GUELPH — Western Ontario farmland prices keep creeping up.
There weren’t any meteoric rises. But some counties saw as much as a $1,600 per acre jump in farmland prices in one year, according to the latest farmland survey by University of Guelph professor Dr. Brady Deaton.
In his annual survey, Deaton asks farmers what prices they’re seeing on farmland in their area. The latest, from 2018, was just released last month, and includes feedback from 1,271 farmers. He reports median results, rather than averages, to counteract the effect of extreme outliers in the data.
Surprisingly, there was one drop, though a small one. Elgin County saw a $400 decrease in the cost per acre of farmland, slipping from $12,000 to $11,600 this year.
Most counties in Western Ontario saw an increase. Chatham-Kent and Bruce Counties saw the biggest increase. Chatham-Kent median farmland prices increased from $12,000/acre to $13,600/acre and Bruce County saw a jump from $8,500 to $10,000 an acre.
