Canada Data Ranks Cannabis Fifth Among 2025 Cash Crops at $3B

Cannabis now out-earns potatoes on Canadian farms

Cannabis ranked fifth among Canadian crops in 2025, with $3 billion in receipts and a 5.8% share of the total, according to Statistics Canada.

Potatoes, the sixth-place crop, trailed by nearly $1 billion. By our math, that implies potato receipts near $2 billion and total crop receipts of roughly $52 billion. Both derived figures are CannIntel's calculation from the reported share. They aren't Statistics Canada numbers.

Our read relies on the Ganjapreneur summary of the agency data. We haven't independently reviewed the underlying tables.

A 32-fold climb in nine years

Cannabis crop value rose from $94.8 million in 2016 to $3 billion in 2025, roughly a 32-fold increase.

That 2016 baseline predates the Cannabis Act, which opened Canada's adult-use market in October 2018. Nobody was farming cannabis at scale for a regulated consumer market then. Now it sits above a staple vegetable in the national ledger.

The comparison has limits. Crop receipts capture what growers earn, not what consumers pay at retail, so this isn't a measure of total market size. It does show how much production capacity a federally legal system can build and keep.

Not small. Not a fluke, either.

What it means for Latin America and U.S. import flows

Canada's number gives Latin American producers a benchmark for licit-crop economics, but none of that volume can legally reach the U.S. market.

In Colombia and Uruguay, policymakers talk about moving farmers from cultivos ilícitos to cultivos lícitos. Canada shows what the licit side can look like once a domestic base exists: a crop that ranks among the country's top five by value.

The Canadian figure was built without the U.S. market. U.S. federal law still blocks commercial cannabis imports, and that same wall faces any Latin American exporter hoping to ship north. Canada's growth came from selling at home, and that's a harder, slower template than the export story many investors prefer, though it's also the one with evidence behind it.

For full background on this story, see the CannIntel topic hub on the Canada cannabis market.

The next signal: whether cannabis holds fifth place when Statistics Canada publishes its next crop receipts data. If potatoes close the roughly $1 billion gap, the 2025 ranking looks like a peak rather than a floor.