The Financialization of Farming with Katherine Aske

You’ve heard of speculative investors pushing up the price of housing, but did you know it’s happening on farms too? With fewer collective protections for farmers, and pressures to sell land and consolidate farms, is the family farm becoming a thing of the past? And is a new form of feudal tenant farming the future? On today’s episode we talk to the Parkland Institute’s Katherine Aske, author of Finance in the Fields: Investors, Lenders, Farmers, and the Future of Farmland in Alberta. We discuss who owns the farmland on the prairies, why ownership models are changing, and what that means for the future of farming – and our food. Farmers are facing immense pressure in a world with fewer collective protections and more unpredictable weather. For small family farms, this can mean going into debt or renting at the whims of the market. And, as Katherine explains, that has big implications for the future of our food.

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