Farming revenues and expenses

• Statistics Canada methodology

Statistics Canada (STC) generates Farm cash receipts (FCR) on a quarterly basis in order to calculate the contribution of Canada’s agriculture sectors to each province and territory’s Gross Domestic Product. The national total of a sector’s FCR is the sum of all provincial and territorial FCR.

FCR are not the sum of all dollars received by each farm in a given sector of a province. They are the value of products where one of the following occurs:

• The product is sold from one province to another; or
• The product is sold to a non-agricultural sector (i.e. sales of milk for processing or animals for slaughter); or
• The product is exported outside of Canada.

FCR does not include sales of products from one farm to another farm within the same province. These products’ value is assumed to be included in the sale of the final product. As a result, the FCR for certain subsectors where the products from one farm are used as inputs on other farms can be lower than the actual value of the products sold by those farms. Examples of such inputs would be eggs for hatching or beef calves sold to feedlots.

Another result is that provincial FCRs for a given sector will also reflect whether that sector’s supply chain is contained entirely within that province. For example, a province with beef cow-calf farms where many of the calves are sold to feedlots in another province may have higher calf FCR than a province where most calves are sold to feedlots within the same province.

In summary, when citing STC’s FCR numbers, they can accurately be described as a given sector’s contribution to Canadian or provincial/territorial Gross Domestic Product. It would be inaccurate, however to say that they represent the value of all products sold by Canadian farms in a given sector.

Below are some illustrative examples of some agriculture supply chains and how certain sales of products will or will not generate FCRs.

Illustrative examples

Note: Values are only used to illustrate the examples and are not representative of real values.