Crop and livestock production in Saskatchewan experienced volatile price hikes last year

Dec 19, 2022

Saskatchewan farmers experienced their most expensive crop and livestock production cost in 2021.

The Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan (APAS) stated there was an $11.5 billion dollar higher production cost compared with the year before.

“We heard about shortages of fertilizer this fall and pesticides throughout the summer. The lack of availability and price volatility in these markets has created a lot of uncertainty that we don’t want to experience again in 2023,” APAS President Ian Boxall said.

APAS representatives expressed concerns over critical farm inputs which are fuel, fertilizers, chemicals and seeds.

In 2021, $2.67 billion was spent on fertilizers; this is just 24% of the cash operating cost of Saskatchewan farmers and it exceeded last year’s purchase of fertilizers by 30%. The cost of other components has also increased such as glyphosate by 62%, fuel by 52%, urea by 112% (since 2019) and anhydrous ammonia is up by 113%.

“These inputs are critical for food production at a time when the world needs Saskatchewan’s agricultural products. We know that inflation and the cost of living are major concerns right now for everyone. At the same time, costs are especially volatile for essential farm inputs which make up a huge portion of farm costs. The lack of transparency on what’s causing these price spikes is very concerning and requires further investigation,” Boxall stated.

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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