NAICS 11121Industry · 5-digitregional market

Vegetable and melon farming

This industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in growing vegetables and melons. Establishments primarily engaged in producing vegetable and melon seeds and vegetable and melon bedding plants are also included in this industry. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A

Establishments · CanadaA: 1,764
Under 10 employeesA: 56%

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

1–459534%

5–940023%

10–1938622%

20–4926715%

50–99764%

100–199272%

200–499121%

500+10%

Of 1,764 Canadian establishments with employees, 56% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.

Where they areA

Quebec53230%

Ontario47427%

British Columbia21312%

Prince Edward Island1669%

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 1112 Vegetable and melon farming covers it.

Operating businessScreenedfiled at 1112

Field Vegetable & Potato GrowingOne thing must be true

binding constraint: distribution

The pre-screen guessed that the reachable version is protected culture sold direct. Both of those already have records — Greenhouse & Controlled-Environment Production and Small-Scale Crop Production — so this screen is the field operation that the code mostly counts, and the counts say what it is. Only a third of the 1,764 establishments have one to four employees; 22% have twenty or more [A]. Beside grain, where 84% sit in the smallest band, that is a different animal: a field-vegetable farm is a labour-heavy employer with a packing line, not a family with a seeder. The attraction is real. Canadian vegetable farm-gate value reached $1.8B in 2025, up 7.1% [A]. But read how: production rose 8.0% on an unchanged average price [A]. Growers grew more and were paid the same per kilogram, which is what a price taker looks like in a good year. The reason is the buyer. A perishable crop has days, not months, to find a home, and the homes are a handful of retail produce desks and, for potatoes, the fry and chip processors who contract acreage before planting. Potato growers seeded 397,122 acres in 2025, the most since 2007, and harvested 125.9 million hundredweight [A] — and FCC reports Prince Edward Island potato land at $6,700 to $8,000 an acre with good parcels 'rarely staying on the market for long' [A]. The scarce asset is the supply programme or processor contract, not the field, and it is held by growers who already fill trucks every week of the season. An entrant can grow the crop in year one. What it cannot do in year one is be the supplier a buyer drops an incumbent for.

NAICS 11126 vendors named12 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. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.

All 162 occupations →

Inside this industry

2 rows sit directly beneath 11121. Each has a base report of its own.

Code	Industry	Establishments · CA	What is known
111211	Potato farming	604	screened at 1112
111219	Other vegetable (except potato) and melon farming	1,160	screened at 1112