While there are no easy answers to the questions above, many farmers and farm experts agree on one thing: long-term success has less to do with sheer size and more to do with management capacity.
“Right size is always a tricky way to think about it,” says Dr. Eric Micheels, associate professor in the department of agricultural and resource economics at the University of Saskatchewan.
“There’s no one right size.”
For decades, growth was often viewed as the clearest path to efficiency and competitiveness in Canadian agriculture. But Micheels says that approach can overlook a more important question: whether an operation is financially resilient, operationally manageable and aligned with the goals and capacity of the people running it.
“The right size depends on the resources available,” he says, adding that size has to match each farm’s specific resource base in terms of management, labour, capital, experience and time.
Why it matters
Farm expansion decisions carry heavier capital, labour and management stakes than they did a generation ago. Knowing where growth gets hardest, and where it stops paying, can shape whether an operation thrives or overreaches.
A balance at 10,000 acres
That idea resonates with veteran Saskatchewan farmer John Kotylak, who farms roughly 10,000 acres near Balcarres alongside his brother and their kids.
Kotylak believes his own farm has found a balance that works for them: large enough to remain efficient and profitable, but small enough to preserve the close involvement and family culture that define their operation.
“I still consider us the family farm,” he says, “and we’re just continuing what my grandfather and father had.”
For Kotylak, one of the most important questions farmers should ask themselves is not how quickly they can grow, but whether their operation could withstand the difficult years that inevitably come.
“They should talk to their dads, their uncles and hear about the bad times, not just the good times,” he says. “The young that are coming up should hear all those (stories), because then it prepares them for a crash, if it happens.”
Bigger farms, bigger demands
Thirty years ago, the average farm size in Canada was roughly 600 acres. Today, farms of 10,000 acres or more are common across Western Canada, with some operations managing more than 100,000 acres of owned and rented land, powered by advanced equipment, technology and specialized labour.
While some have been able to scale dramatically, managing growth remains a major challenge for most farms, Micheels says.
“You still have to be able to get the crop out of the ground. That becomes harder as we get larger.”
Agronomy also becomes more difficult across a larger geographic footprint, he says, as farmers juggle increasingly complex crop rotations, spray timing, harvest logistics and operational decisions across thousands of acres.
The human side of farming has also become more complex. Larger farms increasingly rely on non-family employees, creating new demands around hiring, retention, training and organizational management.
“How do we structure that employee experience and our human resource side to identify highly qualified employees, pay them the requisite wage, keep them in the business for a long time, help them grow?” Micheels asks.
Those pressures can create natural limits to growth for family-run farms.
That is something Saskatchewan farmland realtor Tim Hammond says he sees regularly. In a May 28 webinar on the topic of farm size trends, he suggested many family farms reach a “sweet spot” around 5,000 to 7,000 acres.
“Sometimes you get two brothers or two families that are farming together, you get that up to 12,000,” Hammond told viewers on the webinar.
Some farms successfully scale beyond that, he said, but growth often becomes significantly more difficult once operations outgrow their existing management systems.
“I’ve always said the hardest growth is from 2,500 acres to 6,000 acres. Once you hit 6,000, really the next logical step is another 6,000.”
Hammond said the farms that successfully reach larger scale are those that develop repeatable systems for labour, equipment and management, and build stronger capacity in leadership, human resources and organizational structure.
Where family farms still win
Even as farms continue to grow larger, many experts say family-run operations still hold important advantages, particularly around commitment, flexibility and direct connection to the land.
Hammond believes many family farms remain highly competitive because the people making management decisions are often the same people operating equipment, scouting fields and responding when problems arise.
“I think there’s tremendous strength in the family farm right now at 10,000, 12,000 acres,” he said. “I think they can operate more efficiently, possibly, than the bigger ones, and they’ve also got more commitment to the enterprise.”
That level of personal investment can matter during critical periods of the growing season.
“When it’s June 15, and somebody should be spraying, the employee goes to the lake, but the family goes out and does the spraying.”
Kotylak sees similar advantages in remaining personally involved in the day-to-day work on the farm. Because he and his family still spend time in the sprayer and other equipment, he believes they notice problems and patterns that might otherwise be missed.
“When it’s June 15, and somebody should be spraying, the employee goes to the lake, but the family goes out and does the spraying.”
Tim Hammond, Saskatchewan farmland realtor
This spring, Kotylak says he personally checked fields after seeding to spot issues and monitor how bio-stimulants were performing. That level of first-hand observation becomes harder to maintain at a very large scale, he says.
“If you were hiring people to do this, yes, they might get it and find it, but if you’re farming 30,000 acres, I can guarantee you they’re not looking over every acre.”
That direct involvement, he says, creates a level of awareness and accountability that becomes harder to maintain as operations grow larger and more layered.
The case for scale
Despite the advantages of a strong family farm culture, many within the industry believe Canadian farms will continue to get larger.
Canada’s largest private farmland owner, Robert Andjelic, is one of them. In a recent webinar on farm size trends in Canada, he argued that the long-term shift toward larger operations — driven by technological change, rising capital requirements and evolving business structures — is unlikely to reverse.
“That change has been taking place long before Darrel Monette (who owns about 274,000 acres in Canada and the United States) or I came along,” he said. “And that change is going to continue.”
For Andjelic, the defining feature of many modern large-scale farms is not simply acreage, but the fact that they increasingly operate as sophisticated businesses with formal management systems, marketing strategies and long-term financial planning.
“The real structural change is not just the existence of a 10,000-acre farm,” he said. “It is the fact that they’re run as businesses.”
Some of the most successful operations are those that understand not only production, but also finance, marketing, labour management and organizational strategy, Andjelic said.
Large farms can also create efficiencies that are difficult for smaller operations to achieve, which include greater purchasing power, stronger access to capital, more specialized labour, and the ability to spread risk and equipment costs across a larger acreage base.
At the same time, Andjelic rejects the idea that smaller farms cannot remain profitable or competitive.
In his view, well-run smaller farms can often compete effectively because they remain lean, efficient and closely connected to their operations.
“There’s room for everybody. We’ve got tenants that farm 1,000 acres that are just as good as any 20,000, 30,000-acre guy,” he said. “There is no right size. It depends on your corporate structure.”
Beyond size
Many experts argue that the conversation around “right size” misses the bigger issue altogether.
For some farmers, success may mean building highly scalable operations with larger teams and formal business structures. For others, it may mean maintaining a smaller farm with lower stress, more manageable debt or a stronger work-life balance.
Micheels says the starting point should not be acreage but goals: understanding a farm’s resources, opportunities and long-term priorities before deciding how growth should happen.
“What resources do we have? Where are the opportunities? How do we apply the resources to the opportunity to take advantage of it?”
The future of successful farming may depend less on pursuing scale alone and more on building operations whose size matches their management capacity, financial resilience, business structure and family goals.
The farms most likely to succeed long term, experts say, may not necessarily be the biggest, but instead the ones that best understand how to build systems, cultures and strategies that fit the scale they choose to operate at.
“I think for big corporate farms to survive in the future, they’ve got to figure out how to bring in that family culture,” Hammond said. “And for the family farm to expand is to adopt some of the corporate culture.”
Tim Hammond’s quotes as well as those of Robert Andjelic were taken from the same webinar, Too Big To Farm, hosted by GTF Productions, May 28, 2026.
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