Last week I wrote about the people who reached the top, the successful landowners featured in the Land Report 100. If you haven't read it yet, take a look here.

This week I want to write about something different. Not a success story. A story about scale, and about what happens when even the biggest, most sophisticated operations run into trouble.

As I started digging into the Monette Farms restructuring, a couple of numbers are eye popping! One is the CA$920 million in secured debt and the other is:

274,000 acres.

Sit with that for a second. That's not a farm. That's not even a really big farm. That's a small country's worth of ground.

That's nearly 12 townships.

That's every quarter section on each side of the road for 428 miles.

That's roughly 430 square miles.

It's almost four Theodore Roosevelt National Parks.

It's roughly 1,700 quarter sections.

It's nearly nine cities the size of Fargo.

How do you even begin to value that?

How many appraisers does it take? How many title companies? How many attorneys? How many county's, provinces, and states? How many tenants and leases? How many lenders, each with their own security position? How many crop insurance policies? How many water rights? How many mineral interests? The logistics alone isn't for the faint of heart!

The short version

Monette Farms — a Saskatchewan-based operation with land and leases across Western Canada, Montana, Colorado, and Arizona — filed for creditor protection under Canada's Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) on April 21, 2026. This isn't a simple liquidation. CCAA is closer to a U.S. Chapter 11 than a shutdown — it gives a company time, under court supervision, to sell assets, negotiate with lenders, and try to preserve what can be preserved.

The pressure point was a senior lending facility that came due April 15, with roughly CA$829.5 million owed on it, inside a total secured debt load of about CA$919.5 million. A lender group led by Scotiabank sits at the center of the case. The court appointed FTI Consulting Canada as monitor, and a court-approved sales and investment solicitation process (SISP) put roughly 274,000 acres on the market — Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Montana, Colorado, Arizona, Alberta, and British Columbia — with the whole portfolio marketed at around CA$1.05 billion.

The first approved sale came August 19, 2026: a Nevada cattle operation, Byner Cattle Co., picked up about 3,100 acres near Aguila, Arizona, along with a seed-processing facility and cold storage. The broker reportedly reached out to 17 prospective buyers. One formal offer came back.

One offer. On land that had been listed for a combined $23.5 million.

That tells you something about how thin the buyer pool gets once you're talking about this price point, this fast, under this much legal complexity.

Why haven't they called me?

I'll be honest — as I read through this, I couldn't help but smile and think: why haven't they called me?

Not because I think I know more than the lenders, the monitor, or the attorneys running this process. I don't. But this is what I do. I sell land. Every day, my job is figuring out how to create real value for a piece of ground — how to get the right buyers looking at the right property at the right time.

Granted, I don't have 274,000 acres in my database currently this morning, but I could find you 15,000 acres through Pifer's and likely much more if I put the word out! I've spent my career thinking about exactly the problem this case is wrestling with: how do you find true market value for land, efficiently, when the stakes are this high?

Why the process is this slow and why it doesn't have to be

Here's where I'll say something a little more pointed than I usually do.

Some of why this process is so long and so expensive is legitimate. When you owe nearly a billion dollars, you don't get to simply decide to sell. The lenders have rights. The court has responsibilities. Every other creditor in line deserves transparency about how assets are being valued and disposed of. Every dollar matters, because every dollar is somebody's collateral.

But if I'm honest, a lot of what makes these processes so cumbersome isn't the law itself. It's the fact that the law had to be built to protect against bad actors. Every layer of oversight, every extra approval, every monitor and motion and hearing exists because somewhere along the way, someone tried to hide value, favor a friendly buyer, shortchange a creditor, or quietly move an asset out from under the people who were owed money. The rules got complicated because trust got broken.

That's the part that frustrates me. If everyone in a process like this — the debtor, the lenders, the monitor, the brokers — was truly, transparently working in the best interest of the creditors and the sellers, a lot of this could move faster and produce better results for everyone involved. A monitor still gets appointed. A sales process still gets designed and court-approved. Cross-border transactions — like the Arizona sale, which involves transferable state land leases — still need approval on both sides of the border. Provincial ownership restrictions in Saskatchewan may still limit who can bid on part of the portfolio. But none of that has to mean a slow, expensive, guarded process where only 17 calls go out and one offer comes back. It could mean an honest, wide-open marketplace where value gets discovered quickly because everyone actually believes the process is fair.

Instead, the system defaults to caution, because caution is what protects people when trust can't be assumed. That's not a knock on the professionals doing the work in this case — it's a knock on how many times cases like this have gone sideways before, for enough people, that the whole system now moves at the speed of its worst examples instead of its best ones.

Where my mind keeps going: auctions

I'll admit my bias here. I believe a well-advertised public auction is one of the most transparent ways to establish real value for land — precisely because it removes the room for bad actors to operate. Everyone gets the same opportunity to bid. The market speaks on a set day, in front of everyone. The seller finds out, in real time, exactly what buyers are willing to pay, and there's no quiet room where a favored buyer gets a better look than everyone else.

Now, a restructuring involving hundreds of thousands of acres spread across multiple states and provinces is a completely different animal than a farm auction back home. There are secured lenders with specific rights, court approvals required at every step, leasehold interests, foreign and provincial ownership rules, and dozens of moving legal pieces that simply don't exist in a normal land sale.

But that's exactly my point. If a genuinely honest, transparent, fair liquidation process could be guaranteed — if everyone trusted that the value discovered would be real and the playing field would be level — a huge amount of this legal scaffolding could come down, and creditors would likely see better recoveries, faster. Instead, we get a process built for the worst-case scenario, applied to every case, because that's the only way to protect people when you can't tell the honest actors from the dishonest ones in advance.

Seventeen calls producing one offer isn't a market speaking. It's a market being asked a question, quietly, by people it doesn't fully trust yet.

One disclaimer

Everything I've read here comes from public court filings, media reports, and online sources. I haven't interviewed the Monette family, the lenders, the court-appointed monitor, or the attorneys involved. I'm simply a land broker from North Dakota who's fascinated by land — how it's valued, how it's financed, and what happens when the numbers stop working.

Just like last week's article about America's largest landowners, this story leaves me with more questions than answers. And maybe that's the fun part. I keep reading because every one of these stories teaches us something.

Same fascination, different story

Last week I wrote about people who built incredible land portfolios. This week I'm reading about one of the largest agricultural restructurings in North America.

Different stories. Same fascination.

Land. How it's bought. How it's financed. How it's managed. How it's preserved. And sometimes, how it's sold.

That's why I'll keep reading. I'll keep asking questions. And I'll keep trying to learn from every story, whether it's the biggest success, or one of the biggest restructurings.

This article is based on publicly available court filings and media reporting only. It is not a substitute for reviewing primary court documents, and readers with a direct interest in the case should consult the FTI Consulting monitor's page for official filings.

Author: Steve Link is a Partner and Land Broker with Pifer's Auction & Realty, specializing in agricultural land sales, auctions, valuations, and transition planning throughout North Dakota, Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, Iowa, and Nebraska. Whether you're considering selling, planning for the next generation, or simply want to better understand your land's value, Steve believes the best decisions are made with good information and thoughtful planning.