Ontario farmers plan record corn acreage: StatsCan field crop areas report

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

by SUSAN MANN

Ontario farmers intend to plant more corn and fewer acres of soybeans this year, according to Statistics Canada.

In its March 31 principal field crop areas report, Statistics Canada says Ontario farmers will seed 2.3 million acres of corn for grain this year, which is up two per cent over last year. If farmers do plant that number of acres, Statistics Canada says it would beat the previous record of 2.2 million acres set in 2012.

For soybeans, Ontario farmers anticipate seeding 2.5 million acres this year, which is down 4.8 per cent from the record area planted in 2012.

Todd Austin, marketing manager with Grain Farmers of Ontario, says they haven’t done any surveys of farmers and until everything gets planted it’s hard to say what farmers will plant this year. But Statistics Canada’s numbers are “what we could expect.”

Austin says it is still “early days yet and no one has really gotten on the fields to do anything. We’d certainly like to see some dry weather soon so that we can start planting corn and beans.”

Soybean plantings may be down this year because growers are following that crop with wheat in their rotation, he says, adding more winter wheat was planted in the fall of 2012 compared to the previous fall. Last fall, growers seeded about 930,000 to 950,000 acres of winter wheat compared to 650,000 in the fall of 2011.

“Keeping crop rotations, I could see a bit more land being used for corn and a bit less for soybeans given what was planted the year before,” Austin explains. Another factor is farmers’ perceived values of the different commodities when they made their planting decisions. BF