NAICS 112410Canadian industry · 6-digitregional market

Sheep farming

SoftwareLivestock & Herd Management Software 112

This Canadian industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in raising sheep and lambs, and feeding or fattening lambs. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A

Establishments · CanadaA: 169
Under 10 employeesA: 97%

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

1–415189%

5–9138%

10–1921%

20–4932%

50–990—

100–1990—

200–4990—

500+0—

Of 169 Canadian establishments with employees, 97% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators.

Where they areA

Quebec8148%

Ontario4325%

Alberta169%

British Columbia85%

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 112, 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 112 Animal production and aquaculture

Quota is a purchased asset under supply management and a moat for whoever holds it. Outside quota the operator takes the packer's price on a biological production cycle that cannot be hurried.

Who sets the price: Packers, processors and — in Canadian dairy, poultry and eggs — supply-management boards that set price by quota.
The software it runs on: Herd and flock management, feed and health records, traceability.

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 1124 Sheep and goat farming covers it.

Operating businessScreenedfiled at 1124

Small-Flock Sheep & Goat FarmingOne thing must be true

binding constraint: market size

The pre-screen asked the right question: small-flock scale is reachable, so is the market too thin? Everything that blocks the rest of livestock is absent here. There is no quota, no integrator and no packer owning half the supply, the operating scale the counts imply is small, and an entrant does not have to displace an established domestic supplier to make a first sale. That is a genuinely open door. The count shows how few have made a business of walking through it: 234 employer establishments in the whole country, 83% with one to four employees, none above fifty [A]. Cattle has 9,021. The national flock was 833,000 head on 1 January 2026, up 3.0%, with 370,800 head slaughtered in the second half of 2025 [A] — the entire country's half-year lamb kill is what Canadian hog plants, at 10.9 million head over the same months, get through in under a week [A]. The 2021 census counted 1.1 million sheep and lambs, down 0.2% in five years [A]: this is not an industry being held back, it is one that has found its size. The mechanism is thinness itself. With so few animals spread so widely, there is no dense procurement network — nothing like the thick market of plants, buyers and repeat contracts that cattle and hogs have — and so no obvious way to turn a good flock into a contracted, repeatable revenue line. What works is the direct trade: freezer lamb, farm-gate sales to a community that wants a whole animal, a goat dairy with its own cheese. Each of those is a good small living capped by one family's labour and one catchment's appetite. It is cut not because entry is hard but because what is on the other side of the door is a smallholding, not a company.

NAICS 11244 vendors named10 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.

Sold across the wider branch

Vertical softwareScreenedfiled at 112 Animal production and aquaculture

Livestock & Herd Management SoftwareOne thing must be true

binding constraint: willingness to pay

Incumbent Merck Animal Health (Allflex / SenseHub) and Datamars

The cow-calf operator is the most numerous and least software-paying buyer in agriculture, and the money in the category sits in the ear tag rather than the subscription — Merck and Zoetis bundle the software with the hardware they already sell through the vet channel. A software-only entrant is selling against a free attachment. Same shape as the farm-management record at 1151. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.

NAICS 1123 vendors namedOpen →

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: 97% 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 →