Mixed Picture for Farm Family Income in 2020

Jan 27, 2023

The total income of Canadian farm families increased in 2020, with grain and oilseed operations seeing a particularly healthy gain while cattle outfits experienced a decline.

A Statistics Canad report Friday showed the average total income of farm families operating a single farm in Canada was $179,724 in 2020, up 10.2% from 2019.

However, some farm types fared much better than others, with total income on grain and oilseed farms up 18.9% at $217,343. On the other hand, beef cattle ranching and farming (including feedlot) operations saw their average total income slide about 2.6% to $120,457. At $189,269, total income on hog farms was up 1.8% from 2019.

The increased income for grain and oilseed farms was largely attributable to strong export demand from China, after a reduction of tariffs, and favourable weather conditions in Western Canada in 2020, StatsCan said.

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Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.