Seasonal Canola Upturn Soon Possible

Sep 21, 2022

Canola futures may soon be due for a seasonal turn higher as harvest pressure subsides and prices look more attractive to end users.

While the market trended lower over the summer, MarketsFarm analyst Mike Jubinville said he expects farmer deliveries to soon lighten up, with the lows possibly in place for the time being. He placed chart support in the November contract at C$760 to C$770/tonne, with the close back above $800 on Wednesday a bullish technical signal - if the market can hold above that point in subsequent sessions.

Higher canola prices in the spring led to some demand destruction and an eventual downturn in the futures in June, but Jubinville said the situation has corrected itself.

“We are price competitive internationally again,” he said, noting that China was already thought to be in the market buying Canadian canola with movement to the country likely to pick up over the next few months.

Meanwhile, domestic crush margins remain in the stratosphere. The crush margin for October delivery reported by ICE Futures came in at C$320/ tonne above the November contract as of Wednesday, well above average levels and up by over $100 in the past month.

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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