Barley

Absent a 2022 quality wreck or large wheat/barley yield, a 10 MMT sized barley crop would still require Western Canada to import about 2.5 MMT of US corn versus about 5 MMT in 21/22.  This means domestic barley cannot shy too far away from landed corn value, yet must stay at a premium to landed China to ensure domestic gets enough.  Suspect wheat does it thing, competitive some of the time as a feed for those in deficit areas, but limited elsewhere because food export value should be a superior delivery choice.

22/23 W Can supply demographics will mean more barley (mainly yield) produced in feed deficit areas, and less/similar supply in surplus areas (lower area x bigger yield) that would otherwise be exported or face a hefty freight bill to deficit domestic.  This means less demand pull pricing into deficit regions whose occurrence is either later, slower to engage or less intense.  Local harvest pressure risk is inflated.  Overlapping all this, the two largest barley importers Saudi Arabia & China faced reduced import prospect.

All of these variables have been weaved into an outlook piece.  Please contact for more info.

China bought modest feed barley tonnage from Ukraine/France for summer 2021 shipment this week. China also has bought some Canadian barley for autumn 2021 shipment, all at prices that were a tad under recent old crop highs. Not only does it indicate that China barley import appetite is shifting higher, it hints that China demand bull conditions have shelf life. China would not buy major volume of new crop barley at that price otherwise.

I’m constantly mining the non-obvious for behaviour and clues to help understand big-picture trends or risk-reward. If you would like more detail on this, please send me an email an l’ll send it to you. I can be reached by clicking here