Andrew Douglas B2B journalist, turned PR man, specializing in new media.

Refreshing farm business story on CBC’s The House

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's show on national politics, The House, is not the place I expected to hear a balanced and informative farm business story. But that's what we got on Saturday morning. The only downside is that they buried the lead.

The CBC is best at "retweeting" news releases from the left-leaning National Farmers Union, especially with stories emanating from the mother ship in downtown Toronto. Generally those stories bemoan the loss of the family farm and sell hard on organic agriculture. They don't usually cover agriculture from a business perspective.

The first half of the story focused on the boogeyman that is foreign ownership of farmland even though, "there are only a few examples of foreign investor ownership of Canadian farmland, mostly in the West and Quebec." The one example they gave is Hancock Agricultural Investments Group of Boston, owned by Canadian insurance giant Manulife, that paid $60,000 per acre of producing land when it bought a cranberry farm in Quebec's Eastern Townships.

The story piqued my interest particularly when it turned to interest rates and what their inevitable rise will do to agricultural in Canada.

And then, the bomb dropped.

It came during an interview with George Brinkman, the oft-quoted ag economist from the University of Guelph. "There is a strong parallel to the conditions in agriculture and the conditions in the US housing market just prior to the crash," he said.

Now THAT'S a quote.

Brinkman says that land prices are extremely high as compared to the value of the agriculture production.

High land prices and low incomes. Sound familiar? Brinkman says Canadian farmers invest four times as much capital per dollar earned as compared to US farmers. "There is a strong parallel to the conditions in agriculture and the conditions in the United States housing market just prior to the crash. The numbers have a lot of similarities. And the risk then is that we could have a serious correction in land values. As that occurs it works it's way through the whole agricultural sector."

His advice to farmers: Reduce debt load now, before interest rates climb.

My advice to the CBC: Keep writing farm business stories. It's a fascinating industry full of big business and family stories. And it's only going to get more interesting as the economy continues to evolve. You did a nice job on this one, even though you buried the lead a little. Keep it up.