What's 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 a joint statement that effectively halted one proposal from Bill 97 that would have allowed new kinds of residential and urban development on prime farmland. 

"Ontario boasts some of Canada's richest and most fertile farmland and these policy changes put the sustainability of that land and the food system it provides at great risk," the statement read.

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

In an op-ed for the Toronto Star last year, she cited statistics from the Census of Agriculture about the country's rapidly diminishing farmland, including the fact that Ontario is losing an average of nine family farms a 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, every province has seen decades of decline in total farm area. 

Nationally, the total reported area is down eight per cent in the last two decades — from 68 million hectares in 2001 to 62 million in 2021.

But does urban development alone account for the millions of hectares Canadian farmers are losing?

CBC News has compiled the data in six charts to show what is really happening to this invaluable national resource, and what it means for the future.

The recent joint statement by the OFA specifically opposed new kinds of housing development on "prime agricultural areas." Those areas are classified, by Canada's Land Inventory, as having soil with "moderate-to-no limitations for agriculture."

But the Census of Agriculture cannot account for soil quality. It is a voluntary poll that asks farmers to self-classify and account for the area of their farms, 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 at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) calculated the area across Canada that they classify as "cropland" was 46 million hectares in 2021, down seven per cent, from 50 million hectares, in 2001.