Author
Listed:
- Weersink, Alfons
- Bannon, Nicholas
- Riddle, Julia
- Turland, Madeline
Abstract
The amount of farmland in Canada serves as the basis for debate on a host of public policy issues ranging from food security to sustainability to competiveness. Despite the interest and the basis for policies such as land use controls, there is little documentation on total farmland area and composition in Canada. This report documents the changes in the total amount of farmland in Canada using data from the Census of Agriculture. The national and provincial trends in the composition of farmland from 1921 to 2016 are described with additional focus at the county level for Ontario. There are approximately 160 million acres of farmland in Canada. While there have generally not been significant changes in the amount of farmland between census periods, there were drops of around 4% in the 1981 and 2011 census. Most of this farmland is located in Saskatchewan (40%) and Alberta (31%), while the total amount in Ontario has fallen by 50% since 1941 and represents 8% of the Canadian total. Approximately half of Canada’s total farmland is used to grow crops. The amount of cropland has increased by 28% over the past 40 years with much of the growth occurring from 1976 to 2001. Seeded pasture, which makes up less than 10% of total farmland, has also increased over time with much of the increase occurring in the Prairies. While cropland and seeded pasture generally rose over time, the small decline in national farmland was due to the 92% drop in the area allocated to summerfallow since 1976. The total loss of 3.1 million acres of farmland in Ontario since 1976 is due largely to the reduction in non-cropland as the area planted to crop rose by 4% in total from 1976 to 2016. These changes in total farmland and its mix are evident for all regions although the mix varies significantly. Counties in the southwestern portion of the province have over 75% of their total farmland allocated to growing crops whereas this is approximately 50% in the rest of the province. This percentage, although smaller than in the southwestern region, has also increased over time due to the drop in pasture, fallow, and woodlot/wetland area.
Suggested Citation
Weersink, Alfons & Bannon, Nicholas & Riddle, Julia & Turland, Madeline, 2019.
"Canada's Supply of Agricultural Land,"
Working Papers
292272, University of Guelph, Institute for the Advanced Study of Food and Agricultural Policy.
Handle:
RePEc:ags:uguiwp:292272
DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.292272
Download full text from publisher
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:uguiwp:292272. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iagueca.html .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.