AI Analysis: Employees in the agriculture sector, and agricultural operations with at least one employee, by industry

Executive Summary

Canada's agricultural sector employed approximately 281,000 workers in 2024, reflecting modest but steady growth of 3.9% since 2016, with a peak of 282,411 employees in 2018. The sector is highly stable — no statistical outliers were detected, and all five employment metrics move in near-perfect correlation (r > 0.98), suggesting uniform growth across workforce types. Employment is heavily concentrated in a small number of dominant industries, producing a right-skewed distribution where the mean (19,869) is more than double the median (7,557).

Key Findings

• Total agricultural employment grew modestly from 270,513 in 2016 to 280,991 in 2024 (+3.9%), peaking at 282,411 workers in 2018 before slight fluctuation.
• All five employment statistics — total, full-time, part-time, seasonal employees, and agricultural operations — are nearly perfectly correlated (r > 0.98), indicating that sector-wide growth drives all workforce categories simultaneously.
• Seasonal employees have the second-highest mean value (23,444) among all statistics types, underscoring the strongly seasonal nature of Canadian agricultural work.
• The dataset's value distribution is heavily right-skewed, with most of the 540 records clustering at lower counts while a small number of large values — particularly total employee figures reaching up to 282,411 — pull the mean well above the median.
• No IQR-based statistical outliers were detected across industries or years, confirming that Canada's agricultural employment data is remarkably stable, with the largest single year-over-year change being just 3.2% in 2018.
• The part-time to full-time employee ratio was highest in 2016 at 0.43, suggesting a slightly greater reliance on part-time labour early in the period that moderated in subsequent years.
• Across 12 tracked industries, employment is highly unequal, with top-ranked sectors employing significantly more workers on average than bottom-ranked ones, as reflected in the wide interquartile range of 16,609.