With deep agricultural roots, Western Canada is a major farmland market. Historically, farmland was retained within families by succession. But with strong personal and economic linkages, succession can create a difficult situation for retiring farmers trying to make objective decisions about the future of their (land) assets. Some offer that increased farmland ownership by external investors has the potential to negatively affect farm structure. Yet there are sound financial reasons for institutional investors to want farmland as an investment, including diversification benefits for investment portfolios. Due to the complexity and heterogeneity of individual agricultural land market decisions, we build upon prior related models to develop an agent-based simulation framework designed to highlight the interplay between these potentially conflicting factors. To this end, we endogenize both farm succession and the presence of institutional investors who desire to purchase regional farmland as a financial asset. Under conservative assumptions, we find that the presence of institutional investors elevates farmland prices in the study region by approximately 15% to 40%, depending on scenario. With the presence of investors, farmers tend to lease more land over time to support their arable land base. Through the duration of our simulation, the total number of farms in the study region drops over time, while larger individual farms emerge. We conclude that institutional investors will affect future farming structure in the region, but their presence could manifest in very subtle ways. Most critically, farming success with institutional investors operating in this land market is contingent on future farmers being willing to rely on land rental rather than ownership in the process of farm maintenance or expansion.

加拿大西部有着深厚的农业根基，是一个主要的农田市场。从历史上看，耕地通过继承保留在家庭中。但是，由于个人和经济联系紧密，继任可能会给退休的农民造成困难，他们试图对其（土地）资产的未来做出客观的决定。一些人提出，外部投资者增加农田所有权可能会对农场结构产生负面影响。然而，机构投资者有充分的财务理由希望将农田作为一项投资，包括投资组合的多元化收益。由于个体农地市场决策的复杂性和异质性，我们在先前的相关模型的基础上开发了一个基于代理的模拟框架，旨在突出这些潜在冲突因素之间的相互作用。为此，我们将农场继承和希望购买区域农田作为金融资产的机构投资者的存在内生化。在保守的假设下，我们发现机构投资者的存在将研究区域的农地价格提高了大约 15% 到 40%，具体取决于情景。随着投资者的存在，随着时间的推移，农民往往会租用更多的土地来支持他们的耕地基础。在我们的模拟期间，研究区域的农场总数随着时间的推移而下降，同时出现了更大的个体农场。我们得出结论，机构投资者将影响该地区未来的农业结构，但是它们的存在可以以非常微妙的方式表现出来。最关键的是，在这个土地市场上经营的机构投资者的农业成功取决于未来的农民在农场维护或扩张过程中愿意依赖土地租赁而不是所有权。