This text is taken from our newsletter “Le Courrier de l’économie” of May 16, 2022. To subscribe, click here.
Farmers are aging. It is a fact: six out of 10 farmers (60.5%) were over 55 in 2021, according to the most recent data from the agricultural census. Carried out every four years, this exercise necessary to have a portrait of what is happening in the sector was published last week by Statistics Canada.
If the phenomenon is not new, it is clear that it is intensifying. In the previous census – that of 2016 – nearly 54.5% of operators were over 55 years old. And what this means for the next generation is all the more obvious as the proportion of young farmers continues to decline. Young people under 35 are less and less likely to want and be able to take the reins of farms.
However, it is these same farmers who will have to adapt the sector, which is vital and necessary for humans, to climate change and extreme weather events. This race to adapt is already well underway, as can be seen in this most recent Statistics Canada census.
Over the past five years, more and more farmers have invested effort, energy and resources to adapt to the changing realities of the climate. More of them have changed their agricultural practices by favoring, for example, the burying of green manure or the seeding of winter cover crops.
They are also more likely to have chosen farms better suited to hotter and drier conditions, such as barley. Ditto for the production of renewable energy, which is increasingly popular on Canadian farms. Supported by government policies and programs that encourage it, many have taken the leap.
In 2021, the number of farms that reported producing renewable energy — mostly solar — actually doubled, from 10,185 farms in 2016 to 22,576 in 2021, or almost one in eight farms ( 11.9%).