ACME, Alta. - From his head office in the southern Alberta town of Acme, Dave Price smiles at the thought of expensively dressed office workers streaming from their downtown towers to queue up for lunch at his popular Sunterra Markets.
Acme is only an hour's drive from Calgary, but its endless Prairie sky, near-empty main street and total population of 826 make it seem a world away. It was here that his family started a farm that would eventually grow to include full hog and cattle production, meat-packing, crop and grazing lands, and a chain of seven Alberta retail locations that offer a fusion of high-end supermarket and restaurant.
The farm-to-fork company, run by chairman Dave and four brothers, is a classic example of how Canadian farms and ranches are grabbing more links in the food chain, growing in size and becoming big business.
"I think if you went and visited with virtually any progressive farmer, you'd find they were looking for ways of participating in a value-added kind of activity,'' Dave says, shrugging off notions that the Sunterra business plan is unique.
In fact, the Price family's diversification efforts started when their parents, Stan and Flo, had their grain crops destroyed by hail four out of their first five years.
"Anybody that's going to get ahead in agriculture is not any different than anybody else that's in business for business. They're looking for ways to be successful.''
Statistics Canada's 2006 census of agriculture, released Wednesday, backs him up.
More than 5,900 farms across the country posted gross farm receipts in excess of $1 million last year, a 27 per cent increase in just five years. Back in 1981, the million-dollar-plus operations represented a mere 0.3 per cent of all farms. By May 2006, they represented 2.6 per cent of the country's farms and were responsible for 40 per cent of total receipts.
Consolidation in agriculture, like any other sector of the economy, is inevitable, says Price. Especially if the goal is to be competitive in a global market.
"You would not be able to find another definable business entity that would not be doing the same thing,'' he says.
"How many individual barbers are left in business? How many car dealers are a local proprietorship? They don't exist. They're the exception rather than the rule.''
Larry Couture, co-ordinator of the agricultural business program at Olds College in central Alberta, says the number of million-dollar farms is almost certain to keep rising.
That doesn't mean they all need to follow the same model. Other big-farm concepts include the heavyweight commodity producers and the smaller but more intensive niche market producers.
"Consolidation is an ongoing process,'' says Couture.
"It happened essentially from the time the Prairies were first settled, and it proceeds at a pace. Sometimes that pace is slower, sometimes it speeds up in reaction to some sort of factor in the external environment.''
Hogs, poultry and egg operations are far more likely than any other farms to be fetching $1 million or more in gross receipts yearly, according to the 2006 census.
Field crop farms are the most common type in Canada, but few belong to the million-dollar club -- only 1.5 per cent in 2006. In contrast, 17.8 per cent of all hog farms brought in over $1 million in gross receipts.
Farms are getting bigger even in the supply-managed sectors of poultry, eggs and dairy, where the amount of production and the prices paid are set by marketing agencies. Over 15 per cent of poultry and egg operations fell into the million-and-over receipts class in 2006.
Efficiencies that costly new technologies can bring mean bigger farms can lower the per-unit costs of production.
"It's a good thing insofar as that's the way you reduce costs,'' says Bill Woods, chairman of the Chicken Farmers of Ontario.
"You can be more efficient. But if all you're going to do is pass it on to the consumer, the actual farmer doesn't get to keep the benefits of those per-unit gains, and that's why they've got to get bigger to be in the same place.''
Woods, who also runs a chicken operation in Wellington Country, north of Guelph, says the effect of consolidation has also brought about big changes to the rural Canadian lifestyle.
"As this has happened, a lot of small communities have suffered from population shifts out.''
Susan Schafers, an egg farmer just west of Edmonton, says it's also important to put size in perspective.
In the United States, the size of some farms boggles the mind. The top egg producing company there holds more than 23 million hens -- more than the entire Canadian industry.
"It's a very different kind of scale that we have here in Canada.''
