Support activities for crop production
This industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in providing support activities for growing crops. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 1,536
- Under 10 employeesA
- 80%
- Establishments · USA
- 5,263
- Employment · USA
- 73,015
- Payroll · USA
- $3.7B
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
Of 1,536 Canadian establishments with employees, 80% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators.
Where they areA
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.
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.
How businesses here compete
The structural profile of subsector 115, 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.
Genuinely low-capital service work, bounded by drive time and by customers whose ability to pay follows a commodity price.
- Who sets the price
- The farm or forest operation buying the service, itself a price taker.
- The software it runs on
- Light — scheduling and invoicing; the customer's farm-management system is the record.
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 1151 Support activities for crop production covers it.
Two compounding problems. The software is given away by companies whose revenue is seed, chemistry and equipment — razor-and-blade again — and the buyer has a single annual purchasing moment tied to the crop cycle, with per-acre pricing that collapses gross margin. Precision-ag imagery and drone analytics face the same ceiling with an added hardware cost. 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.
Crop scouting, soil sampling, variable-rate prescriptions and custom application are genuinely low-capital work — a truck, an agronomy ticket and a spreader — and 969 of the 1,536 Canadian establishments have one to four employees, so nothing about the field is closed. The cut is that the advice is not sold, it is given away to move product. Nutrien calls itself the largest global agriculture retailer and runs over 1,800 retail locations with over 4,200 crop consultants behind them; 'services and other' — product application, soil and leaf testing, crop scouting and precision agriculture — was 5% of its US$17,620M of 2025 Retail sales, the same 5% as the year before [A]. The other 89% is crop nutrients, crop protection and seed, with merchandise and financing making up the remainder. An entrant charging for agronomy is quoting against a rival who performs the same agronomy at cost because it earns on the chemical. Per-acre pricing then meets the second problem: there is one buying moment a year, fixed by the crop cycle, and the customer's ability to pay follows a commodity price neither party sets.
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
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
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
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. But note the shape of this industry: 80% 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.
Inside this industry
1 row sits directly beneath 11511. Each has a base report of its own.
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 115110 | Support activities for crop production | 1,536 | screened at 1151 |