Canada’s wheat industry needs to devise a strategy to ensure that global market share is maintained, says the vice-president of marketing with Richardson International.
Brent Watchorn said there are signs that Canada’s reputation as a supplier of top quality, high protein milling wheat is beginning to slip.
He said some foreign buyers aren’t as impressed with Canadian wheat quality as they were a few years ago.
“As we’ve gotten into this market, I think we’ve found over the past two or three years that maybe the Canadian crop has not been as high a quality as we thought,” said Watchorn.
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“We’ve gone in and dealt with some new customers that have said, ‘hey, even prior to the protein issue, the quality of the Canadian crop from a gluten strength on processing (perspective) has not been as strong as it has been in the past.’ ”
Canadian wheat production is expected to surpass 33 million tonnes this year, but protein levels are below the 10-year average and quality is variable.
Environmental conditions play a key role in determining the quality, but varietal selection is also a factor.
Watchorn said Canada’s wheat industry must decide if it wants to continue growing premium quality milling wheat or if it would rather grow larger volumes of a lower quality product.
“Obviously volume is important to farmers, and it’s important to ourselves as well, but you’ve got to balance out the pricing of both of those components and decide where we want to go strategically.”
Definitive data is limited, but there are suggestions that more Canadian farmers are opting to grow high-yielding Canada Prairie Spring red varieties rather than Canada Western Red Spring, Canada’s current gold standard for milling quality.
CPS wheat varieties typically offer higher yields than CWRS but also produce grain with less protein and inferior milling and baking characteristics.
New midge-tolerant CPS red varieties such as Conquer VB and Enchant VB are also coming onto the Canadian market and are expected to gain acres, especially in regions with limited fusarium pressure.
Alberta wheat growers who planted Conquer VB last year saw a yield advantage of 33 percent over CWRS check AC Barrie.
CPS red varieties accounted for less than one percent of all wheat acres planted in Manitoba and Saskatchewan and less than five percent of total wheat acres planted in Alberta.
By 2012, Alberta’s total CPS red acreage had doubled to nearly nine percent of the province’s wheat acres, according to data contained in Yield Alberta.
