Either lose the land that’s been in his family since the early 1900s or go into debt. That’s the decision Saskatchewan farmer Brent Hume said he’s left with due to increasing rental costs on agricultural Crown land.
“At this point in my life, I have to think twice about taking on a 25 year mortgage and whether I can afford that,” Hume said.
The organic grain farmer farms around 1,800 acres of land in Carlyle, Sask. About 480 acres of that was leased from the province more than four decades ago.
Originally the lease was part of the Saskatchewan Land Bank program, established by the NDP government in 1972, to help young farmers plant some roots. Retiring farmers could sell their land to the government, who would then lease it out to the next generation of farmers. Currently, the province has 7,500 agricultural leases.
“The Ministry of Agriculture administers about eight million acres of agricultural crown land, all of it is in the southern part of the province,” executive director of the Agriculture Ministry’s Land Branch, Wally Hoehn, said.
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But several years ago, the province shifted focus from renting cultivated land to grazing land.
As a result, in 2016 a 15 per cent levy was added to land leased within those 300,000 acres, on both cultivated and formally cultivated. Then in 2017, that levy increased to 30 per cent, and in 2018, the levy jumped to 45 per cent.
Around the same time a new rental formula was introduced and the calculation of crop prices were adjusted.
For Hume, this meant his rent jumped from $14,231.60 plus GST/land taxes in 2014 to $29,864.85 plus GST/land taxes in 2018.
During an April 24, 2018 economy committee meeting, Minister of Agriculture Lyle Stewart said, “This is land that would be better off, should be owned by the people that farm it and we’re trying to encourage them to buy it. We’ve also coupled that with a 15 per cent discount on the price assessed, or 10 per cent at the most recent program on the price, the assessed value. So it’s a carrot-and-stick to try and get this land in private hands because there’s just no good reason why government should own land that’s either farmed or previously farmed.”
Hoehn also explained that for those who wanted to buy the land this year, up until March 31, had been eligible for a 10 per cent discount.
“Yes, the rents have increased significantly, but that’s to divest ourselves of these groups of lands that we don’t feel are core to our business anymore and allow us to focus on the ones that are significantly more important to us,” Hoehn explained.
With the levy expected to increase by 15 per cent per year, Hume said it’s left him with an impossible choice.
“I’m going to be forced to make a decision next year,” he said.
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