Saskatchewan farmers will seed almost as many acres to pulse crops as to canola this spring.
With canola prices weighed down by burdensome vegetable oil supplies, canola acreage will likely drop.
Pulse acreage will rise due to better market outlooks for some crops and because pulses produce their own nitrogen, a real plus given the soaring price of fertilizer.
Forecasts vary, but it is safe to assume the pulse total will exceed five million acres.
With that, Saskatchewan’s pulse crop will be bigger than its 2000 barley crop and almost as big as the 2000 durum crop.
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In other words, pulse crop are big business in Saskatchewan.
They are important in Alberta and Manitoba too, but not to the same extent.
It must be frustrating for Saskat-chewan farmers to hear over and over that they must diversify, when clearly they have. They’ve focused on crops, whereas Alberta can point to cattle and Manitoba to hogs.
For an indication of the sweeping change in Saskatchewan, compare 2000 to 1990, when 16.16 million acres were covered with the green and gold of spring wheat. In 2000, only 9.73 million acres of spring wheat were harvested.
Canola was the first crop to paint the province a different color. There were 2.8 million acres by 1990, mainly in the province’s northern and eastern regions. But new varieties and the push for diversification caused canola’s yellow flowers to bloom across Saskatchewan’s plains. By 2000, there were 5.8 million acres.
In 1990, Saskatchewan’s pulse pioneers had seeded 419,000 acres to peas and lentils.
With new, better varieties of the nitrogen-fixing crops, farmers soon realized they were on to a good thing.
In 2000, the province had more than 4.5 million acres of peas, lentils, chickpeas and dry beans.
Looking at it another way, between 1990 and 2000, Alberta decreased its spring wheat crop by 15 percent, Manitoba by 30 percent and Saskatchewan by 41 percent.
At the same time, Kansas’s wheat acreage fell by 25 percent and North Dakota by only eight percent.
Saskatchewan’s story of diversification is far from complete, but many chapters have already been written.
Grain Tables
As you might have noticed, the line charts for grain prices did not update last week due to a technological quirk.
We are sorry for the error.
