By Bruce Cochrane
The executive director of Winter Cereals Canada is advising livestock producers to secure supplies of winter wheat for feed before demand for the crop spikes.
Members of the Saskatchewan Winter Cereals Commission met last week in Saskatoon for their annual general meeting.
Jake Davidson, the executive director of Winter Cereals Canada reports based on levy collection Saskatchewan winter wheat is going all different ways including being exported as feed, exported as milling wheat into the Asian countries for steam buns and noodles, it's very popular in the U.S., and a lot of winter wheat is purchased by the various ethanol producers.
Jake Davidson-Winter Cereals Canada:
Feed usage tends to be fairly consistent. A lot of feed usage is on farm grown and used. It's very popular on the colonies for hog feed and poultry feed and they put hundreds of thousands of bushels into their bins to feed for themselves.
That's one major feed use.
Some of the feed companies rely quite heavily on it.
This year of course, we do have a problem with last summer being a bad fusarium year, so there's a lot of winter wheat sitting there right now that we're just not quite sure where it's going to go from the areas that had the higher fusarium.
The really bad stuff has been hidden everywhere including pellets for wood stoves.
That's more Manitoba.
Saskatchewan wasn't so bad and there's an awful lot of really nice clean winter wheat in central and southern Saskatchewan available for feed use.
Then again, if there's a battle for it, then you may be looking for wheat for feed use, but if it's nice and it's fusarium free, there's a milling market.
Davidson says winter wheat was not moving very well in Saskatchewan for the last six months of 2014 but based on levy collection there's been a lot more winter wheat being moved in the province.
He says people in Saskatchewan have been waiting for a call to take their winter wheat to the elevator and he's confident that time is coming.
Source: Farmscape