While wheat deliveries were typical for November, canola shipments from Saskatchewan were the best in years, according to data from Statistics Canada

Grain deliveries picked up last month, with 1,335,000 tonnes of wheat and 1,247,000 tonnes of canola shipped from farms in Saskatchewan.

That matches the three-year average for November wheat deliveries, but it doesn’t quite square with early predictions of a bumper harvest. The problem, of course, was the weather.

Shannon Friesen, a cropping management specialist with the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture, said that wet weather delayed harvest and led to fungal outbreaks in wheat.

“There’s still quite a bit of the crop left out in the fields,” she said. “Especially on the wheat side, because we’ve had so much fusarium in it, the elevators haven’t been taking it because the quality is so low.”

But canola deliveries were about 50 per cent higher than in November 2015, and more than double the amount that made it to storage in November, 2014.

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