Ag Canada Raises Canola Price Outlook

Apr 17, 2025

Agriculture Canada has raised its 2025-26 canola price projection, even as the supply-demand outlook remains unchanged.

In its latest monthly supply-demand update on Thursday, Ag Canada pegged the average new-crop canola price at $670/tonne (No.1 Track Vancouver). That is up a hefty $60 from last month’s estimate and $15 above the forecast for 2024-25, which was raised $10 from last month.

The government provided no explanation for the upwardly revised price forecast, with canola ending stocks for both 2024-25 and 2025-26 holding steady from March at 1.3 million and 2 million tonnes, respectively. All other canola supply-demand estimates were unchanged from last month as well.

Canola futures were battered immediately after China announced 100% tariffs on imports of Canadian canola oil and meal last month, but the market has since recovered all those losses and moved higher since, as export and domestic crush demand remains strong. In fact, the market’s focus now appears to be returning to the tight old-crop supply situation, with stocks for 2024-25 estimated at a 12-year low.

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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