Some rough numbers: 18 million hectares make up Western Australia’s freehold grain belt. Back in 1970 we had 20,000 growers and farms averaged about 1500ha in size, today we have 4000 broadacre farmers with the average farm about 3000ha.

There are some big family farms out there with more than one 100,000-acre operation, Nicoletti’s, which was sold in 2018, included 30 former properties across 66,000ha plus 127,000 leaseholds. That’s 30 families that came and went in the past 100 years across the eastern Wheatbelt as a result of farm aggregations.

Not that Western Australia is unique. The Simplit Family Farm in Iowa, USA, has been hoovering up 160-acre titles across the Midwest of the United States for more than two hundred years, amassing 35,000ha of cropping land.

But that pales into insignificance with the 570,000ha the Prodimax family runs in Russia which it put together in less than 30 years since the end of communism.

This is matched by the Verevski family’s operation in Ukraine which is listed as having 570,000ha of cropping land. Then there is the Bom Futuro Family Farm in Brazil which just cracks the million acres of crop at 400,000ha and the Grobocopatel family who run 250,000ha in Argentina. I’m talking tractor and harvester farms not horse and cow country, so we are talking big operations.

While we may think our version of the family farm will be here forever, think again. The mega global family farms are on the march and so are the corporates. Both have cracked the formula for running large complex cropping operations with many tens of seeding and harvesting rigs working the ground.

The emergence of big four-wheel drive tractors and 80, 100, 120ft bars plus precision ag has changed the game of big agriculture. Since the turn of the century more than 100 global corporates have piled in the race to take up millions of hectares of cropping land globally pushing out the traditional family farm.

This rush of the mega investor, the sovereign investment funds and superannuation funds into agriculture has been supercharged by the global financial crisis of 2007 as they sought to spread their capital risks.

For example, between 2008 and 2020 Harvard Management Company, which manages Harvard University’s endowment fund amassed more than 40 large rural properties in Brazil covering more than 1 million acres, twice the size of all the farmland in the school’s home State of Massachusetts.

In Australia the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has been a major buyer of farmland along with the Saudis and Chinese. The percentage of Australian rural land owned by foreign buyers currently sits at 12.3 per cent and it is steadily growing, with no indication the Government will put a cap on it.

China remains the biggest off shore investor in Australian farmland with a 2 per cent holding (7.8 million hectares, mostly pastoral with 750,000 being freehold), but investors from the Netherlands, United States and United Kingdom own more freehold land.

This foreign interest is outcompeting Australian farming families from being able to keep up with the race to aggregate to viable holdings.

Historically, Western Australian farming families have managed to buy each other out at the rate of 3 per cent a year over the last 60 crops to drill the number of farm businesses down from the 20,000 to the current 4000 across the Wheatbelt. Three out of four have left the industry and if anything, the speed of aggregation has sped up.

The chances of many of today’s family farms surviving two more rounds of succession planning to double and double again in size within the lifetime of today’s kids is long odds, particularly when up against the competition of global investors with deep pockets.

In fact, by 2100 Western Australia’s 18m hectares could be split up into just 180 farms of 100,000ha, a risk that is real particularly if the corporates are allowed to have free reign and keep buying at their current rate.