Canada’s oats industry is looking forward to 2024 after a challenging 2023 that saw weak prices, lower acres and a mixed bag of production issues.
But with both foreign markets and new product categories like oat milk continuing to expand, farmers, processors, grain companies and others at the Prairie Oat Growers Association annual meeting were overwhelmingly optimistic about the future.
“If we could just even out that… feast-or-famine,” said POGA president Brad Boettger about the industry’s boom-or-bust cycles in prices and acres.
Market development work in Mexico and Japan appears to be working out, Boettger said. The damage to exports caused by the pandemic’s supply chain disruptions and the impact of the drought appears to have been fixed.
Read Also
Head of Bayer Canada bullish on biofuel sector
Antoine Bernet, country head of Canada for Bayer Crop Science, believes that biofuels represent a massive opportunity for oilseed growers in Canada. One of those oilseed crops is camelina, as Bayer recently acquired a camelina company from Saskatoon
Peru has become a new market development focus for Canada’s oats industry, POGA executive director Shawna Mathieson said. That’s not only because of that country being a good source of demand for oats, but materials and experience gained in Mexico can be used as a basis for increasing consumption there. After Peru, other Spanish-speaking countries will be added to the marketing campaign.
Farmers are worried about cuts to Agriculture Canada variety development funding, since the oats industry is small and has fewer private sector and international resources than for the bigger crops, Mathieson said.
What few resources the oats industry has have to be carefully focused on a few priorities, spread between market development, crop development, agronomics and product development.
The industry has seen much change in recent years, with the horse feed market becoming less important due to feed formulators turning to cheaper inputs, with Asia growing as a market, and with oat milk coming out of nowhere to become a popular dairy replacement.
Agricultural weather forecaster Drew Lerner offered farmers few guarantees about the weather they are likely to face in 2024, highlighting the impact in 2023 of the 2022 Hunga Tonga underwater volcano eruption that threw off many forecasters’ predictions. That factor is likely to carry into 2024.
Manitoba Agriculture Minister Ron Kostyshyn paid high praise to the oats industry, naming the many processing plants and mills in his province and noting the impact of value-added processing to farms, towns and cities across the West.
Contact ed.white@producer.com
