Canadian crop sowings to reach 70m acres

Canadian farmers are to raise crop sowings this year by an area bigger than Belgium but will not plant quite as much as had been forecast with canola, as growers turn to corn and durum instead.

Canadian growers are intending to seed more than 70m acres with crops for 2012 harvest, up more than 8m hectares on last year, when spring flooding forced farmers to abandon huge tracts of land, a Statistics Canada survey showed.

Canola plantings will hit 20.4m acres, eclipsing last year's record by 1.5m acres.

The figure is in line with earlier estimates from the country's farm ministry, which noted two weeks ago that the crop boasted attractions of "historically strong prices and expected attractive yields", estimated at 1.91 tonnes per hectare (0.77 tonnes per acre).

However, it is 200,000 acres below the figure the market had expected.

Canola futures for July delivery stood 0.5% higher at Can$618.70 a tonne in morning deals in Winnipeg.

Durum defies forecasts

Canada's growers intend to sow a record area with corn, cashing in on the high prices which have prompted US peers to pencil in their highest seedings of the grain since 1937.

And they intend to lift durum wheat sowings to 5.1m acres, a rise of 27%, more than twice the increase investors had forecast.

The popularity of grain also defied farm ministry expectations of a 4.5m-acre figure, and a forecast by the Canadian Wheat Board last month, when StatsCan undertook its survey, that a "very narrow" spread between durum and spring wheat "should minimise acreage increases".

Growers intend to plant 17.2m acres with spring wheat, a 9.0% rise year on year and in line with farm ministry estimates for non-durum wheat, once the small number of winter sowings are accounted for.

Investors had expected an all-wheat figure of 23.4m acres.