When’s mediocrity a good thing?
When the word describes this year’s prairie field crops, that’s when.
And that’s what the Canadian Wheat Board thinks is coming this fall – if frost doesn’t nip it early.
The board did its year-end shindig this morning and gave its current estimate of the prairie wheat and barley crops.
Here’s what it thinks is coming: 15.6 million tonnes of milling wheat, 2.9 million tonnes of durum and 7.5 million tonnes of barley. That compares to 18.8, 5.5 and 8.9 last year.
Read Also
Worrisome drop in grain prices
Prices had been softening for most of the previous month, but heading into the Labour Day long weekend, the price drops were startling.
That’s a small production year, but not disastrously so. And most of that lowness comes from unseeded and abandoned acres, which the wheat board pegs at about 13 million acres. The crops that are growing, in fact, look OK out there. There are big, bad patches like northeastern Saskatchewan and the Peace River country, but in most places crops look pretty good.
So the board’s going to be marketing a smaller-than-average crop of OK grain into a presently rising market for wheat. That will change if there’s an early frost, of course, but for now, in the aggregate, it looks like the prairies will deliver a slightly sub-par crop.
But, for farmers, that doesn’t really matter. Some farmers are going to get no crop at all and may get ruined and driven out of the business. Others, like many in Alberta, will have their best year ever. That’s the farm by farm reality of agriculture. What I heard today told me that the Canadian grain industry will do fine this year. But for farmers, you’ve got to go farm by farm to figure that out.
