Planning to add to corn and wheat acres in 2015
According to a recent survey by Farms.com Risk Management, Ontario Farmers may be bucking North American trends as they are reporting that they will decrease soybean acres and add to corn and wheat acres in 2015. These are the findings from the Farms.com Risk Management 2015 Ontario Planting Intentions farmer survey conducted from March 1 to March 31, 2015. According to survey participants, Ontario farmers plan on planting 2,923,827 million acres to soybeans, down 4.8% from the 2014 record year of 3,070,000 or -146,173 acres, but still above the average at 2.5+ million acres.
Corn acres are also projected to remain above the seven year average of 1.9 million acres and increase to 2,123,096 +13.7%. This would represent a gain of over 250,000 acres from 2014 results.
For wheat, 985,477 acres are projected to be planted in 2015 in Ontario (including fall 2014 winter wheat and 2015 spring wheat). This would represent a 15.3% increase in wheat acres versus 2014.
“Producers in Ontario as well as the United States are concerned about high input costs and lower prices in 2015. With these concerns, we would have anticipated that producers would want to plant or switch more acres to soybean production,” says Moe Agostino, Chief Commodity Strategist for Farms.com Risk Management. “However, both the Farms.com Risk Management Ontario survey and the USDA March US Prospective Planting Report, both conducted in March 2015, are suggesting that more acres will be planted to corn despite the higher input costs.”
Why are Ontario producers considering planting more wheat?
According to Agostino, the fall of 2014 was wet and many farmers in Ontario were unable to get the SRW wheat acres in the ground. “Some were projecting a loss of 30% of winter wheat acres, but the Farms.com Risk Management Planting Intentions Survey surprised us,” explains Agostino. “The Survey shows an increase to all wheat acres of 4.3% vs. 2014 -- much more than many people are expecting. In fact, our survey is suggesting that a large number of farmers are intending to plant more spring wheat acres in 2015 as farmers are looking to get straw and this would more than make up for the fall and winter. A cold and late spring in 2015 will determine whether these extra wheat acres will get planted.
So far its been a cold wet spring in most of Ontario and there are a large number of variables at play. Agostino goes on to say that “With tight margins and high input costs, weather will still play a big role as to how many acres will be planted in Ontario but at the end of the day farmers are creators of habit and history will repeat itself as rotation also plays a big role as well.”
The acreage estimates in this report are based primarily on surveys conducted during the month of March 2015. The 2015 Farms.com Risk Management Planting Intentions Survey is a probability survey that includes a sample of farmers from across Ontario. This survey used to make acreage estimates is subject to sampling and non-sampling errors that are common to all surveys. Sampling errors represent the variability between estimates that would result if many different samples were surveyed at the same time. Sampling errors for major crops are generally between 1.0 – 3.0% but they cannot be applied directly to the acreage published in this report to determine confidence intervals because the official estimates represent a composite of information from more than a single source.
