Canadian oat and barley stocks were both tighter than forecast at the end of the 2019-20 marketing year.
According to a Statistics Canada grain stocks report released Friday, barley stocks as of July 31, 2020 were down almost 11% from a year earlier to 956,500 tonnes, and below the latest Agriculture Canada forecast of 1.4 million tonnes in August. Meanwhile, despite being reported up 7.3% from the previous year to 425,600 tonnes by StatsCan, oat stocks as of July 31 still fell well below last month’s Ag Canada estimate of 600,000.
The year-over-year increase in July 31 barley stocks is largely attributable to a larger crop last year, up almost 24% to 10.38 million tonnes. With bigger production, on-farm barley stocks were up 8.2% to 688,000 tonnes while commercial stocks jumped 18.5% to 268,500 tonnes.
Feed barley use rose 29.2% year over year to 6.9 million tonnes as of July 31, the highest level since 2010. However, exports remained relatively flat at 3 million tonnes.
This increase in total oat stocks as of July 31 was the result of higher commercial stocks, which more than doubled (+109.9%) to 218,100 tonnes, while on-farm stocks decreased 29% to 207,500 tonnes.
Domestically, oats used for food (+13.2%) and animal feed (+16.2%) increased year over year as of July 31. In addition, exports of oats rose 7.6% to 2.7 million tonnes. Despite these increases, total stocks were still higher as of July 31 than the same date a year earlier, because of high total supply following increased production in 2019.
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