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The 2024 Farming Smarter Conference and Trade Show recently kicked off with a Fireside Chat between John Kolk of Farming Smarter and Robert Andjelic of Andjelic Land Inc., Canada's largest farmland holder.
Andjelic explained that he has a long history of entrepreneurship and investing, starting with him buying his first house for renovation at the age of 17 and later, he was a cofounder of a masonry company, that started with doing masonry housefront, then drifting into doing commercial buildings. In 1987, Andjelic says, he went into commercial real estate independently. After foreseeing the coming recession with the demise of the subprime market he and his family put their entire portfolio of over 250,000 square feet up for sale.
"This was my and my family's lifetime of work, so it wasn't an easy decision, but I foresaw the market crash coming and I didn't think that I had any choice," said Andjelic. "My idea was to sell at the top, then get back into the market at 50 cents on the dollar, after the economic crash took its toll. In between I played the commodities market for around four years and eventually I decided to look for something else, that I thought would have a better future. Being in commercial real-estate most of my life I've seen manufacture's, distributors and other businesses go broke as China took a bigger and bigger market share. Before going into another business venture, I wanted to see what was Canada's advantage that we had that couldn't be easily duplicated and produced in the other countries, no matter...