(Commodity News Service Canada) — Prices for edible beans have held steady of late, and that’s not good news for producers across the Prairies.
“We are lagging behind other commodities right now,” said Tammy Duncan of Duncan Seeds at Morden, Man. She said this can be attributed to the poor economy.
“Typically on the pinto side, we have lots of demand for food aid packages from the U.S., but that just hasn’t been there over the last couple of years,” Duncan said.
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“People are buying the product that they need when they need it. They aren’t keeping the inventories they used to keep because it’s too expensive to do that. End-users’ shelves are basically empty before they decide to start buying again,” she said.
It’s a good thing that producers don’t have to lock in contracts for the upcoming crop year right now, Duncan said, or there would be a major shortfall in terms of supply for edible beans.
“If producers did all their contracts at this time of the year, we could probably say we would have zero bean acres, just because we aren’t close for contract prices,” she said.
This is because end users haven’t been coming to the table with the prices that producers are looking for, she said.
“Our producers are expecting just 19 cents for pintos,” she said. “To compete with canola or corn, we have to be at least in that 25- to 30-cent range, there’s no doubt about it.”
Duncan said she expects acreage to be down 30-40 per cent in the upcoming crop year.
Another factor that looks to decrease acres is the poor crops that producers had this year, both in terms of yield and quality.
“The moisture shut the beans down prematurely because they couldn’t get the yields that they could have because they were stressed throughout the season,” Duncan said. “Then the moisture we had later on in the season ended up causing a lot of pink mold in the navy beans, which turned it into a No. 2 market.”
A forecast at FarmLink Marketing Solutions shows bean planting across Canada for the upcoming crop year will be about 300,000 acres.
