The Canadian Wheat Board predicts that eight to 12 million acres of prairie farmland will remain unseeded this year because of wet conditions.If that figure holds up, it means 15 to 20 percent of cropland in Western Canada will lie dormant this summer.Less than 300,000 acres remain unseeded in a typical year on the Prairies, Bruce Burnett, the wheat board’s director of weather and market analysis, told a grain industry briefing last week.“We were surprised by some very, very poor seeding conditions across the Prairies,” Burnett said.It’s still difficult to know precisely how many acres will remain unseeded, he cautioned, which is why the board’s forecast varies by four million acres.He said the wet and often impossible seeding conditions caught the grain industry off guard because it was a record dry winter on parts of the Prairies.“Many areas got off to an early start but the extraordinary rains halted progress,” he said.If the forecast holds up, the wheat board expects prairie farmers to plant 19.15 million acres of wheat, which would be the smallest area since 1971 when the federal government introduced a stock reduction program called Lower Inventories For Tomorrow.The board also expects farmers to plant 6.6 million acres of barley, the lowest since 1965. The forecast for durum is 3.4 million seeded acres, the smallest area since 1980.Burnett said three million acres of wheat and 1.7 million acres of barley will remain unseeded.“The remainder is the other crops,” he said. “Viterra had a release that said up to five million acres unseeded on the canola side. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with that.”Burnett said a large area stretching from the Alberta-Saskatchewan border to Lake Manitoba received record precipitation from April 1 to June 8. For example, Saskatoon received nearly 200 millimetres of rain during that time, 50 mm more than the previous record for April, May and early June.Stan Novogrodski, a grain producer near Carrot River, Sask., was one of many farmers affected by the incessant rain. He estimated that 230 to 250 mm fell on his farm over the last two months.“This is the worst spring I’ve seen,” he said. “I remember being wet in 1954 but we got all our crop in. It was just later (that year) that we got rain. We couldn’t harvest.”Novogrodski was able to seed all of his 1,000 acres this spring, but many producers in Saskatchewan were not as fortunate.The CWB estimated that seeding in the province was 70 percent complete as of June 11 and 78 percent prairie-wide.Burnett didn’t separate the unseeded acres by province, but said the majority of the eight to 12 million acres are in Saskatchewan.Based on Statistics Canada data, Saskatchewan has 29. 4 million acres of cropland, excluding special crops. The board’s 70 percent completion estimate would mean 8.8 million acres are still unseeded in the province.Jon Driedger, a market analyst with FarmLink Marketing Solutions, said many market participants were slow to understand the scope and breadth of the situation.“It seems like the canola market took a while to wake up to what was going on out there,” he said, noting that futures prices at the ICE exchange in Winnipeg finally responded in the second week of June.“We’ve really seen this canola market rally, close to $20 (per tonne), over this last week.”
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