By Mary Hightower
With harvest of summer’s crops underway, some farmers are planning for fall-planted canola, and they now have a financial tool to help them make decisions about the crop.
“With growers seeing little to no relief this year from high input costs, and with margins for the major row crops remaining compressed, growers are considering every alternative,” said Scott Stiles, extension economics program associate for the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture.
Just-released enterprise budgets from the Cooperative Extension Service now include canola and wheat, both fall-planted and harvested in the middle of the following year. It enables farmers to grow two crops in consecutive seasons, called double cropping.
The enterprise budgets are comprised of downloadable Excel spreadsheets. They are created by Breana Watkins, extension conservation and crop budget economist for UADA, and Stiles.
“Farmers can plug in specific land lease structures as well as customized crop input quantities and prices to get a handle on the profitability of a particular crop and production method,” he said.
Canola is in the same family as turnips and mustard. It can grow up to 6 feet and produces a flush of bright yellow flowers. The plants produce needle-like pods with small black seeds that are crushed for oil. Canola oil is commonly used for cooking, with a neutral flavor and relatively high smoke point, meaning it can be cooked at higher temperatures without producing smoke.
In 2025, over 2.3 million acres of the crop were harvested, mostly in the northern plains, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. North Dakota was the largest grower with 1.8 million acres harvested. Other major producing states are Montana, Washington, Idaho and Minnesota. Neighboring Oklahoma harvested 11,000 acres in 2025.
Source : uada.edu