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Reuters
a day ago
- Business
- Reuters
Insight: Tariffs on canola seen supercharging Canadian farmers' shift to spring wheat
WINNIPEG, Canada, June 9 (Reuters) - In the U.S. Great Plains, where spring wheat once dominated fields, farmers are turning away from the crop. But across the border in Canada, the pinch and prospect of Chinese and U.S. tariffs on canola have prompted farmers to pick up the slack on wheat. Farmers are still putting their crops in the ground, so it is not yet possible to know the extent of the acreage shift into wheat. However, early signs, based on interviews with more than 20 Canadian and U.S. farmers, agricultural analysts, traders and industry organizations, show that the grain primarily used to bake bread is proving to be a big winner in this year's global trade war. China's 100% tariffs on Canadian canola meal and oil and its threat to impose duties on canola seed, amid President Donald Trump's broader global trade war, have rattled Canadian farmers, who since 1990 had nearly quadrupled their canola acres before paring back in recent years because of growing problems with drought, high production costs and crop diseases. Now, tariffs are expected to accelerate the likelihood that thousands of farmers could further cut back, adding up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of acres less canola, and more wheat, farmers and analysts estimated. "There is going to be a massive switch," said Jerry Klassen, a Manitoba farmer and market analyst with Resilient Capital. He has switched hundreds of acres on his own farm from canola to spring wheat this year and thinks like-minded farmers will do the same. Reuters' reporting on fallout from tariffs in grain markets illustrates how global trade turmoil is causing the neighboring countries to diverge on spring wheat production. Canada's rebounding supply of wheat has kept prices down for millers who fuel global bread demand as well as consumers. The shift to Canadian fields has also offset some worry about the long-term decline in U.S. production area. Politicians in Canada are funding and supporting the shift toward greater wheat production as a way to shield the thinly-populated agricultural export powerhouse of Western Canada from foreign pressure. And farmers have their own motivation: improved wheat varieties have boosted the grain's profitability. Adam Dyck of U.K. breadmaker Warburtons in Winnipeg said some Canadian farmers had tripled their production to 90 to 100 bushels per acre since the 1990s. The shift toward wheat reflects canola's vulnerability to tariffs. Most of the C$14.5 billion ($10.59 billion) 2024 Canadian canola exports go to the U.S. and China, with the U.S. biofuels market consuming most of Canada's canola oil while China buys most of Canada's seed exports to crush for edible oil and animal feed, while wheat is sold to dozens of countries around the world. Some Canadian farmers are expecting that in a prolonged trade war, globally-diverse wheat is a safer bet than U.S. and China-dependent canola. In 2024 Canada shipped two-thirds of its total canola seed exports to China, and 95% of total canola oil exports of 3.5 million tons to the U.S. But Canada's wheat exports were "highly diversified," the U.S. Department of Agriculture noted., opens new tab The world's wheat and canola markets will be guessing for weeks about Canadian farmers' final decisions on what to seed. Statistics Canada's next report is scheduled for June 27, and the numbers for that report are being collected before farmers have finished planting. Scott Huso, a farmer in Aneta, North Dakota, said that across the northern Great Plains, stretching from Minnesota to the Montana Rockies, farmers have been planting less wheat in favor of crops like corn and soybeans, which are generally more profitable. University of Minnesota data found that last year, farmers in central Minnesota earned hundreds of dollars in operating profit per acre with corn and soybeans, but lost money on spring wheat in 2024, opens new tab. "Wheat, you're not making money on it," Huso said. U.S. total hard red spring wheat production hasn't changed much since the mid-1990s because of substantial improvements in the amount grown per acre. However, total acres are in long-term decline, dropping from 15-20 million acres in the mid-1990s to 13-15 million in the mid-2000s to 10-13 million in the mid-2010s. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said on March 31 that it expects hard red spring wheat acreage in 2025 to drop to 9.4 million acres -- the lowest since 1970. Yet spring wheat is in great demand from the world's millers and bakers. Its high protein content allows it to be used as the base for top-quality bread flour, or as something to blend with lower-quality, cheaper wheats. The U.S. and Canadian plains are the most reliable major source of the world's high-quality spring wheat. Yet that doesn't always lead to the kind of premium prices U.S. farmers might need to justify growing the crop, with steady Canadian supplies and those from overseas competitors like Russia keeping millers comfortable enough to avoid bidding wars, a frustration for many U.S. farmers like Huso. "You just can't convince guys to love wheat these days," said Huso, a member of the North Dakota Wheat Commission. Committed wheat growers like him and organizations like the commission and export-focused U.S. Wheat Associates are trying to convince buyers to pay higher prices and breeders to produce better wheat crop varieties to help wheat compete for U.S. farmers' fields. It's been an uphill struggle. In Canada, the mood is different. Rather than getting knocked out of the crop roster, more farmers are warming to wheat. In May, farmer Korey Peters finished seeding 1,700 acres of spring wheat on his farm near Winnipeg. With new varieties providing more crop per acre, and canola costly and hard to grow profitably in his area, he said he's been putting more and more of his land into wheat and corn. "I know some people call it 'poverty grass,' but it works for us," Peters said. ($1 = 1.3691 Canadian dollars)
Washington Post
5 days ago
- Climate
- Washington Post
Days of storms expected in central and southern states, continuing relentless season
A classic Great Plains severe weather outbreak — complete with large to giant hail and tornadoes — is likely on Thursday, kicking off a days-long bout of severe weather that could stretch all the way to the Appalachians. Multiple days of rotating supercell thunderstorms are likely, with storms transforming into windy squall lines that race hundreds of miles every night. Widespread strong winds are likely.
E&E News
5 days ago
- Business
- E&E News
Storms, AI demand and policy failures are upending US grid
Ensuring the nation's power grids can reliably deliver electricity is clashing with the tech industry's voracious appetite for energy — pushing the risks of power outages to new highs, executives of regional power markets told federal regulators Wednesday. Grid rules developed during periods of relatively slow growth aren't equipped for the demands of Silicon Valley's investment in artificial intelligence, extreme weather shocks, and deep national and state political divisions over energy and climate policy, grid operators told members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. 'AI is going to change our world,' said Manu Asthana, CEO of the PJM Interconnection, grid operator for 67 million customers in all or parts of 13 Eastern states and the District of Columbia. Advertisement 'In our forecast between 2024 and 2030, currently we have a 32-gigawatt increase in demand, of which 30 is from data centers,' Asthana said. 'We need to stabilize market rules and find that intersection between reliability and affordability that works both for consumers and suppliers, and that intersection is getting harder and harder to find.' Lanny Nickell, CEO of the Southwest Power Pool, PJM's counterpart in a band of Great Plains states, said extreme weather threats and the increasing role of weather-dependent wind and solar power put outages at 125 times more likely to happen than eight years ago. 'As if this wasn't challenging enough,' he said, 'we are now projecting our peak demand to be as much as 75 percent higher 10 years from now, and that's largely driven by electrification and data center growth.' Jim Robb, CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the architect of transmission grid standards, said grid operators need 'much deeper insight' into future electricity supply and demand and the probabilities of extreme storms and heat waves that could push power demand to new peaks. Limited real-time information about the effect that dangerous storms have on gas pipeline deliveries to electric turbines is also an area of concern that has been left unresolved by the broader energy industry. Current industry risk analysis cannot do the job, Robb said in comments filed for a two-day conference at FERC's Washington headquarters. 'This will require stronger modeling of fuel and capacity performance to assess reliability risk,' Robb said. The industry needs to establish an agreed-upon profile of the likely risks operators face, like the 'design basis' accident scenarios that nuclear power plant operators are required to defend against. Susan Bruce, counsel to a group of industrial power customers, said her coalition shares 'serious concerns' about regional grid reliability and the ability to add enough new electric generation to keep pace with demand, particularly from 'unprecedented but undefined' growth of data center and cryptocurrency mining operations. 'There is a lack of trust that even very high prices' in grid markets 'can move the needle' to get new nonrenewable generation in service, she said in remarks filed with the commission. 'New rules of the road are necessary,' she said. 'States leaning on other states' Sharp divisions at national and state levels over climate policies is apparent inside PJM, said FERC Chair Mark Christie. Christie told PJM's Asthana, 'You've got 13 states plus the District, you've got widely divergent policies from New Jersey to West Virginia, from Indiana to Maryland. 'It puts you in an impossible position,' Christie continued. 