APAS report shows farmers are getting less while consumers are paying more

Jun 18, 2024

The Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan has released its 2024 Farmers and Food Prices Report.

The APAS report shows a concerning trend: farmers are receiving lower prices for their commodities, while consumers are paying more at the grocery store.

President Ian Boxall says the disparity between the farmer's portion and retail prices highlights a broken system that fails both producers and consumers.

“This report underscores the critical need for a more transparent and equitable food supply chain that fairly compensates producers while also ensuring affordability for Canadians.”

The APAS report, supported by research from Statistics Canada, respected Canadian market analyst Kevin Grier and the United States Department of Agriculture, indicates that prices for raw commodities such as canola, wheat, lentils, barley, and hogs dropped by 5–16 per cent from 2022 to 2023, while food prices have increased.

Boxall says they are just trying to give consumers more information.

"One example would be margarine. Our canola, that is grown widely in Saskatchewan, that commodity price fell 16 percent, yet margarine increased 21 per cent."

He notes the report should serve as a wake-up call as to what's been happening and the need for a more competitive market with fair practices and transparency.

“We hope this serves as a catalyst for real change toward a system that values the hard work of farmers and restores consumer confidence."

The 2024 Farmers and Food Prices Report is available here.

To listen to Glenda-Lee's conversation with APAS President Ian Boxall click on the link below.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids