Canola contracts move early as growers watch a dry June
Elevators north of the river are signing at levels last seen in 2023, and nobody wants to be the last one to price.
The first new-crop canola contracts of the season went out this week at $687 a tonne for November delivery, and by Thursday afternoon two elevators between Three Hills and Trochu said their sign-up sheets were the fullest they had been since the drought year.
The number itself is not the story. The date is. Contracts usually firm up in late July, once growers have seen the crop through flowering. Signing in the first week of June means operators are pricing a crop that is barely out of the ground — and betting the dry spring holds.
"We had eleven millimetres in May," said one agronomist working fields along Highway 21, who put the district about two weeks ahead of normal stress. "If we catch rain in the next ten days this looks clever. If we don't, it looks like the only smart move anybody made."
The elevators are betting the same direction. Basis levels north of the river narrowed twelve dollars in a week, which is the grain trade's way of saying it would rather own bushels now than argue about them in October.