'How can you guys balance these incredibly divergent political goals and try to run a market … that fits the economic textbooks?' One answer, broached by Christie and several state regulators at the conference, was to push more responsibility on states to meet grid reliability challenges. Panelists at the FERC conference debated whether electricity reliability and affordability would be helped if states ordered utilities to purchase part of the generation they expect to need in the future, rather than relying on PJM's competitive energy markets to deliver supply. 'How do we make it work without the states having a much larger role?' Christie asked. 'We acknowledge that the states need a role because we are responsible for resource adequacy,' said Jacob Finkel, deputy secretary for policy for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D), who has led a challenge to PJM policies by Democratic governors in its region. 'We have a responsibility to our ratepayers for affordability.' 'It's easy to throw darts at PJM,' said Kelsey Bagot, a member of the Virginia State Corp. Commission. 'To the extent we want a larger role in the process, we have to demonstrate that as a group of states with very different regulatory structures and very different goals and policies, that we can actually function as a collaborative body and make decisions. 'I think that challenge has been handed to us,' Bagot said. Dennis Deters, a member of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, sided with Bagot, a fellow red-state regulator. 'We are reactive,' he said. 'Too many states are relying on [PJM] to provide resource adequacy. 'I do shudder to think of injecting more politics into an engineering effort,' he added. Michael Richard, a member of the Maryland Public Service Commission, said the divisions were over principle rather than politics. 'You know, Maryland policymakers, we believe the science on climate change.' Christie several times pressed panelists for opinions on whether states should be held accountable if their utilities aren't building enough generation to meet reliability needs, which, in his calculation, means generation that can operate around the clock, not renewables. 'If you don't build enough, maybe you need to pay a penalty. Clearly, there are states leaning on other states,' he said. 'The states have the ability to do a lot of direct contracting and direct support for their policies,' PJM's Asthana said. 'We have seen the state of New Jersey, for example, directly support offshore wind. We have supported them in that pursuit, and that can work.' Gordon van Welie, president of ISO New England, said that states can lose control. 'We know from experience that it's very hard building fossil resources in New England,' he said. A key part of the region's answer was investment in offshore wind. Now the Trump administration has thrown up barriers to that option, he added. 'So that puts us in a very difficult place as we enter 2030,' he said. 'Something's got to give in that equation. Otherwise we have trouble.'
New York Times
6 days ago
- Climate
- New York Times
It's Not Just Poor Rains Causing Drought. The Atmosphere Is ‘Thirstier.'
Look down from a plane at farms in the Great Plains and the West and you'll see green circles dotting the countryside, a kind of agricultural pointillism. They're from center-pivot sprinklers. But some farmers are finding older versions of these systems, many built 10, 15 or even 20 years ago, aren't keeping up with today's hotter reality, said Meetpal Kukal, an agricultural hydrologist at the University of Idaho. 'There's a gap between how much water you can apply and what the crop demands are,' he said. By the time the sprinkler's arm swings back around to its starting point, the soil has nearly dried out. The main culprit? Atmospheric thirst. 'A hotter world is a thirstier one,' said Solomon Gebrechorkos, a hydroclimatologist at the University of Oxford. He led a new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, which found that atmospheric thirst, a factor that fills in some of the blanks in our understanding of drought, over the last four decades has made droughts more frequent, more intense and has caused them cover larger areas. In general, droughts happen when there's an imbalance between water supply and demand. Rain delivers water to the surface. The atmosphere removes water from the surface through evaporation, with temperature, wind, humidity and radiation from the sun controlling how much water is evaporated. It's a complicated physical process that is hard to capture in models and, for a long time, studies of global droughts only focused on precipitation. 'It just really wasn't detailed enough,' Dr. Gebrechorkos said, likening it to trying to balance a checkbook while only looking at income and leaving out expenses. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Independent
6 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
Join scientists as they drive into hailstorms to study the costly weather extreme
