Canadian Farmland Values Still Rising, but Gains Vary by Province

Oct 03, 2025

Canadian farmland values are still climbing although the gains are uneven, according to Farm Credit Canada’s mid-year farmland values review.

Released Wednesday, the report shows cultivated farmland values rose an average of 6% in the first half of 2025, slightly faster than the 5.5% gain during the same period in 2024. Over the 12 months from July 2024 to June 2025, values rose 10.4%, up from a 9.3% increase in the previous 12-month period.

However, the national figure masks wide variability between provinces. Manitoba led farmland value growth over the past six months with an 11.2% increase, followed by New Brunswick at 9.4% and Alberta at 6.6%. Saskatchewan matched the national average at 6%, while Quebec (2.6%), Prince Edward Island (2.3%), and Nova Scotia (1%) posted only modest gains. Ontario and British Columbia saw no change, underscoring the uneven nature of the market.

“Demand for farmland remained strong in the first half of the year regardless of lower commodity prices,” said J.P. Gervais, FCC’s chief economist. “Buyers continued to invest, driven by long-term confidence in the agriculture sector and the limited supply of available land. While growth is uneven across provinces, the overall trend points to promising growth opportunities in agriculture.”

Despite notable increases in several regions, the overall range of sale prices per acre has moved up only modestly. Provinces that experienced sharp appreciation in recent years are now seeing signs of softening, while regions with more moderate past growth continue to show solid momentum. The broader market appears to be stabilizing, FCC said.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids