Canadians Seeding More Land
PANAMA - Mar 14/16 - SNS -- Western Canadian farmers will slash land left idle as summer fallow to a new record low if they plant crops in the proportions expected by Agriculture Canada and the industry.
Combining special crop estimates from STAT with Agriculture Canada's forecasts for grains and oilseeds suggests Canada will plant 75.78 million acres of field crops this year, up 2.3 million acres from last year and up 4.4 million from the previous five-year average of 71.4 million acres.
Getting there means slashing land in summer fallow from almost 2.6 to 1.5 million acres or less. It also means diverting land from forage production into other field crops. Annual data is not kept on forage production in Canada. But, the 2011 census indicated farmers planted roughly 17 million acres of alfalfa, hay and other forages.
If realized,this would see the amount of land used for grains, oilseeds, pulses and summer fallow jump from 76 million acres last year to 77.3 million this year. Interestingly, during the previous five years, Canadian farmers used an average of 76.8 million acres of land each year for this purpose.
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