OTTAWA — There are 48 Ontario farms of 5,000 acres or more in size, according to the 2021 Canadian Census. Thirty-three of those farms are in southwestern Ontario.
The Statistics Canada figures show that each county typically has no more than one or two mega-farms of 5,000 acres or more.
Huron and Grey Counties are exceptions. Both have four farms of 5,000 acres or more. Dufferin and Niagara have none.
Ontario’s 48 large farms of 5,000 or more acres were just 0.1 % of the province’s 48,346 farms but — with land holdings of just over 367,000 acres — they accounted for 3.1 % of Ontario’s 11.7 million farm acres. That’s up from 2011, when the province had 41 farms of 5,000 acres or more controlling a combined 301,567 acres.
Of almost 190,000 farms in Canada, 5,204 farms have more than 5,000 acres. The number of Canadian farms from 5,000 to 10,000 acres increased 16.5 % from 2011 to 2021.
If you want to look at even bigger farms, there are 200 Canadian farms with more than 25,000 acres. The vast majority of these farms are in Alberta (87) and Saskatchewan (83).
