According to last week’s Stats Canada Principal Field Crops Areas report Canadian farmers expect to plant more canola, soybeans and oats this year, but fewer acres of durum wheat and lentils which were both corps that had high acreage levels in 2016. Here with more on details from the report is IntelliFARM’s Brian Voth

Voth: “Last year we had a lot of fusarium issues with wheat in Manitoba which made it a challenge to market and get rid of the stuff last winter. So that is a big reason why we are going to see a bit of a drop. Again some of that is being replaced by the oat side. There are some really good new crop oat bids out there — that definitely bought some acres up. Soybeans have been a massive increase. We went from 1.3 million acres in Manitoba last year to now they are estimating 2.2 million. A lot of the trade expecting this number to come out at 2.0 million acres. Corn has just been a slow increase in Manitoba over the years. The one thing that is going to be troubling about that increase in corn acres. We lost a bunch of our export demand out of Manitoba this winter. Normally we’d be shipping stuff going to Saskatchewan and Alberta because they were trying to use up their low quality crop out there — a lot of that corn ended up staying here in Manitoba instead and we are still trying to deal how much is left out there. We are kind of following in the footsteps of the United States here in terms of the increase in soybean and the increase in corn acres. That trend seems to just keep going.”