Graph created in Canva using data from Statistics Canada.
Canadian beef and certain fruits and vegetables on grocery store shelves have seen sharp price hikes over the past four months. While several factors are driving the increases, the dry summer has played a major role, says Stuart Smyth, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.
A recent Statistics Canada report shows that 71 per cent of the country was classified as abnormally dry or in moderate to extreme drought conditions in August, including 70 per cent of Canada’s agricultural land.
It’s the highest average in the last five years according to the Canadian Drought Monitor, an Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada tool that tracks perception conditions.
“Farmers have had to sell off livestock because they don’t have enough feed or pasture for all their animals,” Smyth said, explaining that cows, especially, require a lot of both.
Dry summer seasons are not a new phenomenon for Western Canada, and farmers have long had to work around it. However, Smyth said that, “Some of the livestock producing regions of Alberta and Saskatchewan continued into their seventh or eighth year of below average precipitation.”
In fact, the continued cycle of drought has led Canada to record its lowest count of cattle since the 1980s, causing strains on the supply chain, especially in the summer, during barbecue season.
Dr. Pascal Thériault, the Director of farm management and technology program at McGill University, said that when farmers liquidate their cattle, “It lowers the quantity of beef that’s available in the market.”
The demand for beef has held steady over the past four months, said Thériault, but prices have risen as supply across the country declined.
According to another Statistics Canada report, beef products, fresh or frozen, saw the largest increase in price at a 12.7 per cent across Canada during the summer. In Ontario, that amounted to a more than 11 per cent rise in comparison to the spring, making it one of the most inflated items on the shelves.
“It’s not that they [farmers] can suddenly change their herd size in one year. It’s going to take them a number of years to build that herd size up,” said Smyth. “As consumers, we will have higher beef prices for the next two to three years, possibly.”
It’s not just beef that’s been affected, but also crops such as stone fruit, corn and apples. The lack of rain and the unpredictable dryness levels played a role in the quality of the harvest, said Thériault.
The program director highlights that, “If there’s an expectation that quality will not be there, people take positions on the market that create an artificial demand. Therefore, it drives the price higher.”
The lack of precipitation meant the fruit would be ready for harvest seven to 10 days earlier than usual, said Smyth.
“Most strawberry producers were telling me it was so dry, the plants barely grew. So the fall strawberries harvest will be short,” said Thériault. “Strawberry [quality] was not that great and they became pricey, because while the demand is still there, the supply is not present.”
Fortinos, at Appleby and Dundas in Burlington, sources much of its fresh produce from local farms across the Niagara Region and Grimsby and had to work around the quality challenges with driven up price points.
“Some weeks, the availability is great, and we’d get exactly what we ordered. Other weeks, we have to prorate to ensure that all of our stores are able to get some product,” Jake Mathieson, assistant store manager, told OTR.
Yet, despite some changed timelines and raised prices, Canadian customers are still leaning towards buying made-in-country products, said Mathieson and Dr. Smyth. However, the repercussions of an extreme drought in the last four months will be long-lasting.“If we want to be able to navigate around price hikes, we’ll need to be able to adapt quicker and make different choices in the way we make our food purchases,” said Thériault. “Climate change is here, and there’s only so many things we can produce in a greenhouse.”
Otter.ai was used in the transcription of interviews for this story.
