Growing Forward with Agricultural Policy: Strengths and Weaknesses of Canada's Agricultural Data Sets

Abstract

Canada has four major sources of information on the financial and production aspects of agriculture: the Census of Agriculture, the Farm Financial Survey, the Agricultural Taxation Data Program, and administrative data resulting from Business Risk Management programs. These data sets form the basis for the analysis of Canadian agricultural policy, which has shifted from a focus on farm family income enhancement, to commodity‐specific supply stabilization, to enhancing the competitiveness of the sector and individual operations. The changing focus of agricultural policy together with the growing heterogeneity of the farm sector has significant implications for the forms of analysis conducted and the suitability of the data collected for analysis. No single data set supplies all the data necessary to determine the need for and effect of farm support programs. Census data provide descriptive measures of total production but lack detailed farm financial information. Such data is provided by tax data but information is not provided on assets/liabilities, inputs/outputs, and demographics. Proposals to consider the individuals behind a unit of production in the determination of support eligibility would drive an even larger gap between data demands and the current supply of publicly provided data.

Opportunities and Challenges for Big Data in Agricultural and Environmental Analysis

“…Agricultural policy was initially designed to help improve the financial well-being of the farm family and subsequently the rural economy (Gardner, 1992;Schmitz, 2010). Given the historic homogeneity of the farm sector, in which a single farm tended to be operated by a single farmer and supported a single farm family, policies such as extension efforts or commodity price support programs were effective at enhancing farm family income (Poon and Weersink, 2014). The distribution of farm size tended to be normal; for example, the average and median herd size for dairy farms in Ontario was around 40 cows in the early 1990s.…”

Do Farm Support Programs Reward Production Inefficiency?

“…First, our finding suggests that enhancing production efficiency may improve farm competitiveness and profitability and reduce program payout. From the government's perspective, if BRM programs are meant for risk reduction and income stabilization—which according to Poon and Weersink () were the explicit goals in previous incarnations of farm subsidy programs in Canada—then, programs complementary to the current BRM suite can be devised to incentivize farmers to improve their production efficiency and reduce the cost of delivering BRM programs. Providing monetary incentives to enhance productivity has been used outside the agricultural sectors.…”

“…Concerns such as the unpredictability of the program, slowness of payment, discrepancies between payments and actual losses, and ineffectiveness in dealing with severe disasters have led to the replacement the CAIS by AgriStability programs under Growing Forward (Agriculture and Agri‐Food Canada ). Growing Forward is a comprehensive program that is intended to improve the productivity, efficiency, competitiveness, and profitability of the Canadian agriculture sector, with income stabilization embedded within the policy with a maintained focus on producers and their income variation (Poon and Weersink ). The AgriStability program is a margin‐based core farm support and BRM program that is available to eligible farmers regardless of the commodities they produce.…”

The Growing Heterogeneity in the Farm Sector and Its Implications*

“…The farm families were also not as well off financially as their nonfarm counterparts so agricultural policy was focused on enhancing net farm income for the individual farm family. As Poon and Weersink () note, the direct linkage between the farm and farm families meant that agricultural policies, such as extension efforts or commodity price support programs, targeted to farm operations also helped improve the financial well‐being of the farm family and subsequently the rural economy.…”

“…It does not include a minimum sales criterion; rather Canadian farmers and the farms they operate are self‐identified with potentially minimal sales. The all‐encompassing definition of a farm permits a measurement of total agricultural production, which is the purpose of the census (Poon and Weersink ). Determining aggregate measures such as total production or farmland area requires measuring all potential farmers and farms, but there are cautions with using such a broad definition of a farm for other purposes, particularly given the increasing heterogeneity of the sector as discussed further below.…”