Canadian Cattle Numbers Down on Drought, Export Demand

Aug 24, 2022

The number of cattle on Canadian farms has fallen precipitously in the wake of last year’s Prairie drought.

A Statistics Canada livestock inventory report released Tuesday showed Canadian farmers held 12.3 million cattle and calves on their farms as of July 1, 2022, down 2.8% on the year. That is the lowest level recorded since July 1, 1988, and represents the largest year-over-year decrease since July 1, 2015, when record high prices incentivized farmers to sell their animals.

This time around, the decline in cattle numbers is due more to the drought, which tightened feedgrain supplies and led to record-high production costs in some cases. Rising export demand for beef and the resulting increase in slaughter also helped to lead to the drawdown in the Canadian cattle herd, StatsCan said.

Cattle and calf slaughter for the period from January to June 2022 was up 2.5% from the same period in 2021, and reached the highest level recorded for the first half of the year since 2010. Strong export demand for Canadian beef — particularly from the US and Japan — helped support domestic slaughter, as total exports of beef and veal for the January-to-June period rose in 2022, compared with the same period in 2021.

Click here to see more...

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.