People in the special crops industry have a lot of fill-in-the-blank work to do when analyzing Statistics Canada’s March seeding intentions report.
The extensive survey provides the best guess of what farmers are going to seed this spring, but it also leaves a lot of gaps and unanswered questions for certain crops.
Traders are frustrated that the report provides no chickpea estimate and that forecasts for other pulses are incomplete.
They can’t understand why it only measures how many beans will be grown in Manitoba or how many lentils will be seeded in Saskatchewan, ignoring what will happen with those crops in other provinces.
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“Why don’t they put this whole thing together in one tidy package?” said Berdex Canada Ltd. trader David Newman.
Karen Gray, head of Statistics Canada’s grain marketing unit, has the answer.
She said the sample size of the March intentions survey is too small to get a reliable read on the smaller acreage crops, which is why the report is called the March Intentions of Principal Field Crops.
Statistics Canada conducts a much larger survey in June to pinpoint what farmers actually seeded, she added.
“At that time we do produce seeded area numbers for all the crops in all the provinces.”
Agricore United trader Eric Fossay said that doesn’t explain why the federal statistician produces intentions estimates for how much rye will be seeded in Manitoba (40,000 acres) and triticale in Saskatchewan (50,000 acres) but doesn’t track chickpeas, a crop that amounted to 545,000 acres in 2002.
He also wishes the agency would do a better job of further breaking down beans into classes and splitting lentils into small, medium and large categories.
Gray said the fall rye estimate is just a follow-up from the November survey, which is the biggest one the agency conducts. She couldn’t explain why triticale is on the books.
And she said getting meaningful numbers for the various categories of beans and lentils would also require a “massive sample,” and put an extra burden on farmers who respond to the surveys.
Gray said taking larger samples costs money and people would rather see extra money spent on surveys that measure things such as actual seeded area and yields than on intentions.
“Primarily it’s a budget issue. We do the best we can.”
