With the 2023-24 marketing year winding down, the Canadian canola crush declined markedly in June.
A Statistics Canada crush report Thursday pegged the June crush at 776,354 tonnes, down more than 1.4 million or about 15.7% from May and easily the lowest of the current marketing year. In fact, it was the lowest monthly crush since May 2023 at 769,942 tonnes. However, it was still 8.3% above the same month a year earlier.
The cumulative August-June crush now stands at 10.02 million tonnes, about 11.4% higher than the same period the previous marketing year. With just one full month still to report for the 2023-24 crop year, the crush at the end of June stood at 93% of Agriculture Canada’s full-year forecast of 10.7 million tonnes.
Ag Canada raised its 2023-24 crush estimate to 10.7 million tonnes in May, up 200,000 from the April projection, amid a 1-million tonne reduction in the export forecast to 6 million due to weak global demand. In its July supply-demand estimates released earlier this week, Ag Canada revised its canola export forecast back up to 7 million tonnes, but left the crush estimate untouched.
Canola crush capacity in Canada is set to grow from the current 11.2 million tonnes annually to just over 17 million over the next five years, with Cargill last week reporting the construction of its new processing facility at Regina had passed the halfway mark. The Cargill facility will have the capacity to process up to 1 million tonnes of canola annually.
According to StatsCan, the June crush yielded 334,909 tonnes of canola oil, down from 393,501 in May but up from 300,078 in June 2023.
