Nursery stock and plant merchant wholesalers

The reachable business in this group is not the elevator company — the Grain Handling & Ag Retail record screens that and cuts on steel. It is the merchant without an elevator: a desk, a grain dealer licence and relationships on both sides, buying lentils, peas, organics or identity-preserved crops from farmers and selling them to processors and export buyers. 60% of the 1,215 Canadian establishments have fewer than ten people, so the form plainly exists. The cut is the balance sheet that form needs. Canadian farm product wholesalers turned over $61.6B in 2024 at a 6.7% gross margin and a 2.0% operating profit [A]. A merchant on those margins owes farmers for whole truckloads while waiting on a buyer overseas, so one defaulted contract or one price move between purchase and sale consumes a year's profit. The regulator's own record shows how often that happens. The Canadian Grain Commission makes every licensed dealer post security against what it owes producers, and its 2024-25 programme evaluation counts nine licensed-company failures between 2018 and 2024 with about $42M of producer claims paid — and in two of the nine the security fell short, paying 80% and 77% [A]. The names on that list are pulse and specialty merchants, not line elevator companies. The same evaluation records licensees and farm groups calling the security regime a barrier to new and smaller entrants. Capital here is not equipment; it is the bond, the credit line and the ability to survive a counterparty. Livestock dealing and nursery stock, also inside this code, were not examined.