It was all a lie

[LWeber]

Just did the math, Canada has 3,800,000 million square miles, 156,000 square miles are arable. About 4.5%. Sask has about half the arable land.

About 7% of the total land area of Canada is used for agriculture, more than two-thirds of which is arable land. Statistics Canada’s agricultural ecumene identifies the areas of the country where agricultural activity is located

Farm area in Canada declined (-6%) from 68.7 million hectares in 1971 to 64.8 million hectares in 2011 . The loss of 3.9 million hectares of farm area is equal to an area approximately the size of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The number of farms in Canada, meanwhile, dropped 44% from 366,110 farms to 205,730 farms. As a result, the average farm has increased in size from 188 hectares to 315 hectares.

Source: STATSCAN

[ajl]

Statscan data should be taken with a grain of salt as it is notoriously inaccurate although most of the bush clearing has occurred since 2011 in response to high land prices. I see ads on Kijiji regularly for clearing services. Apparently you can clear bush and crop within a couple years now. The season may be too short for some of this land in the peace country though. If we could only figure out what a hectare is?

[fjlip]

Hectare is a term that should be BANNED in North America. There are NONE on our farm. We measured WRONG 150 years ago!

[Marusko]

It remains to be seen if Russia has the stomach for high input ag. Says their canola yields are under 30 bu and that's probably below break even for them.

That being said, we need to be wary too about following the same paradigm because one of these countries could steal our markets in a flash. Especially the northern grain belt where canola and wheat are the only options.

yeilds are under 30 probably because they haven't been putting in the inputs. it says right in the article that they're using saved seed and not hybrids. On twitter I follow a British guy who tours around in the black sea region, there's a lot of modern knowledge they're missing. The whole communism thing really set them back, but they're catching up.