By now you've probably read about that UN report re: how a million species are at risk if us humans keep on keeping on the way we've been doing.
And there was another much-headlined report just a while ago about how we've got till 2030, and not a moment longer, to change our ways, or else really bad shit will fuck us up massively.
Ya, whatever. Call me a skeptic.
But, given that those opinions are relentlessly being foregrounded as immutable truths, there's bound to be an impact. How will this impact the price of farmland?
Around here, where the farmland is, generously speaking, sub-optimal, you'll pay roughly 3-5,000 an acre for what is essentially grazing land.
Not too far south, where the land is flatter, the soil is better, and cash cropping becomes an option, you're up to 10,000 an acre in no time.
A little south of that, folks are paying 15-20,000 per acre and still expect to make a go of it.
And they do, but they do it by strictly observing the commandments of modern agriculture.
You must scale up. A hundred acres is a hobby farm. A thousand acres is a start at real farming.
You must drench your thousand acres in chemicals to ensure the yields of your soy/corn/canola crops will suffice to pay the interest on your multi-million dollar debt.
That's exactly the model of farming that is going to fall by the wayside as consumers get educated about where their food comes from.
So that's the bad news.
The good news is that as society at large gets serious about saving this fragile planet, organic low-tech farming will blossom.
Organic farming is very labour intensive. You can expect your food to get substantially more expensive, because the days of bringing in brown people to do our harvests for slave wages is drawing to a close. Farm workers will be demanding and getting a living wage.
So what happens to the value of farmland?
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