Agriculture Taxation Data Program (ATDP)
Detailed information for 2018
Status:
Active
Frequency:
Annual
Record number:
3447
The Agriculture Taxation Data Program (ATDP) is designed to produce detailed estimates for the following variables: farm revenues and expenses (preliminary, revised), as well as farm and off-farm income of farm families.
Data release - December 6, 2019 (Farm operating revenues and expenses, preliminary data); April 24, 2020 (Number of employees in the agriculture sector); June 4, 2020 (Farm operating revenues and expenses, revised data)
Description
The Agriculture Taxation Data Program (ATDP) is an annual census of unincorporated and incorporated tax filer records used to estimate a range of financial agricultural variables. The financial variables disseminated by the ATDP include detailed farm revenues and expenses as well as farm and off-farm income of farm families.
Data are used by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, other federal and provincial departments, and various agencies to monitor the financial health of the Canadian agricultural sector and serve as a tool for farm-level policy analysis. The Farm Income and Prices Unit, Agriculture Division of Statistics Canada, relies primarily upon ATDP financial data to establish expense estimates for the Agricultural Economic Statistics (AES) and Statistics Canada's National Accounts. The annual on and off-farm family income estimates are used to assess the economic welfare of Canadian farm operators and their families and facilitate farm policy development. Every five years, the ATDP detailed revenues and expenses are input into the Census of Agriculture.
Reference period: For incorporated businesses, the reference period is the fiscal year. For the unincorporated businesses, it is the calendar year.
Collection period: Data are extracted from administrative files on a monthly basis.
Subjects
- Agriculture and food (formerly Agriculture)
- Farm financial statistics
- Farms and farm operators
Data sources and methodology
Target population
The target population consists of all unincorporated and incorporated farms in Canada as defined on Statistics Canada's Business Register. Since the 1993 taxation year, it has also encompassed all communal farming organizations in Canada. Farms on First Nations reserves as well as institutional farms and community pastures are excluded from the ATDP target population.
For statistical purposes, the farm revenue and expense estimates presented cover both unincorporated farms and communal farming organizations with total farm operating revenues equal to or greater than $10,000 as well as incorporated farms with total farm operating revenues of $25,000 and over.
The farm family population includes only those families operating single unincorporated or incorporated agricultural holdings (i.e., single-farm families).
In the ATDP, farm families are modeled after Census families. Census family is defined as a married couple and the children, if any, of either and/or both spouses; a couple living common law and the children, if any, of either and/or both partners; or a lone parent of any marital status with at least one child living in the same dwelling and that child or those children. All members of a particular census family live in the same dwelling. A couple may be of opposite or same sex. Children may be children by birth, marriage, common-law union or adoption regardless of their age or marital status as long as they live in the dwelling and do not have their own married spouse, common-law partner or child living in the dwelling. Grandchildren living with their grandparent(s) but with no parents present also constitute a census family.
Persons who are not members of a census family are excluded.
Instrument design
This methodology does not apply.
Sampling
This is not a sample survey. It is a census of farm establishments as identified on Statistics Canada's Business Register.
Data sources
Farm revenue and expense data are extracted from administrative files supplied to Statistics Canada's Data Stewardship Division via Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).
Data for off-farm income of farm families are extracted from the T1 Family File (T1FF) produced by Income Statistics Division of Statistics Canada. The T1 General--Income Tax and Benefit Return form serves as a source of off-farm income statistics: wages and salaries, net off-farm self-employment income, investment income, pension income, government social transfers and other off-farm income. Data from the Canada Child Tax Benefit File supplement data on off-farm income.
Farm families are identified by linking the ATDP file containing data on farm operators involved in incorporated and unincorporated farms into the T1 Family File (T1FF), containing family units developed by Income Statistics Division. Records are linked and farm families are identified. Linkage results are used to produce aggregate estimates for total income of farm families.
An Agriculture Taxation Data Program (ATDP) operator is a person that reports revenue on their individual tax form as a result of a financial stake of an ATDP farm operation. The financial stake may be direct in the case of an unincorporated farm (typically T1) or indirect through shares for an incorporated farm (typically T2).
Error detection
Data from tax sources are subjected to a series of custom editing and imputation procedures designed and updated annually by Statistics Canada.
Data enter into the ATDP tax processing system already edited and imputed by way of Statistics Canada's T1 and T2 tax processing systems which do initial processing of the data received from the Canada Revenue Agency. Subsequent processing is conducted at the microdata level. Unincorporated farms are edited in order to convert negative General Index of Financial Information (GIFI) values into positive GIFI values and to be consistent with T2 processing. An agriculture industrial code (NAICS) is derived based on reported commodity data or ancillary information. Non-farming revenues and expenses are transferred to farming revenues and expenses when appropriate to reflect farming activities reported in non-farming taxation forms or cells. Deterministic and balancing edits are conducted after values are transferred to ensure consistency at the microdata level.
