Today StatsCan caused a lot of furrowed brows and concerned looks among crop analysts with its big revisions upwards to last year’s canola crop.
It increased production by about 900,000 tonnes and stocks as of July 31 by 500,000.
That’s a lot, and an odd thing to suddenly find.
But even though that’s plenty bearish news, canola’s up a bit so far today, so the trade seems to be ignoring it and really, if this old crop stuff still mattered, it would have mattered long before now and already been factored-in to prices.
And the overall crop outlook is bullish, with corn and soybeans – the dominant crop market drivers – continuing to power upwards. The world’s economy still appears to be turning downward to a new recession, but corn and soybeans are so far impervious because of crop size and quality problems in the U.S. Midwest:
There you have it: our big crops are still wandering in the end-of-summer doldrums, but corn and soybeans are off to the races again. A bit of a letdown, I must say.
Part of it is due to the U.S. dollar’s weakness, but all the other many factors explain most of why our crops just aren’t as peppy as the big U.S. crops.
So perhaps we’ll catch up sometime soon, which would be nice.
In a totally unrelated and irrelevant matter, I’d like to point out something I noticed recently when in Vancouver. I thought a guy was walking towards me wearing a Judas Priest T-shirt of the Screaming For Vengeance album. In fact it was an old Canucks logo. But I’ll bet the trademark lawyers were busy with this similarity:
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