Canadian canola farmers from Saskatchewan to Alberta have spent the past week watching their fields stay too cold to seed and too wet to drive on, raising the prospect that this year's planting window will compress into the first two weeks of May.

Mean temperatures at Prince Albert, in central Saskatchewan, ran more than 7 degrees Celsius below the 30-year baseline in the seven days to April 28, with rainfall close to three times normal across the northern Prairies, according to Cropli's per-point weather data.

Canola seed needs soil temperatures of at least 5°C to germinate reliably; a brief warm window mid-month had Prairie growers bracing to start when the cold returned on April 23.

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"It's probably more than we need out in the field," Ken Farion, who has farmed grain near Vegreville, Alberta, for 50 years, told Global News earlier this month, in comments that captured the Prairie mood. "But on the livestock side, a lot of the dugouts were dry last year."

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Canada produced just under 22 million tonnes of canola in the 2025/26 marketing year on record-high yields, the US Department of Agriculture said in its annual oilseeds report on April 23. The agency forecast a roughly 8 per cent production drop for 2026/27 even before the late-April cold snap, on an assumption that yields would simply revert to their three-year average.

Farm Credit Canada warned in March that a 40 per cent rise in nitrogen fertilizer costs — the kind being driven by Middle East supply disruption — could halve Saskatchewan crop margins for wheat and canola.

Weathering Chinese tariffs

The weather is unfolding against a Canadian canola trade that has been almost entirely remade in the space of a single year.

Canadian canola seed exports to China collapsed in the wake of Beijing's 75.8 per cent anti-dumping tariff last August, falling to 333,000 tonnes in the seven months to February — down from 3.24 million tonnes in the same period a year earlier, according to the USDA report citing Canadian customs data.

Meal shipments to China fell by 97 per cent.

The displaced volumes went almost everywhere else: France took 41 per cent more, Pakistan went from near-zero to over 400,000 tonnes, and Bangladesh quadrupled its purchases.

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Beijing has begun rolling those tariffs back. A January 16 deal cut the anti-dumping duty on Canadian seed to 5.9 per cent on March 1 and removed the levy on canola meal entirely. The 100 per cent tariff on canola oil — the highest-margin product in the complex — remains in place.

"Domestic processors may face increased competition for canola seed from Chinese canola seed buyers due to a significant reduction in trade barriers," the USDA wrote, in a line that captures both the relief and the new bidding war facing Canadian crushers as Chinese demand returns.

Behind those flows, Canada's crush sector is consolidating. The Bunge-Viterra merger, finalised in July, put more than 40 per cent of national capacity under a single firm. New plants from Cargill in Regina and Louis Dreyfus in Yorkton, Saskatchewan will lift capacity to 14.8 million tonnes by year-end.

The new mills will need a steady supply of seed to run. The Saskatchewan ground, on April 29, was still frozen at depth in places.