Crop traders are having a tough time reconciling the acreage numbers in Statistics Canada’s November production estimate report.
The Dec. 3 report shows that western Canadian farmers seeded 6.4 million fewer acres than they did last year and increased their summerfallow by 5.4 million acres.
That doesn’t mesh with Viterra’s July 8 estimate of eight million unseeded acres or the Canadian Wheat Board’s July 30 estimate of 10.5 million acres that didn’t go in the ground.
“Their numbers are their numbers and I still stand by my estimates and never the twain shall meet for a while,” said Bruce Burnett, the wheat board’s director of weather and market analysis.
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The latest provincial crop insurance numbers bolster his case: 734,000 unseeded acres in Manitoba, eight million in Saskatchewan and another 200,000 in Alberta.
The Manitoba and Saskatchewan numbers include insured and uninsured acres, while the Alberta number is only insured.
That is nearly nine million acres that growers reported as unseeded, so it’s hard to fathom how summerfallow increased by only 5.4 million acres over last year.
Burnett isn’t alone in his skepticism about the Statistics Canada report. There is general agreement in the grain trade and among analysts that the survey and the resulting production estimates failed to pick up the magnitude of unseeded acres.
“It is what it is and we’ll have to deal with this uncertainty until we get to the stocks numbers in July,” he said.
He declined to provide the wheat board’s crop-by-crop breakdown of acreage but said the numbers should be smaller across the spectrum of crops grown in Western Canada.
Burnett was expecting to see a decline in seeded and harvested acreage in the Statistics Canada report, but that wasn’t the case.
“To be honest, I could have fallen off my chair when I saw that they’d increased the wheat harvested area from the last report,” he said.
Statistics Canada reported 19.34 million harvested wheat acres, up from 18.96 million acres in the September report.
Markets for various crops could potentially be affected later on if it decides its acreage numbers are bloated.
However, Burnett thinks that impact will be muted by what he considers to be the surprisingly accurate production estimates contained in the same report.
