Barn landscape photo9/16/2023 ![]() ![]() In 2016, giant Prairie farms larger than 2,000 hectares - just six per cent of farms overall - owned nearly a third of all farmland, and brought in a third of all revenues and net income. That concentration is most dramatic in the Prairie provinces (Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta), which make up 70 per cent of the country's farmland. In 2001, the average Canadian farm was 274 hectares in size that number reached 327 hectares in 2021.īased on the new average, Canada can be said to have lost the equivalent of three full farms per day for 20 years.Īccording to a report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), what is left of Canadian farmland is becoming concentrated in the hands of bigger and bigger businesses. In the same period, the size of farms increased. The issue of consolidationĪlong with the decline in farm area, most provinces have seen an even more rapid decline in individual farms - down 23 per cent in the 20-year period. Some farmers say another factor may be responsible. Still, land conversion only accounts for a fraction of the reported loss. Some arable land, AAFC reported, may also be abandoned or become flooded or re-naturalized. Similarly, the census doesn't help specifically identify land that was once leased from the Crown, adopted by public parks or turned over to treaty land. had originally.ĭarrel Cerkowniak, a physical scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, said some conversion is harder to take into account.įor example, as farmers make crop rotations, wooded land once used for grazing might be reported only as forest to the census. ![]() But what was lost still amounted to 26 per cent of the available prime land B.C. ![]() cities - thanks in part to provincial land protections introduced in 1973. The largest conversion from arable land to settlement happened in the Golden Horseshoe area around Toronto.ĭuring that 40-year period, 85 per cent of all urban settlement in the Golden Horseshoe was built on once-prime agricultural land.īy contrast, much less prime land was lost around B.C. Reports from Statistics Canada comparing surveys from 1971 to 2011 showed an estimated 642,100 hectares of agricultural land were lost to new settlements around Canada's largest metropolitan areas. Reasons for conversionĬanada's cities are responsible for the majority of arable land converted to urban settlements. Using a variety of methods, including geospatial analysis, researchers at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) calculated the area across Canada that they classify as "cropland" was 46 million hectares in 2021, down seven per cent, from 50 million hectares, in 2001. Other datasets paint a slightly different picture of the Canadian agricultural landscape. It is a voluntary poll that asks farmers to self-classify and account for the area of their farms, leaving room for human error. The recent joint statement by the OFA specifically opposed new kinds of housing development on "prime agricultural areas." Those areas are classified, by Canada's Land Inventory, as having soil with "moderate-to-no limitations for agriculture."īut the Census of Agriculture cannot account for soil quality. Using the same formula, Canada can be said to have lost the equivalent of seven small farms a day for 20 years. In an op-ed for the Toronto Star last year, she cited statistics from the Census of Agriculture about the country's rapidly diminishing farmland, including the fact that Ontario is losing an average of nine family farms a week. Peggy Brekveld, the first signature on the joint statement and president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA), has long been critical of development on farmland. "Ontario boasts some of Canada's richest and most fertile farmland and these policy changes put the sustainability of that land and the food system it provides at great risk," the statement read. The Ontario government is giving up parts of the Greenbelt for development, citing the province's housing crisis.īut last month, a group of farmers produced a joint statement that effectively halted one proposal from Bill 97 that would have allowed new kinds of residential and urban development on prime farmland. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |