For the second year in a row, Western Canadian farmers seeded more canola than hard red spring wheat, the region’s historical signature crop.
It was 15.42 million acres of hard red spring wheat versus 15.75 million acres of canola, according to the Statistics Canada report released June 23.
Wheat still topped the chart if you include all spring-sown wheat, including prairie spring, soft white, extra strong and other classes, unlike last year when canola acreage outnumbered all spring wheat, excluding durum.
If the canola industry succeeds with its expansion plans of climbing to 15 million tonnes by 2015, and it likely will, the dominant crop in terms of acreage in the West will soon be canola.
Read Also
Wheat markets are under duress
Two of Canada’s top wheat buyers have agreed to significantly ramp up their purchases from the United States.
The oilseed is already the dominant revenue crop, generating farm cash receipts in 2008 in the three prairie provinces of $4.86 billion compared to $3.04 billion for all wheat, excluding durum.
Another statistic in the StatsCan report indicating a major shift was the red lentil number.
In the June report, the agency lists lentil acreage only in Saskatchewan, the overwhelmingly dominant producer. Reacting to outlooks for strong demand, the province’s farmers increased lentil area to 2.32 million acres, up 44 percent from last year and up from the previous record set in 2005 of 1.96 million acres.
Reds were seeded on 1.22 million acres (780,000 last year), large greens on 815,000 acres (630,000), small greens on 215,000 acres (160,000) and other types on 70,000 acres (40,000).
It was only a few years ago that pulse industry leaders urged growers to shift their production toward reds because about 80 percent of the world traded in lentils in that class versus 20 percent greens.
News of the big acreage increase this year did not hurt lentil prices. The market is uncertain about the crop that had been threatened by drought, but received some rain in the last two weeks.
As we move into July, the weather in many of the world’s growing regions has improved. The U.S. Midwest enjoyed nearly ideal growing weather in late June. Australia has received rain, as has eastern Europe, which has scaled back its production outlook because of drought.
Western Europe, especially France was enduring a heat wave that was stressing plants in late June. We’ll keep an eye on that.
The United States Department of Agriculture releases a major grains stocks and acreage report June 30, after our deadline.
We will have coverage next week but for a look at the USDA report before that, turn to our website at www.producer.com where Winnipeg markets reporter Ed White blogs on a regular basis.
