Current Farm Income Measures and Tools: Gaps and Issues

Executive Summary

Paul Murray, Statistics Canada, and David Culver, AAFC

Statistics Canada and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada produce a large variety of data and information that help to shed light on the issues affecting agriculture. This paper provides a short history of farm income and related data. It discusses how some of the structural changes that have occurred in agriculture have increased the complexity of generating farm income indicators and other performances measures. It describes current aggregate and whole farm data, including conceptual issues and data quality concerns.

The paper concludes that the rapid changes in the agricultural sectors impact on measures of farm income and performance. The challenge for the future is to ensure that the rich sources of data are used to provide to policy makers, industry and general public information that accurately reflects the sector and financial performance.

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For more information, please e-mail: Econ_Research@agr.gc.ca.