Canola-Wheat Rotation Mapping

Canola-wheat is the workhorse rotation across the Prairie agricultural belt, and the AAFC Annual Crop Inventory overlay (Ag Farmer tier and above) lets you scan the rotation at provincial scale or zoom to individual quarter sections.

What you'll see on the map

With the AAFC layer toggled, every 1km cell is coloured by its dominant crop over the most recent 5-year window. The dominant crop comes from AAFC's published colour table — same colours used in the AAFC web viewer, so the visual is familiar to anyone who's used that tool before.

Hotspots emerge quickly at a province-wide zoom:

• Central Alberta (Camrose, Lacombe, Wetaskiwin) — heavy canola-wheat with pockets of oats and peas. Black Soil Zone.
• Peace River block — canola-heavy with shorter rotations (canola-canola in some quarters) reflecting the agronomic risk profile up north.
• Central and southwestern Saskatchewan (Saskatoon, Moose Jaw, Swift Current) — canola-wheat-pulse rotations, with more lentils and chickpeas at the south end.
• Brown Soil Zone (Hanna AB through southwest SK) — wheat-fallow dominates outside irrigation.

Drilling from province to parcel

The map zoom levels are tuned to make this drill straightforward:

1. Province view: dominant-crop pattern visible at z6-8
2. RM view: individual cell colours readable at z10-12
3. Quarter section view: click any parcel to get the full 5-year rotation in the parcel report

The parcel report at /parcel/[lld] returns:

• Dominant crop (the modal-of-modals across 5 years)
• Year-by-year rotation array (Year 5 oldest → Year 1 newest)
• Shannon diversity index (0 = monoculture, ~1 = diverse rotation)

A quarter with rotation = Canola, Wheat, Canola, Wheat, Canola has diversity ≈ 0.6. A quarter with Canola, Canola, Canola, Canola, Canola has diversity = 0.

Use cases by role

Agronomists. Identify visit-prioritization clusters — heavy-canola territories during late-July clubroot scouting season, wheat-dominant areas during fusarium head blight surveillance, lentil zones during anthracnose pressure windows.

Ag retailers. Build prospecting territories around customers who match a rotation profile. Use the Territory & Prospecting tool (Investor tier) to draw a polygon, sort the parcel list by dominant crop, and export to CSV with Salesforce/HubSpot column mapping.

Crop researchers and Extension. Pull rotation patterns at the RM level for trial-site selection. Diversity index lets you find high-rotation reference RMs vs. low-rotation monoculture-heavy zones for comparative work.

Crop insurance. Underwriting on a new policy benefits from confirming that the parcel has been in production — five years of canola or wheat on a quarter is much stronger evidence than a stated declaration.

Coverage and source

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

Source pipeline: AAFC Annual Crop Inventory raster → reproject + 1km mode aggregation via gdalwarp -r mode -tr 1000 1000 → polygonize to vector cells → join AAFC's crop class codebook. Full detail at the AAFC layer reference.

Related

• AAFC Crop History per Quarter Section
• LSRS Soil Productivity Score
• Township Canada for Ag Retailers
• Saskatchewan Quarter Section Guide for Grain Farmers