True Patriot Love - July 20, 2026


Agriculture In Canada


Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

171.65

Word count

1,825

Sentence count

19

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Mike and Mike talk with our very own Paul Micucci about the decline of farming in Canada. We talk about the reasons why farmers are leaving the farms and why we could be at risk of losing our food supply.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 but as you get into rural canada it seems to me that we are starting to be at a loss that is
00:00:07.360 we're up against an aging farm pot farming population we just pointed out that there's
00:00:13.920 uh 66 percent of them don't really have plans to pass it along
00:00:17.760 no that means that we could be losing our food in canada
00:00:22.560 all right thanks for joining us this is tplmedia.ca don't forget you might have the local
00:00:32.420 version already operating in your neighborhood go to tplmedia.ca local and if you find us there
00:00:39.100 then you'll get your local news weather great deals on groceries and updates from right there
00:00:45.240 in your community today we're going to talk a little bit about the agri world here in canada
00:00:51.440 on occasion i ask our very own paul micucci paul tell me a story explain something to me
00:00:57.480 today's one of those moments paul thanks so much for doing this thanks mike uh recently as we are
00:01:03.380 traveling the country by the way keep up with us follow us on all the socials and you'll make your
00:01:07.960 way across canada with us uh you by the time this is airing you guys are already in the east coast
00:01:13.720 yeah looking forward to it mike but this is uh something that i'm bringing back actually from
00:01:18.440 west coast and i think that you can give me some insight because as we started to talk about this
00:01:23.240 i was like wait wait we got a show oh yeah out west i started seeing billboards encouraging
00:01:28.440 people to get into farming yeah there's podcasts out there that feature women getting into farming
00:01:33.720 as entrepreneurs there's a huge push to develop farming in canada and it actually made me worry a
00:01:41.160 little bit are we on decline here in canada when it comes to farming oh yeah of course we are for
00:01:47.160 decades and we've known it mike this isn't something that just crept up on us we've known
00:01:52.600 it for for many decades that people were leaving the farms they're going to the cities yeah the
00:01:58.280 biggest issue right now if you own a farm is what do you do with it when you retire yeah this is a
00:02:04.520 crazy stat yeah 66 of uh farm producers do not have a succession plan in place leaving the future
00:02:12.440 farmland kind of up in the air yeah the kids don't want to farm you know you're driving along and you
00:02:17.880 see that kind of uh decrepit rundown farmhouse that's a property that's been passed along and
00:02:24.760 the kids didn't want to come back right so that house just fell apart it's sitting there and
00:02:29.080 they're leaving it as development land that probably they'll never be able to use in their
00:02:34.920 lifetime they're playing paying property taxes on it they've probably already leveraged it into the
00:02:39.400 things they want to do financially in their life it's it's sitting there as just an asset yeah but
00:02:44.920 the interesting part is those those assets that are sitting in their life are now uh
00:02:51.880 the their assets that they have in the cities are devaluating and the assets in the country are
00:02:58.120 appreciating so it's an interesting place to be it's switched right for years years and years
00:03:03.560 uh you know when i was involved in the farming world uh you know it was
00:03:09.400 a couple thousand for an acre it varied about how good the acreage was you were getting and what
00:03:14.120 the farmland was but it was fairly reasonable to get into it it wasn't a backbreaker to buy a farm
00:03:20.120 uh start to the issue really was covering your property tax making sure you got the tax breaks
00:03:26.440 by farming it whether you're a hobby hobby farmer or not whether you're a full-time farmer that was
00:03:31.640 something to look at but you know that's really all the things you're worried about but but as i
00:03:37.560 got into it i'd meet people and and uh that were farming around me and they were usually in their
00:03:43.800 50s 60s 70s 80s they were quite they're older gentlemen and ladies really happy really uh
00:03:51.160 good neighbors and nice to deal with they've enjoyed being farmers they loved it they had a
00:03:55.960 good community lived in small towns they didn't have this all the stresses we we have living in
00:04:00.600 the city with traffic but but you know they didn't have really anyone coming back to pass them on to
00:04:05.800 and so so you know as time went on uh it became less and less and you saw less equipment less
00:04:11.880 farming less dealerships you know that john deere dealership that was on every corner
00:04:16.680 started to disappear um and for quite quite some time so i thought mike here's the interesting
00:04:23.080 thing when i started to see farming have a little bit of a resurgence i thought it was
00:04:29.560 new immigrants coming back to farm yeah i'm seeing this like there's in my neighborhood for example
00:04:35.240 there's a couple of seek farms like they you know they even say you know seek firm and i think that's
00:04:41.080 because they you know they want to promote to their community that they're there farming but
