It is shaping up to be a special year for special crops.
Statistics Canada’s June crop estimate said growers planted record lentil, field pea and canaryseed acres in 2004. They also seeded a lot more dry beans than anticipated.
Lentils showed the biggest increase over 2003, rising 37 percent to 1.85 million acres, followed by canaryseed, up 30 percent to 790,000 acres. Pea area rose 10 percent to 3.53 million acres.
The canaryseed number shocked Ray McVicar, special crops specialist with Saskatchewan Agriculture.
“It’s very high. That was a big surprise to me. I knew it was going to be up but I didn’t think it would be up that much.”
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Nearly 90 percent of last year’s canaryseed crop was seeded in Saskatchewan, where growers haven’t achieved an average yield for three years running.
That streak may end with what looks to be a decent crop, said McVicar. He worries that Canada, a dominant player in canaryseed markets, could flood birdseed suppliers.
“As our crop production goes, so goes the price. If those seeded acres turn out to be true and we get an average yield, it’s not going to be very good for the price,” he said.
Saskatoon commodity broker Larry Weber is projecting a 334,000 tonne canaryseed harvest, shattering the previous record of 284,600 tonnes set in 1996-97.
McVicar recalled that harvest led to a serious price crash in 1998.
“It was low and stayed low for a number of years after because we had two years of production (in one year).”
Weber also forecasts record pea and lentil harvests of 2.88 million tonnes and 993,000 tonnes respectively. Stat Publishing analyst Brian Clancey projects smaller crops of 2.8 million tonnes and 838,000 tonnes, neither of which would break records.
McVicar thinks StatsCan’s pea acreage number is bang on, while the lentil estimate might be a little high. He didn’t generate production numbers of his own but offered some thoughts on how the pea and lentil crops are shaping up.
“I would think we’re looking at average (yields) or maybe even a little lower.”
While Weber saw “awesome” pea crops on a recent drive between Saskatoon and Meadow Lake, McVicar dwelled on dismal looking lentil crops south of the Trans-Canada Highway suffering from what he termed “wet feet.”
Ron Hundeby, a grower from Elbow, Sask., said the potential for a large pulse harvest in Canada and other regions of the world is spooking markets. Earlier in the year he contracted peas at $5 per bushel. Last week it was a different story.
“There’s some downwards pressure with the (big) crops coming off, so I decided I should contract some at $4.”
Dry bean markets were also caught off guard by StatsCan’s estimates of 220,000 acres of white beans and 210,000 acres of coloured beans.
The trade had expected a much-reduced crop compared to 2003 due to lackluster prices, but coloured bean acreage basically held its own while whites shot up 33 percent.
A similar surprise was delivered south of the border with the United States Department of Agriculture projecting a 1.42 million acre bean crop, up from earlier estimates of 1.33 million acres.
Don Sissons, Manitoba Pulse Growers Association president, said extremely wet conditions shifted acres to beans from soybeans in Ontario and Michigan.
He said the trade also became more aggressive on navy bean contracts late in the spring, which helped sway acres to that crop.
But McVicar believes farmers shifted acres away from beans after the government surveys were conducted because it was too wet to seed. He thinks the bean numbers are too high.
