It’s official.
Despite a late start to spring and a harvest that seemed to drag on forever, prairie farmers brought in a big, big crop.
Statistics Canada last week put the official stamp on what farmers and the market already knew, said Dave Reimann, manager of floor trading operations for Benson Quinn-GMS.
Futures prices dropped slightly across the board at the Winnipeg Commodity Exchange on Dec. 3, the day StatsCan released its November estimates.
But Reimann said the drop had more to do with price weakness in Chicago futures than the content of the report.
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“I really don’t think there was any shock for the trade,” said Reimann.
StatsCan pegged total Canadian canola production at 8.798 million tonnes.
This was within 100,000 tonnes of the range of estimates by the trade, said Reimann. Benson Quinn-GMS had expected 8.696 million tonnes from Western Canada and another 100,000 tonnes in Eastern Canada.
This is a record for Canada.
Farmers set the previous record last year, with 7.6 million tonnes of canola production. Acreage increased by two percent from last year, but yields made the big difference.
StatsCan said the canola crop had a record average yield of 28.2 bushels per acre. The recent five-year average canola yield was 23.8 bu. per acre.
Average yields were higher than last year for most crops measured by StatsCan.
And production for most crops was higher than expected in the agency’s last survey done at the end of July.
Less is good
Flax production was the only exception. It dropped by five percent from the agency’s July estimates to 1.05 million tonnes.
Reimann said the drop is “sort of good news” for flax markets, because demand for the crop has been so poor.
However, the five percent change is not large enough to affect the big picture for price prospects for flax, he said.
Durum production dropped by a third on the Prairies this summer, but farmers produced more spring wheat than last year to fill the gap.
The survey showed 88 percent of the wheat planted in Western Canada went into hard red spring varieties. Nine percent of the wheat was prairie spring types and three percent extra strong.
It showed that despite a lingering harvest in many areas, Manitoba farmers planted 130,000 acres of winter wheat this fall, 44 percent more than last year.
In Saskatchewan, farmers seeded 60 percent more winter wheat this year: a total of 150,000 acres.
Saskatchewan growers took off 187,500 tonnes of chickpeas, up from 50,900 tonnes last year.
Manitoba bean growers continued to take over the industry from their counterparts in Ontario, harvesting 122,000 tonnes of beans, compared to 106,000 tonnes in Ontario.
And prairie farmers set a new record in lentil production: 723,800 tonnes, which is 51 percent greater than last year’s record 479,800 tonnes.
