LAST month, Statistics Canada completed its farm census and policy makers, economists and farm leaders await the results with great anticipation.
The census, completed every five years, is one of the great resources for tracking the evolution of Canada’s farm sector.
Unfortunately, it asks at least one wrong question and the subsequent answers produce results that distort the picture. But that is not the reason for the farm policy-maker anticipation.
These are the eagerly-awaited answers:
Will the average farmer be older in 2001 than in 1996 when he/she was over 57 years? Yes.
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Will there be fewer farmers than the close to 280,000 identified in 1996? Yes.
Will farmers be more computer literate, more likely female, and more likely to earn the majority of their income from off-farm sources? Almost certainly.
These are the predictable results. There will flow analysis about the farm crisis, alarming evidence of farmer aging and outcry over farmer exodus.
But the most useful thing Statistics Canada could do to illuminate the Canadian farm policy debate is to change its definition of a farmer. Census takers count as a farmer anyone who says they produce food to sell commercially. This catches everyone from the $5,000 gross market gardener to $500,000 commercial operators.
The result distorts the reality of farming. There are not 280,000 farmers in Canada, by any realistic definition of farmer. If this census counts 250,000, that does not mean 30,000 have been driven out of the industry.
Probably, there are 100,000 Canadians, give or take 20,0000, who can legitimately say they want to or can make their living from food production. The rest are small operators with a sustaining income source off the land, a lifestyle wish or an implicit decision to live in subsistence poverty.
But policy makers and critics of farm policy look at the whole. Farm programs are designed to benefit all those deemed to be farmers, lest the government be accused of favoring the big over the small.
But should farm support policies help small sideline operations owned by city lawyers, journalists or tenured professors?
It is a distortion of the farm debate to consider a farm operator grossing $50,000 a victim of the farm income crisis. A $50,000 gross cannot produce much more than a $5,000 or $10,000 net in the best of circumstances. That is not a living family wage.
No one should be denied the opportunity to keep their toe in the food production business but neither should farm policy spread limited support dollars among every StatsCan-defined farmer.
And the farm debate should not be distorted by tales of $30,000 gross farmers who left the business.
There is a real income crisis involving tens of thousands of legitimate and hard-pressed farmers, many of whom want to farm fulltime but who need off-farm income to survive.
Their cause is not advanced by using a 280,000 base as the way to judge the size and health of the farm sector.
It would be politically controversial but Statistics Canada could help immensely by finding a way to define commercial farmer and then tell us how many there are and how they are doing.
