An early blast of snow and cold temperatures across the Canadian Prairies has delayed the mustard harvest and is likely to result in quality downgrades for any crop still in the field.
“It has to be absolutely flattened,” mustard buyer Walter Dyck of Olds Products in Lethbridge said of the crop after parts of the Prairies received a heavy dump of snow over the weekend.
Up until the snow, the Prairie harvest had been stymied by overly wet conditions, with Dyck estimating that as much as half of the mustard crop remains unharvested. Meanwhile, all of the moisture has caused sprouting in the crop – something that hasn’t been seen in the mustard market for many years.
“There’s a significant amount that’s out there, and there are definitely concerns about the quality,” Dyck said.
However, the likelihood of lost yields and quality downgrades has not yet heated up the mustard cash market, with a large portion of the country’s mustard grown under contract. Yellow mustard is currently priced around 36 to 37 cents/lb, with Brown mustard topping out at 30 cents.
In addition to the latest harvest problems, mustard acres were also lower to begin with this year.
“Signals are telling me that we’ll see spot prices climb off their lows and want to move higher,” Dyck said. “The big question is just getting (this year’s crop) off.”
Canadian mustard production for 2019 is currently estimated at 141,200 tonnes by Statistics Canada, well down from 173,600 tonnes the previous year.
Source : Syngenta