The Animal Nutrition Association of Canada is advising livestock producers to anticipate shortages of most of the feed ingredients they typically use this winter.
Estimates from the Canadian Wheat Board indicate 10 to 12 million acres of cropland across the prairies have been left unseeded because of the abnormally wet spring.
Herb Schultz, the Animal Nutrition Association of Canada’s Manitoba operations manager, says livestock producers will have to anticipate shortages of the feed ingredients they normally buy but quality is still an unknown factor.
The biggest problem is there’s this huge unseeded acreages that are out there this year and it’s not only spot areas, it’s across the prairies.
Normally the prairies yield can have a complete wipeout in one area but the rest of the country sort of covers you off.
The real concern is what’s going to come in in the fall and there you really don’t know what your feed stocks are going to be until it’s actually combined.
That’s a grade issue and we don’t know what that is.
The canola is a big issue because the canola meal is a pretty important ingredient in terms of our industry.
The wheat and barley reductions, more the barley reductions, if it’s a feed wheat you’ve got a problem if you don’t have enough of that but our options are always more than that.
In Manitoba particularly, the eastern half of the province, we access a lot of feed stock from the U.S.
Corn, distiller dry grains and solubles, that’s our biggest source there.
We access both ways.
In other words if the prairies don’t offer us a good supply we go south and in fact right now I think we’re probably accessing quite a bit from the south.
The DDGS are really an important source for us.
Schultz says this is one of those situations that producers will need to assess once the fall harvest is underway and the crops start to come in.
Source: Farmscape.Ca
