After watching their wheat endure rain, snow, mice, deer, mould, and some more rain, some farmers who couldn’t get the crop off last fall are now watching it sit in their bins.
Options for selling spring-harvested wheat are dwindling, especially for farmers with the poorest quality crops.
Farmers had until June 6 to sign contracts with the Canadian Wheat Board under its special Series U, for unthreshed grain.
The board will take all the grain contracted to the series. For competitive reasons, officials don’t release how much grain was contracted.
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Fraser Robertson, who farms near Fairview, Alta., contracted about 220 tonnes of wheat to the series. It was part of 700 acres of crop he and his brother didn’t get off before the snow fell last fall.
“I didn’t bother trying to market it except through the board, because a lot of the feeders don’t really want it,” Robertson said, adding many neighbors did the same.
The wheat was feed quality in the fall because of a wet growing season, but had a bushel weight over 59 pounds. When he combined in mid-May, the wheat had shrunk to 52 lbs.
Some analysts say farmers who could sign contracts did the right thing, especially those far from feed markets.
Ian Morrison, market strategist with Alberta Wheat Pool, said estimated pool returns of $153 per tonne for feed wheat will yield about $112 to Alberta farmers.
Meanwhile, farmers with feed wheat weighing at least 58 lbs. per bushel could get non-board prices in central Alberta last week around $110 per tonne.
Non-board price
Morrison said farmers with lighter wheat would get about $2 per bushel in the non-board market.
Light wheat can often find a home in Eastern Canada, Morrison said. But now that Alberta farmers face freight rates of around $45 per tonne, shipping through Thunder Bay is too costly.
Farmers who had mice and wildlife run rampant through the swaths all winter are having the hardest time finding a home for their badly damaged grain.
The problem is not so much what the animals took as what they left behind in the field.
Allan Johnston, a broker at Welwyn, Sask., said he’s having a hard time finding buyers for wheat with a high amount of mouse excrement.
“Cows and pigs are about as enthused about eating this stuff as probably we would be,” said Charlie Pearson, an analyst with Growers Marketing Services.
“If we didn’t have the large supplies of feed grain around, maybe we could twist somebody’s arm and they could use it,” added Morrison.
While the lowest quality wheat can be blended and used in the feed market, prices are low.
“It’ll disappear,” said Johnston, “but guys have got to realize that the value of it is a lot less.”
Off-board prices have dropped $10 to $15 per tonne from highs in the winter, when analysts urged farmers to sell.
Supply reduces price
Now, the market has been depressed by farmers dumping spring-harvested wheat, and others emptying bins for cash flow or space, analysts say.
“The horse has left the barn,” said Pearson. “If (the farmer) didn’t capture those prices two and three months ago, he’s taken quite a hit on it now.”
An analyst with the Canadian Wheat Board’s weather and crop surveillance department said it’s hard to pinpoint how much spring-harvested wheat is in farmers’ bins.
Bruce Burnett said quality and yields varied widely, and some farmers chose to burn off the poorest crops.
But he said one to two million tonnes of grain were left under the snow in the fall, and 800,000 to 1.2 million tonnes of that was wheat.
