Canada: Canada harvests smaller, quality-challenged barley crop severely affected by heat and drought

In many years, challenges with the U.S. crop can be offset by the Canadian crop, which has expanded in recent years. While seeded and harvested acreage grew across the border, sharp yield declines across Western Canada, brought on by similar hot and dry climatic conditions as seen in the United States, meant a much lower Canadian crop as well, the latest edition of The New Brewer says.

Estimates for Canadian barley production in 2021 are 328 million bushels, down sharply from the revised 493 million in 2020. While not the smallest crop in the past decade (2014 was 327 million bushels), yields were the lowest since 2002, and the second lowest in 30 years.

If there was a silver lining, it’s that planted and harvested acres both grew, helping to partially the offset the sharp decline in yield. The majority of barley acreage is located in western Canada. In 2021, Alberta and British Columbia seeded 3.93 million acres, followed by Saskatchewan at 3.71 million acres and Manitoba with 0.413 million acres. Saskatchewan actually pulled ahead of Alberta and BC in terms of harvested acres, harvesting 3.45 million acres versus 3.42 million for its two neighbors to the west.

As in the U.S., hot and dry weather pushed yields down sharply. Both provinces experienced a hotter-than-normal June and July, and a period with low precipitation from early June through early August. David Phillips, senior climatologist at Environment and Climate Change Canada, was quoted on the Canadian website CBC.ca summarizing the situation: “There was a spell of 60 days from June 10 to August when virtually no rain fell on the Prairies.”

NOAA maps of Canadian prairie provinces show most barley growing areas at below 75 percent of normal precipitation for June through August, with patches below 50 percent or even 25 percent of normal. Temperatures for the three-month period were generally 2–5 degrees Fahrenheit above 1981–2010 averages (source: NOAA).

Dry weather caused yields to plummet, with Alberta down 33 percent, while yields in Saskatchewan dropped 49 percent. Both provinces are critical for North American barley. As seen in Table 2, each of those two provinces individually exceeds U.S. barley production annually. And the majority of the Western Canadian crop is headed for beer, with 53.7 percent of barley being seeded for malting in 2020.

Preliminary quality results for the malting barley harvested to date show the challenges inherent in this smaller, heat- and drought-stressed crop. Overall protein content in 48 preliminary Canadian samples averaged 13.6 percent, up from 11.8 percent in 2020 and 11.5 percent in 2019 (dry basis). In addition, after little to no precipitation, rain in the third week of August had resulted in some reports of chitting (premature sprouting of barley). In all, the Canadian crop largely mirrored the American crop, with a much smaller, quality-challenged crop severely affected by heat and drought.

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