As farms grow increasingly industrious, the days of the traditional "ma and pa" farm are behind us. For decades, operators have faced intense pressure to expand just to survive rising input costs, thinning profit margins, and skyrocketing land prices.
“There's been a pattern going on in agriculture for some time, probably since the end of the Second World War, really, where this push towards intensification and getting larger happened, and that picked up steam in the 1960s and 1970s, and today has continued that way,” said Wayne Caldwell, a professor in Rural Planning and Development (OAC) at the University of Guelph.
While some farmers have chosen to become large-scale, industrial operations, others are finding entirely different uses for their land.
