What is happening to Canada’s farmland?

The Ontario government is giving up parts of the Greenbelt for development, citing the province’s housing crisis.

But last month, a group of farmers produced one joint statement that effectively halted a Bill 97 proposal that would have allowed for new types of residential and urban development on prime farmland.

“Ontario boasts some of Canada’s richest and most fertile agricultural lands and these policy changes jeopardize the sustainability of that country and the food system it provides,” the statement said.

Peggy Brekveld, the first signatory to the joint statement and president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA), has long been critical of farmland development.

In a op-ed for the Toronto Star last year she cited statistics from the Census of Agriculture on the country’s rapidly declining farmland, including the fact that Ontario is losing an average of nine family farms per week.

Using the same formula, Canada can be said to have lost the equivalent of seven small farms a day for 20 years.

Arable land – that is, land suitable for crops – is a limited resource in Canada. According to the Census of Agriculture, each county has seen decades of decline in total agricultural area.

Nationally the total reported area has fallen by eight percent over the past two decades – from 68 million hectares in 2001 to 62 million hectares in 2021.

But does urban development alone explain the millions of acres Canadian farmers are losing?

CBC News compiled the data into six graphs to show what’s really happening with this priceless national resource and what it means for the future.

The OFA’s recent joint statement specifically opposed new forms of housing on ‘primary agricultural areas’. Those areas are classified as land with “moderate to no restrictions on agriculture” according to the Canadian Land Inventory.

But the Agriculture census cannot take soil quality into account. It’s a voluntary poll that asks farmers to rate themselves and account for their farm’s acreage, leaving room for human error.

Other datasets paint a slightly different picture of the Canadian agricultural landscape. But the downward trend remains clear.

Using a variety of methods, including geospatial analysis, researchers from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) calculated that the area across Canada they classify as “arable land” will be 46 million hectares by 2021, seven percent less than 50 million hectares. in 2001.

Reasons for conversion

Canada’s cities are responsible for the majority of arable land converted to urban settlements.

Reports from Statistics Canada comparing surveys from 1971 to 2011 found that an estimated 642,100 acres of farmland had been lost to new settlement around Canada’s largest metropolitan areas.

The largest conversion from arable land to settlement occurred in the Golden Horseshoe area around Toronto.

During that 40-year period, 85 percent of all urban settlements in the Golden Horseshoe were built on once prime farmland.

In contrast, much less prime land was lost around BC’s cities, thanks in part to provincial land protections introduced in 1973. But what was lost was still 26 percent of the available prime land that BC originally had.

Darrel Cerkowniak, a physics scientist at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, said it’s harder to account for any conversion.

For example, if farmers practice crop rotation, forested land once used for grazing can only be reported as forest for the census. Likewise, the census does not help identify specific land that was once leased from the Crown, adopted by public parks, or transferred to treaty land.

Some of the arable land, AAFC reported, may also be abandoned or flooded or renaturalized.

Yet land conversion represents only a fraction of the reported loss. Some farmers say another factor may be responsible.

The consolidation issue

Along with the decline in farmland, most counties have seen an even more rapid decline in individual farms — a 23 percent decline over a 20-year period.

In the same period, the size of the farms increased. In 2001, the average Canadian farm was 274 hectares; that number reached 327 hectares in 2021.

Based on the new average, Canada can be said to have lost the equivalent of three entire farms per day for 20 years.

Census data shows that farmers are taking more of their fallow land, pasture and “other” land into production. This means that fewer farmers are going to work more thoroughly on more of the dwindling farmland.

According to a report of the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), what is left of Canadian farmland is being concentrated in the hands of ever larger companies.

That concentration is most dramatic in the Prairie Provinces (Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta), which make up 70 percent of the country’s farmland.

In 2016, giant prairie farms covering more than 2,000 acres—only six percent of farms in total—owned nearly a third of all farmland and brought in a third of all revenue and net income.

Nettie Wiebe, a professor of ethics at the University of Saskatchewan and an organic farmer with “deep roots” in the Prairies, said a lot of land in her area is disappearing due to urban sprawl. But increased investor ownership may explain why less and less farmland is being reported.

The count “does not end up on the desk of the person who fills in the actual production capacity”, says Wiebe, “[but] rather in some Toronto headquarters, where it’s part of an investment portfolio.”

Farmland has become exponentially more expensive due to low interest rates and increased speculation and competition. A report from Farm Credit Canada (FCC), a Crown Corporation that monitors land sales, shows that the average price per acre has quadrupled in 20 years.

“Reasonable land tenure is being replaced by concentrated control over agricultural land,” the CCPA report says. “Accessing farmland is becoming increasingly difficult, stifling the possibility of farming as a career choice for young Canadians.”

Higher prices and an aging population mean that land is becoming more passively owned, says Wiebe.

“[Corporate investors] you don’t have to worry about, ‘Will you really be able to grow enough wheat on this acre, or are you really going to be able to graze enough cattle on this pasture to actually make the payments?’” she said. don’t worry about it, because it’s more speculative than that – and their financial well-being is not determined by their productive capacity.”

Wiebe said consolidation and intensive farming practices will actually degrade cropland beyond the point of usability.

“We just won’t continue to be able to pour so many chemicals into the country and get so many products out of it without paying a longer-term ecological price,” she said.

The ecological price

In addition to growing food, agriculture helps slow climate change by storing carbon in vegetation and soil. AAFC says 10 percent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions also come from crop and livestock production; as production increases, less and less agricultural land is available to absorb the emissions.

When farmland is lost to sprawl, it is unlikely to ever recover. Among other impacts, “sealing” the soil under urban development significantly reduces the potential for carbon capture, groundwater uptake and wildlife support.

Just as urban sprawl invades farmland, farmland invades natural wetlands and forests. Data from AAFC showed that forestland became cropland much faster than cropland becoming urban settlements over the past two decades.

Increased production on less land also changes the price, variety and sustainability of the goods farmers can produce, Wiebe said.

Culturally, she argued, something equally important is also being lost.

“The land is not just a resource. It’s where we live. It’s where we are. It’s where we’re rooted. It’s our neighborhood,” said Wiebe.

She is concerned about the declining country and the changes that come with it, but she remains optimistic.

“We have a lot to learn, and we have a lot of innovation and a lot of new things to understand,” Wiebe said. “It seems to me that there is a generation of young people who are willing to think critically about that direction.”