchases, “you have to almost be a millionaire before starting your agricultural business,” Cure said. If young people can’t afford to get into farming, then most rural communities risk being left with two or three large farms, he lamented. Lenders, she said, “don’t want to finance it, because they don’t know it, and that makes it really hard.”Farming has always been a capital-intensive industry — with high costs for land, equipment and inputs — but prices across Canada have risen above the revenue that can be generated from that land, said Jean-Philippe Gervais, the chief economist of Farm Credit Canada, a Crown corporation that lends to farmers.
But even large farms are challenged by high costs. A survey of more than 3,600 farmers released last month by Quebec’s farmers association found that 11 per cent are thinking about closing over the coming year. The Union des producteurs agricoles found that costs on Quebec farms rose by an average of 17.3 per cent in 2022 while revenues rose by an average of 14.7 per cent.
“Sometimes you hear there’s no one to take over, but it’s not true, there are a lot, but we need to make sure they’re able to set up,” Bissonnette, with the Federation de la releve agricole du Quebec, said in a recent interview. “It’s so much money.”
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