Alberta and Manitoba farmers jumped on the canola bandwagon this spring, accounting for most of the million acre increase in the yellow flowered crop from last year.
Statistics Canada’s June survey of farmers showed a big drop in summerfallow area as farmers chased high crop prices with their seeders.
Fallow area in Western Canada dropped by a remarkable 1.9 million acres or 25 percent from last year. Fallow area in Saskatchewan at four million acres is now less than half of what it was in 2000.
Go back another 10 years to 1990 and summerfallow took up 14.4 million acres.
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The surprise in the StatsCan report was in canola and it was Alberta that led the charge, adding 14.4 percent or 650,000 acres to the area seeded last year. Manitoba farmers added 8.1 percent to last year’s area but Saskatchewan’s canola area rose by only 2.1 percent, perhaps reflecting drier conditions in parts of that province.
A 15.812 million acre canola crop would produce 9.47 million tonnes at last year’s average prairie yield of 26.4 bushels per acre.
At the 30.5 bu. per acre average of 2006, it would produce a crop of 10.94 million tonnes.
The crop got off to a bad start and is late in development, but prospects look better now that a large part of prime canola land in Saskatchewan’s northern grain belt received beneficial rain recently.
The market was not depressed by the larger canola acreage, focusing instead on rising prices for soybeans, driven higher by U.S. seeding troubles and higher crude oil prices.
Barley was the other surprise in the report. Farmers had indicated in the March seeding intentions survey that they would seed less barley, but they wound up sowing even less than expected, only 9.07 million acres.
That will produce a small crop, but with domestic livestock feed demand down and a weaker offshore market this year, supply and demand might be in balance.
Oats area also dropped from the March intentions report.
Ethanol’s impact felt
Wheat acres are up from last year. That was expected, but there was a little shifting in the category with more acres of durum seeded than found in the March intentions
survey.
The June report gives a more detailed breakdown of wheat classes and through it the impact of a prairie ethanol industry becomes apparent.
There is a significant increase in the soft white spring wheat class, with acreage rising 568 percent from last year to 455,000 acres. That is because ethanol plants such as Terra Grain at Belle Plaine, Sask., are contracting varieties like AC Andrew, a high yield, high starch soft white wheat.
Almost all of the increase occurred in Saskatchewan.
Lentils were another area where farmers diverted from their March plans.
At that time they expected to seed 1.33 million acres, but as spring progressed it became clear that drought in parts of the Middle East would slash production in Turkey and cause Syria to impose an export ban, knocking major competitors out of the market. Prices jumped to record highs and farmers decided to increase plantings to 1.56 million acres, up 17 percent from March intentions. Of that total, 740,000 will be red, 600,000 laird large greens and 180,000 small greens. This marks the first time that red lentil acreage has surpassed laird area.
