Why East Central Saskatchewan

Land is still affordable in East Central Saskatchewan, providing tremendous opportunities to cattle producers who are running into price and availability problems in their home areas.

Not that there is anything wrong with the land; the land is good, but the economic realities of grain production have resulted in low prices.

Farmers in the region have a long grain farming tradition. Grain has been grown here since the first settlers, many of them east Europeans, came here in the late 1800s and the early part of the last century, and broke the sod.

Since the mid-1990s, grain producers have suffered severe impact from the loss of the Crow Subsidy, and international subsidy wars far beyond their control.

Freight rates have increased more than three-fold for grain producers in the region. Being located at the furthest point from both the Lakehead and the West Coast terminals, freight rates increases that came with the removal of the Crow rate have caused a major increase in operating costs.

This has coincided with a sharp decline and then moderation in grain prices, at a time when the use of large equipment in grain farming has made the land more marginal for grain production, due to the common occurrence of potholes and bush.

All of that has had a very direct impact on land prices, as illustrated in the following graph. Land prices in East Central Saskatchewan continue to decline or, at best, increase marginally, while prices in Alberta continue to strengthen significantly.

The result is that the good land of East Central Saskatchewan is still affordable and very low-priced by the standards of other western Canadian agricultural areas, and well-suited to cattle production.

It is the last cattle frontier.