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2025 Canadian Farming Outlook Reveals Mixed Results

2025 Canadian Farming Outlook Reveals Mixed Results
Sep 02, 2025
By Farms.com

Farmers face variable yields across provinces in 2025

Canadian crop production in 2025 is expected to show both gains and declines, with farmers projected to harvest more canola, corn for grain, oats, and lentils.  

At the same time, spring wheat, durum wheat, soybeans, and barley are anticipated to see reduced production compared with 2024, according to model estimates based on satellite imagery and agroclimatic data. 

Across the Prairie provinces, crop conditions have been highly variable. Lower precipitation and extended heat in some regions led to below-average crop conditions by late July. Other areas that benefited from timely rainfall recorded stronger growth. In Alberta, nearly two-thirds of major crops were rated good to excellent at the end of July, above the five-year average. Still, moisture shortages in parts of the province may limit yield potential. 

In Saskatchewan, rainfall supported normal crop development in some areas, while dry conditions forced earlier-than-normal maturation elsewhere.  

Manitoba faced greater challenges, with many regions receiving less than half of normal rainfall, combined with high early-season heat that may reduce crop performance. 

Eastern Canada also experienced diverse conditions. Ontario and Atlantic Canada saw below-average rainfall, while Quebec received more than normal. Overall, higher-than-usual temperatures affected most of the eastern provinces throughout the growing season. 

Satellite measures of plant health, using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), confirmed this variability. Prairie crop health ranged from much lower than normal to much higher than normal, aligning closely with rainfall patterns. 

Statistics Canada has applied these satellite-based models since 2016 to estimate yields. Final harvested area figures will be confirmed in December 2025 through the Field Crop Survey.  

You may also be interested in reading some of the articles below to learn more details for each crop forecast.    

 


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From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

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