British farmers could soon call Canada home

Brexit vote has some British farmers considering relocation

By Diego Flammini
Assistant Editor, North American Content
Farms.com

Farmers in Ontario may be welcoming neighbours from across the pond in the near future.

After June’s decision by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union as part of the Brexit vote, some British farmers could call southern Ontario home.

“We will see some British farmers coming,” Murray Gibbons, a rural realtor in Waterford, Ontario told the Financial Post.

At the core, the decision for some to relocate to Ontario comes down to income.

According to the Financial Post, 55 per cent of U.K. farmers’ total income comes from the EU’s Common Agriculture Policy.

Lucia Zitti, an economist with the National Farmers Union, told the Financial Post that less than half of farmers’ income comes from sales, and that if the EU removes some of its supports in subsidized sectors like livestock and grains, farms will suffer.

According to Dan Mazier, president of Manitoba’s Keystone Agricultural Producers, Canadian land prices could attract farmers from overseas, but he warns they'll have to adpot to certain regulations.

What might British farmers pay for land?

Figures couresty of Stats Canada.

“The irony of a move from Britain to Canada is that they would be exchanging complex quotas in that system for Canadian supply management, which is a quote regime of its own,” he told the Financial Post.