Farmers who threw the Census of Agriculture on a pile with other unopened mail may want to dig it out and get it completed this week.
The streamlined online questionnaire is relatively quick to complete and once done, the information is used to improve the services and programs available to farmers across the country.
Greg Peterson, director of agriculture statistics for Statistics Canada, says the census captures detailed regional information.
“The census of agriculture is different from all the other questionnaires we do,” he says.
Read Also
Agi3’s AI-powered individualized farm insurance products win innovation prize
Agi3’s AI-powered individualized farm insurance products won the business solutions prize in the Innovations Program Awards prior to the Agriculture in Motion farm show in Langham, Saskatchewan.
All levels of government use the information to develop better policies and agricultural associations use it to support their members.
By filling it out, farmers will be helping themselves and their neighbours access better services and resources, he says.
Farmers can also access some of the statistics, when published, which might help them research new opportunities.
Peterson says the Census of Agriculture is constantly being tweaked after consultations with the groups that use the data. This year, the questionnaire can be completed online and much of the detailed financial reporting that was previously part of the forms has been eliminated.
“We’ve streamlined the questionnaire on organic farming and added in questions about succession planning and precision farming,” says Peterson.
He says the questionnaire is 30 percent shorter than in the past and should take between 25 and 50 minutes to complete.
By answering the questionnaire online, farmers benefit from automatic calculations of financial information. Questions will automatically be skipped if they are not relevant to the operation being surveyed.
In addition, smaller operations will not get the agricultural census at all because some of the information formerly collected can be accessed in other ways.
Peterson says satellite imaging provides more accurate results of cropping patterns than the census, which led to the elimination of the fall agricultural survey.
“The information produced forms the backbone of all agricultural statistics,” Peterson says.
“The census provides a good baseline of information that we can build on using other tools that we now have at our disposal.”
The arrival of the agricultural census coincided with an early spring for farmers on the Prairies.
For some, it’s an aggravation to be ignored until the workload eases or until a Statistics Canada employee knocks on the door, usually at suppertime when busy farmers are most likely at home.
Peterson concedes the timing of the survey may be inconvenient.
“We survey around 15 million households for the regular census and some 250,000 farmers for the agricultural census, so it makes sense financially to do them at the same time,” he says.
