On February 29, Stuart Oke and Katherine Aske spoke at the House of Commons Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry for the Senate Study on Soil Health in Canada. Watch the full presentation to the Senate Hearing on Soil Health & Foreign Landownership
Stuart Oke, Past NFU Youth President
Thank you. Good morning, senators.
My name is Stuart Oke. I am a farmer. I own and operate a farm in North Augusta, Ontario, alongside my partner, Nikki, and a small team of employees. We grow vegetables that feed families from Ottawa to Toronto, with the long-term goal of ensuring that, at the end of our careers, our farm and its soil are left better than when we arrived, doing that weighty job all while feeding the community that supports our business.
I recently had the chance to speak with another farmer who shared with me the idea that there are only two things in farming you can never get back: time and soil. This is an ethos that my time farming has been in commitment to since I was 18 years old.
To build upon this commitment and further it, I’m also a member of the National Farmers Union, a grassroots democratic farmer-run organization that advocates on behalf of farms like mine and for issues that affect us, such as that of degrading soils and increasingly unaffordable farmland. I’ve been a member of the union for many years and have held numerous positions, including that of youth president. I’m a member not just because the organization is made up of members who are passionate, intelligent and keen problem solvers but because it is an organization unafraid to take hard looks at the problems facing our farming and rural communities, anchoring its solutions in grounded truths and well-researched positions unbiased by outside interests.
It’s that unflinching commitment to issues that drew my attention to read the National Farmers Union report entitled Losing Our Grip. It explores the myriad ways land has been and is currently being consolidated and otherwise grabbed by an increasingly small number of actors, both domestic and foreign, and how that has created an over-financialization of the land to such a degree that I am genuinely concerned for the future agricultural stewardship of our lands and soils. It’s that over-financialization of land and its effects, creating an entire generation of tenant farmers as well as the corresponding effects on our soil, pushing us into reliance on agricultural inputs, that has let me to provide this testimony today.
My time spent in the leadership of the NFU allowed me to travel the country and speak with hundreds of farmers, hearing countless stories of farmers struggling to make ends meet, forced to rent land when none was affordable enough to acquire and forced to make tough decisions on how that rented land should be managed, with the knowledge that it could be sold out from under them at any time. Put simply, as farmers owe more and more and own less and less, and as farmers are forced more into the arms of corporations and investors, farmers lose control of Canada’s farms and foodland and, with it, the control to manage the soil in a way that will ensure long-term soil health instead of short-time investment in agricultural inputs. Inputs only feed the crop and are no substitute for common-sense practices aimed at feeding the soil and the increased resilience that comes with long-term soil improvement.
From relatively small farms like my own to multi-thousand-acre operations in the Prairies, right across the country, we are feeling the effects of an over-financialized farmland system. We know that Canadian farmers are facing a farm net-income crisis. In 2018, for instance, for every dollar farmers received, they only kept 6 cents. Similarly, we have a problem of massive farm debt. It was $138 billion in 2022 compared to $106 billion in 2018.
These compounding crises, combined with increasingly high land prices, force farmers seeking to increase those net incomes into more and more land using rental arrangements, on and on until the reality of today, which is that 40% of Canadian farmland is currently rented. We’ve seen systems like this before. Granted, that was hundreds of years ago, and the land was being consolidated in the hands of nobility. Now, it’s being consolidated into the hands of pension funds and investment schemes. This system didn’t allow for responsible stewardship of the land then, and it doesn’t allow for it now.
From my perspective as a farmer, and bearing in mind the topic of today’s meeting, we need to be equally cautious of large-scale consolidation and speculative investment endeavours, whether they be owned by foreign-owned corporations or Canada-based entities. Both serve to contribute to the over-financialization of farmland, keeping control of our food system further removed from the stewardship of the farmers responsible for growing it.
I was recently speaking to a farmer at an event geared toward farmers trying to access land, and they said something to me that succinctly made this point: “I don’t have land tenure. I have land tenuousness.”
To promote soil health, we need common-sense solutions that ensure farmers have the security of tenure. We need a system that does more to protect farmland for farmers and food producers, and that prevents large-scale consolidation of land by outside actors that financialize land, turning it into a commodity to be exploited rather than an irreplaceable ingredient necessary to sustain us.
