WINNIPEG, June 20 (CNS Canada) – Old crop Canadian lentil stocks may be higher than previously thought, but they’re not high enough to affect the market, especially as anticipation mounts for the possibly record-large new crop.
Agriculture Canada’s June supply and demand report shows lentil carryout for 2015-16 at 75,000 tonnes, up from a forecast of 25,000 in the May report.
But that is still negligable.
“If the whole world ended today there would be no lentils in Canada. There’s no pods, there’s no seeds, there’s very little in the bins, there’s virtually nothing,” said David Newman, owner of Victoria-area pulse trading and processing firm Commodious Trading.
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Newman said the market is paying close attention to the potential of what’s coming from the new crop now growing.
“There are a lot of acres in the ground and there’s a lot of potential … but we don’t really have a lot of control over it. I sort of consider it the dark zone, we don’t really know what will happen,” Newman said.
David Nobbs, general manager of Canpulse Foods, said he thinks lentil acreage will be more than the March forecast from Statistics Canada’s farmer survey.
“We’ll probably find out that the acreage on the new crop is wrong, that it’s higher than the 5.2 million acres they’ve stated. I think it will be closer to six million,” Nobbs said.
Time will tell what the quality of the crops is like, Nobbs said, but so far everything looks positive.
“We’ve had good moisture in most areas, there are a few areas that have had too much moisture, but for the most part the crop ratings coming out of Saskatchewan Agriculture are excellent … and we’re ahead of schedule as far as upcoming flowering,” Nobbs said.
