One of the more enduring and useful farm business management benchmarks has been the “Residual Return to Land, Labour and Management” (RLLM). Historically, it has been used as a return to the two residual claimants –farmland and family labour and management. It also can be used as a starting point for several other benchmarks. Two measures of RLLM are examined, one based on regional farm level data (microdata approach) and the other based on provincial income and expense statistics (the aggregate approach). While they result in similar 1926-1999 means, they result in somewhat different patterns because of the differing relative impacts of drought and new crops such as canola. Nevertheless, they both show the narrowing margin of the residual, particularly after 1980. Cost shares are also used to delineate a series of agricultural epochs.