The Canadian canola crush declined for the second straight month in May but was still up sharply from a year earlier.
A Statistics Canada crush report on Wednesday showed a total of 920,432 tonnes of canola were crushed last month. That is down 3.8% from the April crush of 957,639 but a hefty 19.5% above the 769,942 tonnes crushed in May 2023.
The cumulative August-May crush now stands at 9.25 million tonnes, 968,636 or 11.6% ahead of the same period a year earlier. With just two months now left in the 2023-24 marketing year, the crush at the end of May stood at 86.4% of Agriculture Canada’s full year forecast of a new record high of 10.7 million tonnes.
Ag Canada raised its 2023-24 crush estimate to 10.7 million tonnes in May, up 200,000 from the April projection, amid a 1-million tonne reduction in the export forecast to 6 million due to weak global demand. However, crush demand remains hot as the sector expands to serve U.S. and Canadian demand for renewable energy. Ag Canada made no changes to its 2023-24 canola supply-demand estimates this month.
Canola crush capacity in Canada alone is set to grow from the current 11.2 million tonnes annually to just over 17 million over the next five years.
According to StatsCan, the May crush yielded 393,501 tonnes of canola oil, down from 412,867 in April but up from 323,217 in May 2023.
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