Land prices shaping, rural Saskatchewan, farmers

MURRAY MANDRYK

Politics

Grandpa could never have imagined that Saskatchewan farmland — or the crops it produced — would be worth so much.

There again, grandpa probably could have never imagined how imagined how big farmers would become or how and armers would ever be able to afford to farm at these prices.

And he certainly couldn’t have imagined how all this would change the face of rural Saskatchewan as towns, villages and even neighbours become further apart.

There have certainly been some social negatives associated with farms becoming bigger and costly. It’s tougher it is to get kids to school or hockey practice. And as towns and villages shrink and disappear, your are much further from a doctor or an RCMP officer than you’ve ever been.

But as former University of Regina professor and now University of Dalhousie Agri-Food

Sylvain Charlebois noted in a recent article, it’s not been all a bad thing.

“Yes, farmland in Canada is getting more expensive, but farmers in Canada are also making more money,” Charlebois said, noting both record farm cash receipts and record exports.

In the past 20 years, there have been “fewer barriers, including the end of the Wheat Board’s single desk on wheat and barley, that have brought a slew of new possibilities for the farming community,” Charlebois wrote.

We sometimes forget the decades of heartbreak that accompanied farm foreclosures and farm selloffs ... although who now owns farms and what they are like is an issue worth exploring.

The food professor noted farmland value in Canada has increased 334 per cent since 2001 and 213 per cent since 2016.

In Saskatchewan, it’s been even more dramatic — a 391-per-cent increase since 2001 and a 259-per-cent increase since 2016.

But as land costs have soared, so has what we produce on them. When it comes to world production, this province now accounts for 51 per cent of the lentils, 36 per cent of the field peas, 27 per cent of the canola meal, 19 per cent of the canola and mustard seed and 16 per cent of the flax.

It’s hard to argue that’s a bad thing in an overpopulated and hungry world.

And it’s surely not a bad thing for a provincial economy that has had to rely on the ups and downs of oil, gas and mining.

But what it has undoubtedly done is change the nature of rural Saskatchewan … and perhaps the nature of those who farm it.

In 1941 the number of Saskatchewan farms peaked at 138,713 in 1941. By 2016, that number had decreased by 82 per cent to 24,523.

We all know what this has done to schools, hospitals, businesses and, ultimately, villages and towns throughout rural Saskatchewan. Notwithstanding, better roads have made it easier to get farther much faster, people are further apart than they ever have been.

Yet in another way, the farming community may be more like-mined than ever.

Long gone is the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool and the Canadian Wheat Board that solidified the co-operative movement. In its place has developed more of a single mindset among today’s famers.

They surely all aren’t all corporate farms. Many are still family-run operations, albeit, rather large ones.

But what has developed is a relatively uniform class of entrepreneurial farmer that’s not only survived the downturns in industry but also today’s the more recent inflationary land prices.

They are businessmen and, as such, likely more uniformly conservative than they have ever been.

This should not be seen as a negative. Most are still part of the local communities that make rural Saskatchewan so special.

But what is rather undeniable is that rural Saskatchewan community is becoming different from what it used to be.

And it seems rather obvious that the biggest thing shaping this is big farming driven by land prices.

Murray Mandryk has been covering provincial politics since 1983.