Lettuce Production and Cost
Mar 10th, 2005 by amelia
Question
A graduate student here is trying to find the amount of lettuce produced in Canada and the average market cost for the years,
1940, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000. Can anyone out there help?
Answer
Ag Canada produced a “Handbook of food expenditures, prices and consumption,” which contains ‘retail prices’ for lettuce. We carry 1973-1990 in print, however, it also carries the price index for lettuce beginning with 1949.
Usually STC does not have much if anything on actual prices of consumer goods to avoid the data being used for illegal price fixing. There was a table in the Consumer price index pubs (62-001) with a selection of prices for a small number of retail consumer goods such bread and milk. The up to date source for this is the Canada Food Statistics CD-Rom 23F0001XCB. It will not have the price of lettuce, but it will have the cpi for lettuce as well as production info. Production data can be also found in Fruit and Vegetable production 22-003 xib and xpb. Census of ag data would just give you acreage, not actual amounts of lettuce produced.