leftfield


With strong commodity prices, the practice of taking land out of production for summer fallow is becoming increasingly rare.

According to Stats Can latest Spring Planting Intentions Report the area of summerfallow in Western Canada will be the smallest on record, at less than 4 million acres.

Chuck Penner, President of Leftfield Commodity Research, says the reduced summer fallow, combined with flooded acres returning to production, will allow for increased acres for nearly all the crops grown on the prairies.

"The only two that we saw that were a little bit lower were lentils and mustard. Everything else went up and in some cases a lot. That's partly a factor of recovering those flooded acres and also this extra summer fallow that went into production."

The previous low for summerfallow was over 6 million acres…last year, there was about 12.4 million acres