Farmers receive less of the food dollar: study

Jul 09, 2026

Farmers continue to receive less of the food dollar, even as consumers pay more for their groceries, says the Agricultural Producers Association of Saskatchewan.

Its latest Farmers and Food Prices Report indicates the trend has not changed much since the organization began analyzing six products in 2021-22.

“Our data continues to show a consistent story,” said president Bill Prybylski.

“Food prices are rising, but the farmer’s share is actually shrinking.”

The report, which was released in June for 2024-25, actually showed a little bump in the farmer share of two products:retail pork and canola oil.

“I was a little surprised that some of the numbers have actually reversed, but when you think about it, I guess it makes sense that canola prices have rebounded a little bit compared to where they were,” Prybylski said.

APAS tracks the farmer share of several food products by comparing the retail price with the producer price for the initial commodity. These include a 675-gram load of bread, three litres of canola oil, 907 grams of margarine, 900 ggrams of lentils, a 24-pack of beer and retail pork.

The pork price is the combined retail value of all cuts rather than a single cut.

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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