As severe storms once again soak, twist and pelt the nation's midsection, a team of dozens of scientists is driving into them to study one of the nation's costliest but least-appreciated weather dangers: Hail. Hail rarely kills, but it hammers roofs, cars and crops to the tune of $10 billion a year in damage in the U.S. So in one of the few federally funded science studies remaining after Trump administration cuts, teams from several universities are observing storms from the inside and seeing how the hail forms. Project ICECHIP has already collected and dissected hail the size of small cantaloupes, along with ice balls of all sizes and shapes. Scientists in two hail-dimpled vehicles with special mesh protecting the windshields are driving straight into the heart of the storms, an area known as the 'shaft' where the hail pelting is the most intense. It's a first-of-its-kind icy twist on tornado chasing. 'It's an interesting experience. It sounds like somebody on the outside of your vehicle is hitting you with a hammer,' said Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini, one of the lead researchers. A team of journalists from The Associated Press joined them this week in a several-day trek across the Great Plains, starting Tuesday morning in northern Texas with a weather briefing before joining a caravan of scientists and students looking for ice. Driving toward the most extreme forecasts The caravan features more than a dozen radar trucks and weather balloon launching vehicles. At each site, the scientists load and unload drones, lasers and cameras and other specialized equipment. There are foam pads to measure hail impact and experimental roofing material. There are even special person-sized funnels to collect pristine hail before it hits the ground and becomes tainted with dirt. Already in treks across Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, the team has found hail measuring more than 5 inches (13 centimeters) in diameter — bigger than a softball, but not quite a soccer ball. The team's equipment and vehicles already sport dings, dimples and dents that scientists show off like battle scars. 'We got a few good whacks,' said forensic engineer Tim Marshall, who was carrying roofing samples to see if there were ways shingles could better handle hail. 'I look at broken, busted stuff all the time.' At Tuesday's weather briefing, retired National Weather Service forecaster David Imy pointed to potential hot spots this week in Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. Computer models show the potential for a 'monster storm down here near the Red River" later in the week, he said. Acting on the latest forecasts, Gensini and other leaders told the team to head to Altus, Oklahoma, but be ready to cross the Red River back into Texas at a moment's notice. A few hours after his briefing, Imy had the opportunity to chase one of the bigger storms, packing what radar showed was large hail at 8,000 feet (2,438 meters) in the air. Because of the warm air closer to the surface, the hail was only pea sized by the time it hit the ground. But the outing still provided good data and beautiful views for Imy, who was with a group that stationed themselves about a half-mile from the center of the storm. 'Beautiful colors: turquoise, bluish green, teal,' Imy said, pointing to the mushroom shaped cloud dominating the sky. 'This is beauty to me and also seeing the power of nature.' A costly but overlooked severe weather problem This is not just a bunch of scientists looking for an adrenaline rush or another sequel to the movie 'Twister.' It's serious science research into weather that damages a lot of crops in the Midwest, Gensini said. Hail damage is so costly that the insurance industry is helping to pay for the mission, which is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation. 'These are the stones that do the most damage to lives and property,' Gensini said. 'We want the biggest hail possible.' A 2024 study by Gensini found that as the world warms from human-caused climate change, small hailstones will become less likely while the larger ones become more common. The bigger, more damaging ones that the ICECHIP team is studying are projected to increase 15% to 75% this century depending on how much the world warms. That's because the stronger updrafts in storms would keep stones aloft longer to get bigger, but the heat would melt the tinier ones. The experiment is unique because of the combination of driving into the hail and deploying numerous radars and weather balloons to get an overall picture of how the storms work, Gensini said, adding that hail is often overlooked because researchers have considered it a lower priority than other extreme weather events. Outside scientists said the research mission looks promising because there are a lot of unanswered questions about hail. Hail is the No. 1 reason for soaring costs in billion-dollar weather disasters in the United States, said meteorologist Jeff Masters, who cofounded Weather Underground and is now at Yale Climate Connections. 'Now a large part of that reason is because we simply have more people with more stuff in harm's way," said Masters, who wasn't part of the research. 'Insurance has become unaffordable in a lot of places and hail has become a big reason." In Colorado, hail is 'actually our most costly natural disaster,' said Lori Peek, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, adding that 'hail does such incredible damage to property." ___ The Associated Press' climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at
