By Jim Hagarty
2011
A farmer in Perth County, Ontario, Canada, sold 335 acres of prime farmland divided into three farms in the late 1970s for just under $300,000, a pretty good figure at the time.
According to a recent story on land values in our local newspaper, that farmer today, if he could get top dollar, would walk away with a cheque with the figure $4,690,000 written on it. If that farmer were still around to read about this, he would probably be crying big salty tears in his beer. On the other hand, he paid only $4,500 in the early 1940s for one of those three farms (100 acres) which he sold for $75,000 eventually, so that must have seemed almost more amazing to him then than today’s figures would if he could learn about them. (Update: In 2018, those 335 acres could fetch as much as $7 million.)
Another farmer in the same area sold his farm a few years earlier for $19,000. He was going to buy a house in town with his money which he could easily do but the new owner said he wasn’t going to use the farmhouse so the farmer could just stay as long as he wanted to. So, the farmer did. I don’t know whether or not he paid rent but after a few years, he decided to move to town. Unfortunately for him, house prices had zoomed past him so quickly in those few years that his $19,000 wouldn’t buy him a house by then. If he was still around, with that money he couldn’t even buy a decent van to live in down by the river.
