Income is clearly a key, but we also have to look at the big picture. We have a demographic crisis looming in primary food production. One of the major impacts is just the cost of starting to farm. Even if you inherit the farm, you're probably looking at half a million dollars in start-up. If you're buying, you're probably looking at a million dollars in start-up. There's nobody now who is a young person who can look at purchasing a farm and say, “yeah, I can make enough money to pay for the mortgage and the equipment and any livestock I need to buy” or whatever it might be from the farm. You just can't do it. You cannot pencil it.
I've tried. And I'm in that age group where we bought our farm not that long ago--although it's probably getting more than I'd like to say--and we've been working off the farm for a number of years to pay the mortgage.
The actual business part of the farm, if you take out the land value, the part that we run year to year on our farm is profitable. It's quite profitable. But it's that paying for the land; it's the initial payment. It has to come out of some other income source, and for us it's off-farm income. It won't come. It's not that we're bad managers, or that we're just financially stupid or anything. I go back right to Scotland. Money is a pretty big deal in our family. It's about those land values.
Larry, Paul, and I all live in the same area. That competition from people coming up to buy their little piece of heaven and then demanding city services and all that has a huge impact on our community.
Right now, for most of rural Canada, and particularly in southwestern Ontario, our greatest commodity is not soybeans. It's not livestock. It's our youth. We're exporting our youth because they just can't do anything else.