00:04:45.240 there's a lot of uh immigrant farmers in my neighborhood i made the same assumption yeah
00:04:51.080 but then when i got into the show so then i started to dive into the show and i'm looking
00:04:55.240 uh i'm thinking to myself okay who's buying up farms so i go and start to look at the real
00:05:01.880 estate pages and i start to take a look at who's buying farms it turns out it's funds and companies
00:05:09.000 and they're buying massive amount of acreage so i'm thinking myself okay um and it's it's it's
00:05:15.000 u.s uh investors it's canadian investors it's uh new canadian investors but they're not buying like
00:05:21.560 one or two farms like i thought like to your point you know indian family comes from india
00:05:27.080 they've been farming all their life they decide to buy 200 acres of farm we're going to get into
00:05:31.320 farming here in canada it's a natural progression yeah no no well to an extent but it's a it's
00:05:37.240 it's done very differently than i thought and haven't been involved in and farm communities
00:05:42.480 for years um so i had to refresh kind of who was doing what but really what it is now it's big
00:05:48.640 funds that come in and they look at it like a hedge against inflation um they want to diversify
00:05:55.260 their assets their portfolios and they basically are tired of putting all their eggs in commercial
00:06:01.240 real estate a show we just did previously where we looked at logistics and trucking and uh
00:06:07.480 containers and shipping it's a precarious commercial market right now it is and they
00:06:11.800 don't want all their eggs in that basket so they've got into as a kind of a hedge or a financial
00:06:16.440 instrument they've got into the farmland acquisition mode um because they can diversify
00:06:21.560 their portfolio and they're looking at it you know uh they're looking at it very uh well
00:06:27.240 organically i'll use but theoretically um they're using it very they're saying land is a limited
00:06:33.800 supply right so make it anymore god ain't making any more so come to canada you pick up a lot of
00:06:40.520 land the population continues to grow uh an argument i don't know in canada it has but that's
00:06:47.560 been for uh immigration purposes our birth rates have been horrifically bad so i don't know if
00:06:53.880 that's the greatest assumption but they make it food demand remains relatively stable okay so i
00:06:59.480 think that's probably a good assumption and farmland well farmland has it's historically
00:07:05.240 appreciated so and it continues to appreciate and you know i'm i was looking at some properties uh
00:07:10.760 as we're getting ready for the show my wife and i you know she says let's get into farming i'm like
00:07:15.000 well let's look at what farming costs right and as we're going through she's you know 30 000 an acre
00:07:21.080 40 even as high as a hundred and something thousand an acre um whereas when i was involved
00:07:27.240 in it it was actually like i said thousand per acre right not yeah you know three thousand was
00:07:32.040 kind of the max you paid per acre that was kind of the rule of thumb where we lived um but now
00:07:37.240 you know those properties are going out at 40 50 60 000 an acre but in in rural canada where farming
00:07:44.360 is a big thing uh the price per acre i think is based a lot on the yield and not so much on the
00:07:50.440 The real estate value, which I think just outside of the GTA here in Toronto or outside of the Calgary, greater Calgary area, for example, might be a little bit pricier.
00:08:00.280 You know, fancy ranches and things like that.
00:08:02.400 You know, hobby farms, I should point out.
00:08:04.980 But as you get into rural Canada, it seems to me that we are starting to be at a loss.
00:08:11.820 That is, we're up against an aging farming population.
00:08:16.200 we just pointed out that there's uh 66 of them don't really have plans to pass it along
00:08:22.620 no that means that we could be losing our food in canada yeah which is a major deal for us
00:08:30.820 yeah a component of it and i think you know some people who are savvy and these are you know
00:08:35.720 interesting you look at the traditional families uh the irving family for example you know potato
00:08:41.700 family uh they've got into it big time the nielsen family uh got into it in western canada
00:08:49.760 um and then robert angelic uh another canadian right he's actually done a huge purchase of
00:08:56.800 farmland i saw that yeah and then you know you have uh other institutions like bonney field
00:09:02.340 got into it big time the monette farms got into it so they've really decided to buy up a lot of
00:09:08.500 property and i i started looking and i'm thinking okay so we see a lot of canadians and some non
00:09:13.980 canadians um buying just property because they can buy acres and acres and acres of it rich u.s
00:09:20.780 uh billionaires have come in and bought property uh it seems to cause a little bit of ripple you
00:09:26.240 look online there's not happy people about that but you know they're doing it for estates right
00:09:31.540 so that's a whole different thing but i went and i said okay is there is there any case
00:09:37.940 or information available about Canadians going to the U.S.
00:09:43.000 and doing the same thing.
00:09:44.820 And I was shocked because this had apparently,
00:09:48.000 and I didn't know this,
00:09:49.980 had become quite a controversial issue
00:09:52.040 in turn of the millennia.
00:09:55.300 Canadians buying U.S. farms.
00:09:58.220 Yes, yes.
00:09:59.100 We are the largest foreign...
00:10:07.940 We'll be right back. 0.99