Analysts then manually review a set of the records determined by a number of criteria including magnitude. The variables within the microdata record are grouped into 15 blocks based on agricultural commodity or expense item, each with a corresponding block total. These block totals also contribute to one of two overall totals (overall revenue total and overall expense total). When manual changes are made to a block component without making the correct corresponding changes to the appropriate totals, the editing system prorates all of the components within the block to respect the block total. This is done to localize manual inconsistencies and prevent them from affecting the rest of the record.
Imputation
Units with partial non-response are imputed by a combination of donor imputation using Statistics Canada's generalized edit and imputation system Banff and manual imputation. Units with total non-response that are very important are sometimes manually imputed using expert intelligence.
Estimation
Total farm revenue and expense items are estimated by aggregating the individual revenue and expense items. The calculated revenue and expense items are summed by domain to produce the total revenue and expense items. A domain is defined as a region, a type of farm, a revenue class or a combination of these variables.
Data for the three territories are excluded.
ATDP tax records are linked with a family file to produce total estimates for farm families. The family file is created by the Income Statistics Division within Statistics Canada. Income Statistics Division's family file (T1FF) combines individual taxation records in order to create groups modeled after Census families.
Family total income is derived from personal income tax returns of each family member. Off-farm income estimates are produced by adding the off-farm income components of family members. Each record corresponds to a family. The calculated off-farm income items are summed by domain to produce the total off-farm income items. Before aggregation, the farming income components of farm families, such as the net operating income, are multiplied by the family's partnership share.
Quality evaluation
The ATDP farm and revenue data are evaluated through comparisons to other sources of farm financial information, such as the Agricultural Economic Statistics series and the Census of Agriculture to assess the quality of the data. Extra scrutiny is paid to the largest farms or top commodity contributors.
If there are discrepancies, the micro-level data records are analyzed to determine if differences are attributable to errors. Tools are used to analyze data at the provincial level, by farm type and revenue class including year-over-year change.
Aggregated data produced from the Personal Master File and estimates on income of all families produced from the T1 Family File (T1FF) are also used to assess the quality of the series for farm and off-farm income of families.
Disclosure control
Statistics Canada is prohibited by law from releasing any information it collects that could identify any person, business, or organization, unless consent has been given by the respondent or as permitted by the Statistics Act. Various confidentiality rules are applied to all data that are released or published to prevent the publication or disclosure of any information deemed confidential. If necessary, data are suppressed to prevent direct or residual disclosure of identifiable data.
All tabulated data are subjected to either a "random rounding" or an "adjustment" confidentiality procedure to prevent the possibility of associating statistical data with any identifiable agricultural operation or family.
The "random rounding" procedure is applied to all data pertaining to the number of farms reporting. Employing this technique, the number of farms reporting, including totals, are randomly rounded either up or down to a multiple of 5. While providing protection against disclosure, this procedure does not add significant error to the data. It does, however, result in certain data inconsistencies which are outlined in the data inconsistencies paragraphs presented below.
The "value adjustment" procedure adjusts all cell values in dollars and is required after the "random rounding" of farms reporting, in order to preserve true averages.
Finally, data for those geographic areas and/or farm types with fewer than 10 agricultural operations are not released separately, but are accounted at higher levels of geography and/or farm type.
The application of the "random rounding" confidentiality procedure to data result in the following data inconsistencies:
Since the totals in a table are randomly rounded/adjusted independently of their component cell values, some differences may exist between the rounded/adjusted totals and the sum of their rounded/adjusted components.
Random rounding can significantly distort results for variables with small cell counts. Individual data cells containing small numbers may lose their precision as a result.
This method preserves the confidentiality of the data, without jeopardizing the quality of the actual estimates.
Revisions and seasonal adjustment
Revisions may occur and will be noted as such in the tables. Seasonal adjustment methodology does not apply to this statistical program.
Data accuracy
Data coming from the Canada Revenue Agency are considered to be of high accuracy at the microdata level, however they may be incomplete.
While considerable effort is made to ensure high standards throughout all stages of processing, the resulting estimates are inevitably subject to a certain degree of error. These errors can be broken down into two major types: non-sampling and sampling.
Estimates produced by ATDP are derived from a census of administrative data so they are not subject to sampling errors. However, the ATDP may not receive tax records for all of the units in its population or the tax record may not be complete. Therefore, the main source of non-sampling error comes from imputation. There are two kinds of imputation done for ATDP. Firstly, partial imputation takes place when a block total is reported but not the detailed components of the block. These details need to be imputed. Secondly, massive imputation takes place when no tax data are received by the ATDP tax processing system. In this case, all variables in a record are imputed from a single donor.
Documentation
- Description of farm family income components
- Date modified: