MarketsFarm — Farmers, commodity traders and market analysts will have to wait a while for agriculture-related reports from Statistics Canada in 2020.
The main reason for the delay is the COVID-19 pandemic, said John Seay, an analyst with StatsCan’s agriculture, energy, environment and transportation statistics branch in Ottawa.
“Given the COVID-19 outbreak, senior management is currently reassessing all of the programs. So the focus right now is on issuing critical surveys,” he said.
The first of those reports, on principal field crop area, was originally scheduled for April 24, he said.
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“We were only about halfway through collection when all of this shutdown happened as a result of COVID-19,” he said. “We had to do a quality assessment of our data… and see what our estimates were like to publish at this time.”
The follow-up report, slated for June 29, will be postponed as well, as will the stocks of principal field crops report that was to be released May 7, he said.
Along with the above reports, Statistics Canada issues a number of other farm-related reports throughout a calendar year, including:
- farm income (May 26, Nov. 25),
- principal field crops estimates (Sept. 14), and
- production of principal field crops (Aug. 31, Dec. 3).
Seay was unable to provide new release dates for those reports at this time.
— Glen Hallick reports for MarketsFarm from Winnipeg.
