AAFC Crop History per Quarter Section

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) publishes a national raster called the Annual Crop Inventory (ACI). Each ~30m pixel carries an integer crop class — canola, spring wheat, soybean, fallow, etc. — for each growing season from 2009 onward. Township Canada aggregates the most recent five years to a per-cell summary and surfaces it on every parcel report.

What the summary returns

For any quarter section in Alberta or Saskatchewan, the AAFC crop summary card on /parcel/<lld> returns:

• Dominant crop — the crop class that occupies the most acres across the 5-year window
• Rotation — the year-by-year sequence of dominant crops (e.g., Canola → Wheat → Canola → Lentil → Canola)
• Shannon diversity index — a 0-1 measure of how varied the rotation is (0 = monoculture, ~1 = even mix of several crops)
• Years covered — which years are included in the aggregate

The pipeline reprojects each year's raster, takes the modal crop class per 1km vector cell, and joins to AAFC's published colour table. Coverage extends across Alberta and Saskatchewan; the layer can be toggled as a full map overlay at the Ag Farmer tier and above.

How to use it

For farmers checking a new lease. Before signing, pull the report on the parcel. If the dominant crop is wheat-monoculture for five straight years, that's relevant — both for understanding what came off and for nitrogen/disease pressure planning. If the rotation is canola-wheat-canola-wheat, that's a different signal.

For agronomists prepping visits. A territory of 20 parcels with dominant crop and diversity already in the report lets the agronomist build the visit list around what's actually growing — soybean visits in one cluster, canola in another.

For carbon project developers. The Alberta TIER Conservation Cropping protocol requires historical crop history per parcel. The per-parcel AAFC summary serves this directly without a manual GIS query against AAFC's published rasters. See Alberta carbon credits legal land descriptions.

For investors underwriting a portfolio. Dominant crop and diversity across 60 candidate parcels give a quick read on intensification level — high-canola, low-diversity portfolios behave differently than mixed grain-pulse-oilseed portfolios in price-shock years.

What's not in the summary

A few clarifications:

• It's modal per pixel, then aggregated — a quarter section that grew canola on 60% and wheat on 40% reports canola as dominant, not "60% canola / 40% wheat." The parcel-level acreage breakdown is in the underlying data; the surfaced summary picks a single dominant.
• It's observed, not declared. AAFC ACI is satellite-derived; what gets reported is what the imagery sees. A canola crop that failed in May and got reseeded to oats may show as oats; an unseeded fallow shows as fallow.
• The rotation is chronological, not most-recent-first. Year 5 (oldest) → Year 1 (newest).

Coverage

• Alberta: full coverage
• Saskatchewan: full coverage
• Manitoba, BC, Ontario: partial; AAFC publishes for the agricultural land base only

See the AAFC layer reference for the data pipeline.

Related

• LSRS Soil Productivity Score
• Parcel report at /parcel/[lld]
• Alberta Carbon Credits Legal Land Descriptions
• Saskatchewan Quarter Section Guide for Grain Farmers