I could say more, but I see my time is up, so I will leave it at that. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I welcome your questions.
Katherine Aske, Researcher and NFU member
Good morning, senators. Thank you for having me and for taking soil health seriously.
I run an organic farmer training program at the University of British Columbia. I am also a researcher who has been part of a project analyzing the impacts of investor farmland ownership and concentration across the Prairies that is run out of the University of Manitoba.
I’m here to argue that it is not foreign farmland ownership we need to be concerned about with regard to soil health but farmland speculation as a whole, much like Stuart just said, whether that be foreign, domestic or even local. Farmland investors might differ as individuals or in investment structure, but on the whole, they have one thing in common: a desire to extract financial value from the land and the work of the people who live on it.
It is difficult to know the impacts of any kind of investor ownership on soil health in Canada at present because provincial governments have not been using their land titles data to track and publicly report on changing farmland tenure patterns. That means that the public does not know how much land is owned by investors. In some provinces, university researchers have even been barred from accessing this public data. For example, in Alberta, our research team was told that it would cost us $50,000 to access it, more than we could afford. Without this data, I conducted qualitative research instead and interviewed over 50 grain farmers across the province in 2019 and 2020, ranging from 230 to 33,500 acres in size.
The only province where we do have a sense of the extent of investor farmland ownership and concentration is in Saskatchewan. That’s because members of our research team, led by Dr. Annette Desmarais, accessed the land titles data, analyzed it and publicly reported on the findings. They revealed a 19-fold increase in investor farmland ownership from 2002 to 2018, up to nearly a million acres. Further Prairies research has shown that even a small number of investor purchases drive farmland prices beyond what most farmers can afford, which then propels high debt loads, farm deconcentration, short-term rental contracts that limit how farmers can practise and even farmers themselves relating to the land like a speculative asset, all of which have associated environmental impacts.
We now know that Robert Andjelic, who is here with us today, who is the largest landowner in the province and perhaps in the country. As he indicated, his company owns over 233,000 acres in Saskatchewan, almost as much land as billionaire Bill Gates owns across the U.S. I mean no disrespect to you personally, Mr. Andjelic, but this kind of concentrated wealth and power brings us back to a kind of neo-feudalism that has devastating effects for our democracy, our communities and the health of the land.
You don’t have to take it from me. A recent survey of 400 Prairies farmers found that nearly 80% of respondents see investor farmland ownership as “negative” or “very negative” for their local communities. Mr. Andjelic just spoke to the kinds of improvements that his company does on the land, and there is a video on his website that speaks to that and improvements on 22,000 acres around Yorkton. In the video, they talk about the clearing of trees and bush, creating fields that are open and cleared, with sloughs dried up, allowing for farming from corner to corner. Theoretically, this means more income for farmers through higher crop production in the short term and thus higher rental rates that can be charged.
Mr. Andjelic’s company is absolutely not unique in doing land improvement in that way. However, as soil begins to erode due to a lack of trees to block the wind or increasingly intense spring storms and a lack of ability to handle them, these anticipated yields may not be realizable, and reversing those changes will take decades.
My interviewees in Alberta described various types of domestic investor owners and the largest farmers doing the same things. They are deeply concerned about the corner-to-corner approach. Bush lines are coming down everywhere, they told me, as farmland speculation has created both pressures and incentives to do so. One farmer told me: “Some days, we will have days and days of wind. I often wonder is it because there is nothing to stop it or slow it down. The wind was always here. Just those bush lines and tree stands helped stop the wind. We never had soil drifting ever in this area. Now we do.”
After widespread drought and ecological collapse on the Prairies in the 1930s, the government stepped in and established the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration. Western Canadian farmers were given free saplings in support to plant bush lines, and an estimated 600 million trees were planted through the 20th century. This program ended in 2013. We are now forgetting our history and regressing more with so-called improvements to the land, removing bush lines at a time of an ever-growing climate crisis.
To close, I am grateful for this committee’s research and concern but question the emphasis on foreign farmland owners and suggest it is farmland speculation as whole that presents a major concern for soil research and much more.
