Farms.com Home   News

No Easy Planting Decisions in 2025: FCC

Farm Credit Canada’s first crop outlook for 2025-26 suggests there may be more price upside for cereals rather than oilseeds. However, producer planting decisions are still not expected to be easy. 

The outlook – which does not account for the impact of any potential US tariffs – shows prices for most crops stabilizing near their five-year averages in 2025-26 after falling year-over-year in 2023-24 (see chart below). 

Looking ahead to the coming year, FCC said it expects soybean and canola prices will decrease relative to their cereal counterparts, specifically corn in eastern Canada and spring wheat in the Prairies. The relative price advantages do not necessarily indicate that one crop is more profitable than another; rather, they reflect the “current state of local and global supply and demand.” 

Since the beginning of 2023, cash soybean prices in eastern Canada have been higher relative to corn, reaching levels not seen in over a decade. However, stocks-to-use ratios for the two global crops are trending in different directions according to data from the USDA.  

For example, the global soybean stocks-to-use ratio has been increasing due to large worldwide supplies. On the other hand, world corn stocks are tightening. 

As for wheat, global wheat stocks-to-use ratios are expected to be the lowest since 2007-08, supporting the market.  

Global canola stocks-to-use are currently at 7%, which is below the 5-year average of 9%. It is anticipated that supplies will be even tighter in Canada due to a smaller crop in 2024, strong exports, and new crush capacity coming online. But canola prices are also influenced by the large global soybean stocks.  

Click here to see more...

Trending Video

Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

Video: Wheat Yields in USA and China Threatened by Heat Waves Breaking Enzymes

A new peer reviewed study looks at the generally unrecognized risk of heat waves surpassing the threshold for enzyme damage in wheat.

Most studies that look at crop failure in the main food growing regions (breadbaskets of the planet) look at temperatures and droughts in the historical records to assess present day risk. Since the climate system has changed, these historical based risk analysis studies underestimate the present-day risks.

What this new research study does is generate an ensemble of plausible scenarios for the present climate in terms of temperatures and precipitation, and looks at how many of these plausible scenarios exceed the enzyme-breaking temperature of 32.8 C for wheat, and exceed the high stress yield reducing temperature of 27.8 C for wheat. Also, the study considers the possibility of a compounded failure with heat waves in both regions simultaneously, this greatly reducing global wheat supply and causing severe shortages.

Results show that the likelihood (risk) of wheat crop failure with a one-in-hundred likelihood in 1981 has in today’s climate become increased by 16x in the USA winter wheat crop (to one-in-six) and by 6x in northeast China (to one-in-sixteen).

The risks determined in this new paper are much greater than that obtained in previous work that determines risk by analyzing historical climate patterns.

Clearly, since the climate system is rapidly changing, we cannot assume stationarity and calculate risk probabilities like we did traditionally before.

We are essentially on a new planet, with a new climate regime, and have to understand that everything is different now.