Statistical Analysis & Food Security
In a groundbreaking new release, Statistics Canada this week published data on farms that sell food locally, and farms that use beneficial management practices that reduce environmental risk.
The role of national statistical reporting in agriculture is a critical part of a country’s food security strategy.
In the ‘Great Grain Robbery’ of 1973, export merchants oversold domestic crops to Russia, who was hiding the severity of its own shortfall. The subsequent spike in grain prices led to food shortages, and prompted the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to implement mandatory reporting of export sales thereafter.
In recent decades however, food security has not been the focus of national federal statistical agencies, and agriculture surveys have been reduced. Stats Can’s Field Crop Reporting Series, for example, is scaling back its efforts, causing some controversy among grain analysts.
Statistics Canada’s data reporting has grown steadily less relevant to the grain trade over the years, irrespective of tweaks like this to the methodology for estimating supply and demand. And mandatory export sales reporting has never been implemented in Canada.
The government is currently considering it, in order to improve transparency in the prices paid to farmers by grain elevators in the countryside. That’s a noble enough goal, and more information is always a good thing when it comes to prices in commodity supply chains.
However, in this day and age, it won’t help solve domestic food security challenges, nor address environmental damage caused by input-intensive commodity crop farmland practices. Thus, it is with much excitement and appreciation that we now have data from Statistics Canada’s new “Survey on Local Food and Beneficial Management Practices, 2022.”
Let’s Dig In!
According to the summary, just under 8% of Canadian farms sell food locally. Beef and fresh produce farms make up ¾ of these, which makes sense as those two capture sales of everything from 4-H cows to market stands to wine.
Only 9% of the Canadian farms that sell food locally are supply-managed and vertically-integrated dairy, poultry and hog production operations, but the data on sales by farm size would suggest that these are a much more significant source, by volume. Compared to just 9.6% of local food sales revenue flowing to small and medium-sized farms, 90.4% goes to farms selling over $900,000 annually.
This is reflective of the infrastructure and regulations facing different types of farmers. Small and medium-sized dairy/poultry/hog farms are raising relatively tiny herds, underneath the quota system and/or on pasture… while the biggest barns in Canada produce on an industrial-scale in confined animal feeding operations (CAFO’s).
Environmentally-Conscious Farming Practices
The second part of the study chose two types of beneficial management practices to survey farmers about. Interestingly, these two practices reside at opposite ends of the spectrum of shifts in farming practices that offer a positive environmental impact.
The use of products that limit the escape of nutrients into the environment in applying nitrogen fertilizers to crops; and
Rotational grazing of livestock.
Urease and nitrification inhibitors may improve a crop’s yield potential, and/or allow for less nitrogen fertilizer to be applied. However, farmers have to invest without any ability to predict beneficial economic outcomes, because the performance of these products is entirely contingent upon the weather. For this reason, less than 10% of Canadian farmers applied them along with their fertilizer in 2022.
Slightly more Canadian farmers (14.7%) practiced rotational grazing on their farms, for reasons related to conservation and capability. In other words, they recognize the long-term resiliency that healthy ecosystems offer, and they’ve figured out the complex math and biology involved in feeding livestock off the land, compared to relatively simple CAFO’s.