The Statistics Canada spring seeding report may have stunned traders, but farmers haven’t done anything crazy, according to one analyst.
“They made rational, sensible choices,” said crop marketing adviser John Duvenaud.
The June 23 report estimated that Canadian farmers cut their planned oats acreage by about 12 percent from what they expected to plant in March and increased their canola acreage by about 14 percent.
Some parts of the Prairies have suffered from excessive moisture this spring, affecting seeding on millions of acres, but Duvenaud thinks the swing away from oats and into canola was almost entirely due to market prices.
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“That was quite a rally we had in May,” he said about the price surge that made canola more attractive.
At about the same time, when farmers had their last chance to vary seeding decisions, oat prices had dropped 20 cents per bushel and the outlook was gloomy.
For some farmers it was tempting to switch from one to the other. For others, who had a small amount of uncommitted acreage, deciding which crop to plant became a no-brainer.
“If you’ve got a quarter, why not throw her in (to canola),” said Duvenaud.
Statistics Canada said its numbers were coloured by the wet spring that delayed seeding. It expects to see changes to final acreage numbers in its August report.
Canadian Wheat Board crop condition analyst Bruce Burnett said the board expects up to two million prairie acres to go unseeded this year, with the losses spread across the major grains.
Some crops in rain-saturated areas will also face yield losses or be plowed down due to drowning, Burnett said.
But he and other crop analysts have said the losses from flooding and saturation may be balanced by improved soil moisture and crop conditions in other areas.
Recent torrential rains in southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, while excessive in terms of timing, hit some of the driest areas of the Prairies. Farmers there face better prospects now than they did a few weeks ago, especially in formerly parched southern Alberta.
“Those areas didn’t have excessive moisture,” said Burnett.
“In southern Alberta they were desperately in need of precipitation. This actually came a bit too late for the crops to reach full potential, because they had already suffered, but they needed it most.”
