CALGARY – This year’s high quality barley market could mean brisk winter sales for feed and malting varieties.
Bob Sutton of Canada Malt in Calgary said they have received calls from countries never contacted before. The demand is largely due to a severe drought in Australia.
“We have a reputation for quality, but Australia has a lot of traditional customers it can’t satisfy,” said Sutton.
Canada Malt has a network of production facilities across Canada and in order to keep up with the demand it had to reopen two plants previously closed.
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Wheat board commissioner Gordon Machej said the board expects to sell two million tonnes of malting barley.
“Our priority number one is to sell the supplies of malting barley. Number two priority is to maximize the sales of feed barley to commercial markets, i.e. Japan,” he said. Japan has agreed to buy 800,000 tonnes of 1CW annually.
However, the downside in the market is competition Canadian feed grains are getting from a 10 billion bushel American corn crop.
In some cases, corn has replaced feed wheat in Manitoba where it’s used in poultry rations. A smaller amount has landed in the southern Alberta feed market.
Little competition
Domestically, farmers can expect decent prices partly because there isn’t much feed wheat around to create competition. The mid-November average for feed barley was $115 a tonne, said Al Dooley of Alberta Agriculture market analysis division.
The wheat board pool return outlook has also gone up by $4 a tonne from the October price range of $106 to $116, which is encouraging, but could be the last of the high prices for the season, he said.
The 1994 harvest saw 11,077,000 tonnes come out of the fields with about half that coming out of Alberta. Saskatchewan had the highest percentage of malting barley at 41 percent followed by Alberta at 17 percent and Manitoba at nine percent.
Saskatchewan tends to grow more malting varieties while Alberta leans toward feed varieties.
Last year about 13 million tonnes of barley were harvested.
