2023 Crop Will be Most Expensive Yet: FCC

Feb 07, 2023

This year’s Canadian crop will be the most in expensive in history, with input sales expected to move higher yet, Farm Credit Canada (FCC) is forecasting.

In a website post Tuesday, FCC senior economist Leigh Anderson pegged 2023 total crop input sales (fertilizer, chemicals, seed, and fuel) at $23.1 billion, a nearly 6% increase over last year.

“Overall, demand for crop inputs remains robust, supported by strong farm cash receipts, even if commodity prices soften from peak levels,” Anderson wrote. “The 2023 crop will be the most expensive ever planted.”

For this past year, the Canadian crop input market (fertilizer, chemical, seed, and fuel) is projected to have grown 26.1% in 2022, reaching an estimated record $21.8B in sales. Most of the growth was driven by increases in fertilizer and fuel prices, stemming from global supply chain disruptions and the war in Ukraine.

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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.