NAICS 111150Canadian industry · 6-digitregional market

Corn farming

This Canadian industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in growing corn. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A

Establishments · CanadaA: 1,038
Under 10 employeesA: 96%

Size and shape

How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.

Canadian establishments by number of employeesA

1–486083%

5–913513%

10–19363%

20–4971%

50–990—

100–1990—

200–4990—

500+0—

Of 1,038 Canadian establishments with employees, 96% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators.

Where they areA

Quebec62360%

Ontario37536%

Manitoba111%

Alberta101%

Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.

How many new establishments are still tradingA

Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting, US · opened 2020

88%

1 year

71.7%

3 years

61.8%

5 years

53%

10 years

opened 2015

Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.

No US figure is shown. County Business Patterns is coded to the 2017 US edition of NAICS; this code either does not exist there, names a different industry, or is outside the programme's coverage (most of agriculture, rail, postal and public administration are). A figure is attached only where both the code and the title agree.

How businesses here compete

The structural profile of subsector 111, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.

regional competitionhigh capitalUNVERIFIEDinherited from 111 Crop production

Land and machinery are the entry ticket and the crop sells at a price set elsewhere. The reachable niches are the ones that escape the commodity — controlled environment, direct-to-consumer, specialty crops.

Who sets the price: Commodity exchanges and a handful of processors; the grower is a price taker.
The software it runs on: Farm management, agronomy and precision-ag platforms, increasingly bundled by equipment makers and input suppliers.

Market screens and studies

Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.

Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 1111 Oilseed and grain farming covers it.

Operating businessScreenedfiled at 1111

Prairie Grain & Oilseed FarmStructure decides

binding constraint: capital intensity

Grain is the largest farm type in Canada — 10,584 employer establishments, 84% of them with one to four employees [A] — and it is a family-scale business in headcount only. The entry ticket is land, and the land market has stopped being priced by newcomers. Farm Credit Canada's 2025 report puts Saskatchewan cultivated land at $2,800 to $4,700 an acre by region, up 9.4% in 2025 after 13.1% and 15.7% in the two years before [A]. The 2021 census counted 34,128 Saskatchewan farms on 60.3 million acres [A] — about 1,770 acres each across all farm types, and a grain operation is larger than that average. Put the two together and the land under one ordinary farm is several million dollars before a combine, a sprayer or a bin is bought. The mechanism that matters is who the buyer of the next quarter-section is: FCC describes producers 'acquiring land previously rented from landlords' and making 'strategic, efficiency-focused' purchases [A]. That buyer is the neighbour, bidding with equity that three years of appreciation created on land he already owns, and spreading a machine line he already has over more acres. An entrant pays the same price with borrowed money and no existing line, then sells wheat and canola at a price set on an exchange. Renting solves the land cheque and not the machinery or the working capital — and rented land is what the FCC report says incumbents are buying out from under tenants. The small-scale and direct-market routes are screened separately in Small-Scale Crop Production; this record is the commodity farm, and it is cut on the capital stacked in front of a price-taker's margin.

NAICS 11115 vendors named11 sourced figuresOpen →

Filed above — wider than this industry

Operating businessScreenedfiled at 111 Crop production

Small-Scale Crop ProductionStructure decides

binding constraint: entry cost

Land price per acre has decoupled from what an acre can yield, which means the entry cost is set by a real-estate market rather than by an agricultural one — in the BC valleys most acutely. The decoupling is measurable in two of Statistics Canada's own tables: the average value of Canadian farm land and buildings went from $2,550 an acre in 2015 to $5,643 in 2025, while realized net farm income for the whole country went from $7.02B to $8.34B [A]. The asset repriced by 121% against an earnings base that grew 19%, and Ontario at $21,073 an acre and British Columbia at $10,577 are where the gap is widest. An entrant buys the acre at a price the crop cannot service, and pays it to a seller whose alternative bidder is a larger farm or an investor rather than a new operator. The versions that clear the hurdle are high-value protected culture and direct marketing, both of which need capital and neither of which is farming in the sense the buyer usually means — Local Bounti, one of the listed controlled-environment growers, sold $48.4M of produce in 2025, lost $94.4M doing it, and carried $483.1M of long-term debt at year end [A]. The farm-management software above this code is screened separately at 1151.

NAICS 1115 vendors named9 sourced figuresOpen →

Software serving this industry

The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.

No vertical software market has been recorded along this branch. What the subsector typically runs on: Farm management, agronomy and precision-ag platforms, increasingly bundled by equipment makers and input suppliers.

And what every business buys · 25 generic categories

Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.

Who works here

The occupations employed in Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.

Concentrated in this sectorA

Managers in agriculture, horticulture and aquaculture One industry 93.1%

Fishing vessel masters and fishermen/women One industry 92.4%

Workers in agriculture and fishing occupations One industry 88.9%

Agriculture, horticulture and harvesting labourers and related occupations One industry 85.4%

Logging machinery operators One industry 81.9%

Logging and forestry workers Mostly one sector 61.5%

Contractors and supervisors, agriculture, horticulture and related operations and services Mostly one sector 16.3%

Managers in natural resources production and fishing Mostly one sector 12.5%

Logging, forestry, landscaping and other related labourers Mostly one sector 6.5%

Tourism and amusement services occupations Mostly one sector 6.2%

These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.

And the jobs every business has

Other technical trades Across the economy 14.2%

Accounting, insurance and related business administrative occupations Across the economy 3%

Building maintenance installers, servicers and repairers Across the economy 1.6%

Legislative and senior managers Across the economy 1.5%

Financial, insurance and related administrative support workers Across the economy 1.4%

Office administrative assistants - general, legal and medical Across the economy 1.1%

Administrative, property and payroll officers Across the economy 1%

Shoe repairers, shoemakers and upholsterers Across the economy 1%

Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. But note the shape of this industry: 96% of establishments have fewer than ten employees, and at that size most of these roles are one person wearing several hats, or bought in from outside.

All 162 occupations →