Canola Ending Stocks Revised Higher; Other Crops Up Too

Dec 20, 2023

With upward revisions in production, Agriculture Canada has raised its 2023-24 ending stocks forecasts for a number of crops, including canola.

In its final monthly supply-demand update for calendar year 2023 on Friday, the federal department pegged canola ending stocks for the current marketing year at 1.45 million tonnes. That is up 450,000 tonnes from the November estimate, although still below the previous year’s ending stocks of just over 1.5 million.

The increase in ending stocks is due to Statistics Canada’s crop production report earlier this month, which raised this year’s canola crop to 18.32 million tonnes, up about 1 million from the agency’s previous forecast made in September of 17.36 million.

Ag Canada offset some of the larger production estimate by raising the 2023-24 crush estimate by 500,000 tonnes from last month to a new high of 10.5 million – above 9.96 million a year earlier. On the other hand, projected exports held steady from November at 7.7 million tonnes, below the previous year’s 7.95 million.

“Total domestic use of canola is estimated up slightly on an expected record canola crush of 10.5 million tonnes as the sector expands to serve US demand for renewable energy,” Ag Canada said in its commentary.

Compared to last month, canola feed, waste, and dockage was also revised higher, up marginally to 233,000 tonnes from 223,000.

Despite the expectation of heavier stocks, Ag Canada revised its 2023-24 canola season average price $15/tonne higher from November to $730, still well down from $857 the previous year.

All wheat ending stocks were bumped higher from November as well, increasing 350,000 tonnes to 3.95 million, versus 3.65 million in 2022-23.

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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.

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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