Flax acres could drop again in 2023

Jan 17, 2023

Canadian flax acres dropped last year, but yields rebounded nicely in many areas.

Chuck Penner with LeftField Commodity Research says we saw lower acres despite new crop bids of $24-25 a bushel.

He says that while acreage was down, yields rebounded allowing supplies to recover to where we were before the drought, but certainly not a big supply situation.

Unfortunately, flax exports this year have not been encouraging.

Canada has three key buyers of flax that take about a third of the crop each, the U-S, China and the E.U.

In 2022, Canada shipped some containers into China and the EU, but most of our flax exports this year went to the U-S, which has a limited market.

Penner points out that Russia and Kzachstan have been boosting their flax production which was having an impact for some sale opportunities.

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Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

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This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

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• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

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• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.