October Canola Crush Up from Previous Month, Below Last Year

Nov 25, 2025

The Canadian canola crush increased in October compared to the previous month but still fell below last year.

A Statistics Canada crush report on Tuesday pegged the October canola crush at 1.026 million tonnes, up 1.9% from September and the highest so far in the 2025-26 crop year that began in August. However, this past month’s crush was 6.7% below the 1.101 million tonnes of canola crushed in October 2024.

The cumulative 2025-26 canola crush now stands at 2.901 million tonnes, up just 0.5% from the same time last year. The three-month total amounts to 24.5% of Agriculture Canada’s full-year forecast of 11.8 million tonnes. That compares to last year, when the Aug-October total of 2.884 million tonnes was 25.2% of the eventual total 2024-25 crush of 11.412 million.

Given the expansion in domestic processing in recent years, demand for Canadian canola is now largely domestically driven, Ag Canada said in its November supply-demand update, released on Monday. As such, the 2025-26 canola crush estimate remains forecast at a record high of 11.8 million tonnes, up modestly from last year’s 11.4 million and notably higher than the five-year average of 10.3 million.

According to the Canadian Grain Commission’s harvest sample program as of Nov. 14, 2025, 96% of the 1,049 submitted canola samples were rated No.1 with an average oil content of 43.6%, higher than last year by 3%.

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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