Agriculture Question

Question

I have a researcher looking for estimated areas, yields and productions of principal field crops, vegetable crops, fruit crops, and specialty crops in metric units by Census Division and Census Consolidated Subdivision from 1981 to 2000.

As he needs it annually, the Census of Agriculture won’t work and because of the geography, the CANSIM tables I found don’t cut it either.

Any thoughts or perhaps Agriculture Division could provide a custom tab?

Answer

Respondent #1: This may be a bit of a stretch even as a custom tab as the survey data will not support small area data for very many commodities. In some cases, the provincial agriculture statisticians take the STC sample data and do their own analysis.
Here is the Ontario site:

http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/stats/crops/index.html



This one is quite good. There are similar sites in most provinces.

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I have looked in each province and have found a rather uneven small area profile. The census does not carry yield and production but will have the area planted. The agriculture division may have small area data in unpublished form, but it may not be very clean. Our team can find that out for you.

Here is what I found out looking prov by prov
If it is not on their web site, they may still have it an an XL ss.

Manitoba http://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/statistics/yearbook2006/past_trends_crops.pdf

Sask http://www.agr.gov.sk.ca/apps/agriculture_statistics/HBV5_P2.asp

Alberta: http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/sdd12401#tables

This may not go back far enough but they do have the data.

BC: http://www.agf.gov.bc.ca/stats/index.htm not very good but it has the contact info

Ontario: http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/stats/crops/index.html

Quebec: http://www.fadq.qc.ca/index.php?id=828&L=1

NB: http://www.gnb.ca/0168/01680004-e.asp limited

NS: http://www.gov.ns.ca/agri/bde/econ/NSStats2002.pdf does not go back very far but they may have it

PEI: http://www.gov.pe.ca/af/agweb/index.php3?number=70179&lang=E#field

NF-Lab http://www.nr.gov.nl.ca/agric/mark_stats/pdf/stats2003.pdf limited

Respondent #2 : I had forwarded your question to our Agriculture Division and they confirmed that this information is not available. Here is their response:

"Unfortunately, for yields and specialty crops, the smallest level of geography that we have data for is crop district. For fruit and vegetable crops, we don't have any data other than at the province level."

Respondent #1: The reply from the Agriculture Division Their suggests that crop district level data are available for some crops...no doubt the major ones.  I suspect that this would be useful when trying to look at sub-provincial data.  The links that I sent earlier are probably all at the crop district level.  CCSD data (area) are only available during a census year and for non-census years, would have to be estimated using census data to dis-aggregate  crop district data.  Or the researcher would have to reformulate the research question to look at broader areas.