By John Miner
September 2, 2025
Excerpt from article:
When the SOLD sign goes up on the farm down the road, there's an increasing chance your new neighbour might turn out to be a pension fund. Insurance giant and international fund manager, Manulife Financial Corporation launched a new retirement fund this summer that invests in fa rmland, real estate, in frastructure, and timber.
Available for defined contribution pension plans, the pitch to investors is that these assets can protect against inflation, provide diversification, and may reduce volatility, improving retirement outcomes for Canadians.
"This marks a significant development in the Canadian retirement market," Brett Marchand, head of Manulife Group Retirement, Canada, said in a release announcing the fund.
But Manulife isn't alone in developing an appetite to own farm land. Other investment funds have looked at the increases in farmland values and concluded their portfolios can benefit from more than bonds and equities.
"It's attracting interest and it is attracting capital," said Stephen Johnston, a director at Omnigence Asset Management, an investment firm that currently owns 140,000 acres of farmland across Canada valued at $500 million.
In the past year, Omnigence added 18,100 acres to its farmland portfolio, boosting the value of its holding by $100 million.
Johnston, who is credited with launching Canada's first RRSP/TFSA eligible farmland investment vehicle in 2007, said interest by financial institutions in farmland is basically increasing everywhere.
"It is not a blip," he said in an interview. Behind the increased institutional interest in farmland are concerns about stagflation , a condition where there is below trend growth and above-trend inflation, Johnston said.
"A pension plan is looking to hedge that risk and farmland hedges stagflation risk extremely well."