PrairieRates

About the data

Alberta: surveyed charges

The Alberta Custom Rates Survey (Government of Alberta) contacted producers and custom operators and recorded what they actually charged, by county, along with the equipment and notes. We pulled every individual charge from the published reports for 2004–2018 (grain harvesting, field operations, hay and silage, livestock). Alberta hasn't published newer custom rates reports. Every figure links to the PDF page it came from.

How we screen the data

Government reports contain the occasional typo or mislabelled unit. For example, Alberta's grain harvesting reports list one Leduc County combine operator at $150–$175 an acre from 2011 to 2018, four to five times the normal rate. To stop entries like that from skewing the numbers, every Alberta charge goes through the same checks, grouped by job, unit and five-year period:

  1. Plausible range. Each job and unit has a generous sanity range (for example $8–$110 an acre for combining). Anything outside it is excluded.
  2. Unit check. A per-acre or per-tonne figure that matches the job's hourly rates, or whose notes price it per day, per hour or per gallon, is treated as a mislabelled unit.
  3. Distance from typical. We compare each charge with the median of its group on a log scale, using the median absolute deviation. A charge is excluded only if it is both statistically extreme (robust z above 3.5) and more than 3× or less than a third of the typical rate. Different kinds of work are compared separately: small and large bales, silage packing, and rental-only equipment.
  4. Carried-forward answers. Alberta repeated many operators' unchanged rates in later surveys. Each year's chart point uses that year's survey, but multi-year figures (the headline rate and the county table) count each operator's answer once, so one operator can't count three times.

Excluded charges (1,170 of 41,742) stay visible in the individual charge lists, greyed out with the reason, and link to the source page so you can judge for yourself. A further 2,370 unusual but plausible charges, such as multi-machine crew rates, are labelled “Unusual” and still count. After de-duplication there are 28,620 distinct operator answers.

Farmer reports go through the same idea before they count: a hard plausible range, a comparison with the official and existing farmer figures, limits per submitter and per day, duplicate detection, and automated bot checks. Reports that look off are held for review and never appear in averages until approved. County figures use the median of at least 3 different submitters, so a single report can't move them much.

Saskatchewan and Manitoba: calculated guide rates

The Saskatchewan and Manitoba Farm Machinery Custom and Rental Rate Guides calculate a fair farmer-to-farmer rate from each machine's purchase price, depreciation, interest, repairs, fuel, labour and a 15% margin. They're not surveys of market prices and aren't meant for commercial custom operators, so a commercial custom operator's price is often higher.

Anonymous farmer reports

Anyone can share what they charged or paid, with no account. We keep only the county or RM, show an average only once a county has 3 or more reports, and hold reports that sit far from the official figures for review. We store a one-way hash of the submitter's network address only to limit spam.

Extraction is automated, so errors are possible. Please check the linked PDF before relying on a number.

Sources (75 documents)