Farm Credit Canada CEO sits in the hot seat between financiers and Canadian family farmers
Good morning. Canada’s agriculture industry is trying to get its global swagger back. So Farm Credit Canada hired an Ottawa outsider with a finance background to help make it possible.
In focus today is the big bet on the farm, along with the SpaceX IPO hype. Hi, I’m Kate Helmore, agriculture reporter with The Globe. Last November, I met the chief executive of Farm Credit Canada in a boardroom in a high-rise in downtown Regina. She surprised me.
FCC is the bedrock of Canadian agriculture. It is one of only three financial Crown corporations in the country, and it is the only one to focus entirely on one sector.
Its history stretches back a century, and for most of that time the corporation has been led by white men who – as the joke goes – are born in the halls of Prairie agricultural colleges.born in Montreal, where she was one of the first Black girls to attend her Catholic school. She cut her teeth as a Royal Bank of Canada branch manager before moving to Export Development Canada, where she wrapped up her tenure as chief sustainability officer.
FCC has traditionally been viewed as a senior secured lender, whose focus is primary agriculture . If a farmer needed funding for a new barn, FCC was where they went. But the corporation wanted to stretch beyond these borders. Canada is an agricultural superpower.
It’s acknowledged here and around the world that the sector carries a global punch when it comes to commodities: fertilizer, grains, beef and pork, among others. We grow just about everything. But Canada falls short when it comes to turning these raw productsHendricks believes her mission is to make the FCC a catalyst for capital and a unifying leader for Canada's disjointed agriculture sector. There is a dearth of capital entering industry.
Agrifood companies attract just 4 per cent of growth capital, according to a recent RBC report. Overall investment is lower today than it was a decade ago, with deals down 29 per cent and the value of those deals down 32 per cent. Fragmentation is part of the cause, and some of this is structural.
There are many steps between the soil and the grocery-store shelf, and the businesses are often tucked away in rural communities, hidden from the average urbanite. There are around 400 associations representing business interests at each step of the process, all clamouring for government help and investor funds. At home, Canadian family farmers are usually suspicious of outsiders such as Hendricks.
Plus, the sector is mired in questions of Canadian identity, too: East versus West, francophone versus anglophone, rural versus urban. The impact of the trade war doesn’t help. Tariffs on pork, seafood and canola have since been eased, but not eliminated. And today, the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, which facilitates the transit of one-third of the world’s fertilizer, has doubled some prices.
Hendricks’s mandate is to make FCC the unifying force Canadian food production has long needed and, in so doing, attract fat stacks of capital.
“It’s almost as if, as a country, we kind of take food for granted,” Hendricks told an FCC conference in February. Since taking the helm in 2023, she’s launched a new arm of the organization called FCC Capital. So far, she’s raised $5-billion from a host of investors, including generalist funds and those that specialize in agriculture. She spent her first 90 days at FCC criss-crossing the country.
Each summer she hits the road for around 10 days to visit as many branches and clients as possible and talk to them in person. Those listening skills are extremely valuable, but the stakes are high. Canadians are skeptical at best, pessimistic at worst, summarized one of my sources – venture capitalist Alison Sunstrum, head of a fund that focuses on food systems and agriculture. If Hendricks succeeds, she’s unlikely to get the credit due, Sunstrum told me.
A failure, on the other hand, is unlikely to be ignored.
“She’s brave as hell, that’s what I would say,” she said. The SpaceX IPO will be the start of a rocket-ship ride for retail investors: Under Mr. Musk’s leadership, an explosion is just as likely as a safe landing. The Wall Street hype machine is going into overdrive to sell the US$75-billion SpaceX IPO to retail investors.
But, Andrew Willis warns,Toronto and Montreal are embarking on a period of mass school closings, driven not by falling birth rates or changing political priorities but by a failure to buildGlobal stocks rallied as investors rushed to buy the latest dip in tech stocks, while oil prices fell after Israel and Iran agreed to Wall Street and TSX futures rose after U.S. stocks ended mostly higher on Monday and Canada’s main stock index clawed back some of Friday’s decline. Catch up on yesterday’s session Overseas, the pan-European STOXX 600 was up 0.56 per cent in morning trading.
Britain’s FTSE 100 lost 0.31 per cent, Germany’s DAX gained 0.71 per cent and France’s CAC 40 advanced 0.90 per cent. In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei closed 2.17 per cent higher, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng finished 0.37 per cent lower.
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