More farmers are using computers to run their businesses, StatisticsCanada says, and Quebec is leading the nation in wired agriculture. And among farmers who use computers, almost three-quarters of them increasingly rely on the Internet for their farming needs.

Across the country, 39.4 per cent of farmers use a computer in some way to manage their operations. In Quebec, however, 47.7 per cent of farmers are computerized. The figures, drawn from the 2001 census, have just been released as a separate report on technology and farming.

It was the fourth census in which Statistics Canada has asked about computers. Over that period, computer use has risen steadily from just over 10 per cent in 1986. The rise in computer-managed farms has doubled every five years since 1991, StatsCan said, a rate of adoption almost matching the rapid increase in corporate and residential use of computers during the same period.

Across Canada, 54.9 per cent of Canadians owned a computer, according to statistics in 2000. After Quebec, Alberta was in second place, with 41 per cent of its farms using computers, followed by British Columbia (40 per cent), Ontario (39 per cent), Manitoba (36 per cent), and Atlantic Canada and Saskatchewan (35 per cent).

The high number of farmers using computers in Quebec may appear surprising, said Statistics Canada agriculture analyst Wilson Freeman, but two factors help to explain the province's lead. Farms tend to be larger in Quebec and with their increased revenue can afford computers, Mr. Freeman said. Also, provincial government initiatives put in place after the 1996 census encouraged poorer farmers buy computers.

The result catapulted Quebec farmers to the top spot from last place in 1996. Ten years earlier, in 1986, only 2 per cent of Quebec's farms used computers, below the national average of 3 per cent.

Across the country, the number of working farms dropped dramatically over the previous census (from 276,548 in 1996 to 246,923 in 2001, a drop of 10.7 per cent), but the proportion of them using computers has risen. (58,724 farms computerized in 1996 to 97,378 farms in 2001, an increase of 65.8 per cent).

Mr. Freeman said that the drop in the number of farms is not alarming. The number has been falling steadily since an alltime high in 1941. "But there are very few bankruptcies in farms," he said. Family-owned farms tend to stay in family hands, with the owners preferring to adapt to changing economic conditions rather than selling. When they do stop farming, the land usually becomes a part of larger farming enterprises.

That trend alone helped to increase the number of farms using computers, Mr. Freeman said, because larger farms — those with annual revenues more than $250,000 — require increasingly sophisticated management tools and have more cash left over to buy them with. And those farms accepted computers about as quickly as residential urban users did, Mr. Freeman said. "I can't see much difference," he said. "In fact, in terms of communications, it would be logical that computers would save time and money for farmers."

He did not express surprise that farmers have also taken to the Internet to research the weather, find out commodity prices, and to communicate with each other. The distances between farming operations make e-mail a major saving for the farmers, he said.

Moreover, he added, going on-line for agriculture-related research makes sense as well. "Sure you can go to the library," he said, "but we've ceased putting stuff on hard copy these days."Canadian farmers are in fact clamouring for better Internet connections", said Ontario Federation of Agriculture general manager Neil Currie, and preferably broadband.

The OFA studied the matter of broadband three years ago and concluded that not only farmers, but what it calls "real rural" communities should be wired. Farmers are "desperately demanding" broadband, Mr. Currie said, and so are rural businesses, "which is farming." But for the OFA, one of the most compelling reasons for broadband is not research or on-line business, but a social one. "We have a problem with rural youth," Mr. Currie said. "We're having trouble keeping them on the farm.

"The 2001 census asked, for the first time, about the ways farmers used their computers. Across the country, more than 77 per cent said they used their computers for bookkeeping, almost 49 per cent for livestock and crop record-keeping, 64.6 per cent for word processing and labeling, 70.4 per cent for the Internet and 63.2 per cent for e-mail.

Mr. Freeman, himself a farmer, said it was natural for most farmers to go to the computer to manage their operations. "Most farmers already have a manual method for keeping records," he said, "and it is just a matter of moving that to an Excel spreadsheet."

JACK KAPICA Globe and Mail