Pulse Market Insight #240

Oct 19, 2023

Even though it’s early in the 2023/24 marketing year, there’s already a lot going on for peas; some good and not so good. It was another challenging production year, with drought showing up again for some farmers, leading to the obvious comparison with 2021/22 when yields were cut back severely. Even though the 2023 Canadian pea crop was about the same size as the 2021 drought year, there are some big differences in the 2023/24 market that will affect the outlook.

The last crop estimate from StatsCan pegged 2023 pea production at 2.27 mln tonnes, down 34% from last year. That’s based on a sizable cut in acreage and a yield of 28.1 bu/acre, but there’s a good chance the crop isn’t quite that small. Yields from both Alberta Ag and Sask Ag crop reports were 34.6 and 29.4 bu/acre respectively, well above StatsCan’s provincial yields. If we plug in the crop report yields, the 2023 crop would be 2.61 mln tonnes, still not huge but supplies wouldn’t be quite as tight. One bit of good news is that the pea harvest was completed in good time and quality was above average.

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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