Is an average Prairie canola crop more likely to be 14 million tonnes or 18 million tonnes?
Are farmers more likely to produce 27 million tonnes of wheat or 37 million?
Statistics Canada says they’ve done both in the past two years, which creates a problem for anyone trying to figure out what farmers, the grain industry and Canada should be prepared to deal with in a “normal” year.
“We now have proof that there is no such thing as average,” joked Brian Chorney, a farmer from Selkirk, Man., and longtime canola industry representative.
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“The genetics seem to be there to produce a big crop. It’s the age-old story: the farmer can be a hero if the weather co-operates.”
“Whether it’s corn, soybeans, wheat or any other crop, the yield potential seems to be there to produce a large crop of everything.”
Statistics Canada’s final crop production report of 2013 found farmers had grown 37.53 million tonnes of wheat compared to 27.2 million tonnes last year, which was a 38 percent difference.
Canola production of 17.96 million tonnes was 29.5 percent higher than last year’s 13.87 million tonnes.
Oat production swelled by 38.3 percent to 3.89 million tonnes from 2.81 million last year.
So which is the outlier year: 2012 or 2013?
“Both of them are outliers,” said CWB crop production and weather analysis expert Bruce Burnett.
“It’s a range you can drive a truck through. The answer (to what is normal) lies somewhere in the middle.”
Burnett said more impressive than the record gross production tonnages are the record prairie average yields in canola and wheat.
“To exceed (previous) record yields by five percent is pretty exceptional,” he said.
“To exceed by 10 percent, you’re starting to talk crazy.”
Burnett said some measures put this year’s average canola yields up by 15 percent. Statistics Canada found that prairie farmers averaged 40 bushels per acre, a 43 percent increase from the previous year.
Burnett said wheat yields were even more impressive, beating the previous record by a higher percentage than canola.
The 2012-13 crop year was notable for having few grain handling and transportation problems, but 2013-14 is already becoming one many farmers will remember for decades, mostly because of the massive size of the crops needing to be moved. The railways say their performance is good compared to other years, but such a big crop has resulted in backlogs.
Fortunately for canola producers, much of the prairie crop doesn’t have to be moved all the way to Vancouver or Thunder Bay because new canola crushing capacity can now crush millions of tonnes on the Prairies.
“That infrastructure is critical for us to be able to handle the volumes,” said Chorney.
“If we didn’t have that crush capacity, we’d be looking at a much larger carryout.”
Some analysts are expecting 15 million tonnes of all prairie crops to be still in storage on the Prairies by the end of 2013-14.
Huge canola crops mean good times for crushers as well as farmers, said Pat Van Osch of Richardson International, whose company built a large new plant in Yorkton, Sask.
“The industry saw a lot of upside potential in the productive capacity of canola,” he said.
“We took a very macro view and looked at what’s going on in the world and where the demand’s going.”
However, Van Osch said he doesn’t expect to see crops like the one harvested this year to become typical for some time. Nor does he think that bad production years like the one experienced last year will be normal.
“You can probably take the two years and average them,” said Van Osch.
“You get a 16, maybe 16.5 million tonne (canola) crop.”
That will be easier for the system to handle than this year’s crop, which is estimated to be almost 18 million tonnes, but it also reveals that small crops will now be a lot bigger than they were five or 10 years ago.
“I think it tells you that we’re at a different plateau,” said Van Osch.
“If you get to 20 million acres, having 15, 16 million tonnes of production over the next couple, three years is quite doable.”
Burnett said total production of a crop such as canola can hit records more easily than yields can because farmers have been adding acres to canola. Total canola production records will almost certainly be broken before the yield record is broken again.
“It probably won’t be for a number of years,” Burnett said.
“If you look at history, we could go 15 to 20 years before we see these record yields again.”
Individual farmers are thrilled to harvest big yields, but the transportation system bogs down and gives every farmer a marketing headache when almost everyone gets big yields.
Chorney, annoyed by today’s high basis levels, said the agricultural industry should use this year, outlier or not, to improve the capacity to move crops. Yield trend lines will make this year’s production typical at some point, and the system needs to be able to handle it, he added.
“We need to be looking at our infrastructure to be supporting large crops like this as time goes on,” said Chorney.
“This could become normal.”
