Ag Canada Hikes Canola Export Forecast; Feed, Waste and Dockage Goes Negative

May 22, 2025

Agriculture Canada has officially recognized the 2025-26 canola balance sheet just isn’t going to work out.

In updated monthly supply-demand estimates on Wednesday, Ag Canada hiked its canola export forecast by 1 million tonnes from April to 8.5 million. With its total supply estimate unchanged at 20.742 million and projected ending stocks holding at a 12-year low of 1.3 million tonnes, the larger export forecast forced the government to revise feed, waste and dockage to a negative 609,000 tonnes versus last month’s estimate of 391,000.

The negative dockage figure is a temporary fix, giving Statistics Canada an opportunity to revise its 2024 canola production up from the current 17.845 million tonnes, thus boosting the total supply. Ag Canada could also raise its import forecast from 150,000 tonnes to further augment the supply side.

Market watchers and analysts have long suspected Statistics Canada underestimated the size of the 2024 canola crop, given the red-hot pace of exports and domestic use. For its part, the USDA is continuing to estimate last year’s Canadian canola production at 18.8 million tonnes.

The Canadian Grain Commission this week reported year-to-date canola exports for the week ended May 11 at just over 8.1 million tonnes. That is 66% ahead of last year and 22% ahead of the five-year average. The domestic crush, unchanged from last month at 11.5 million tonnes, was running 6% ahead of last year as of the end of March.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids