News item: Canola cracks top 40.
The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) reports that canola moved up one spot — from 40 in 2011 to 39 in 2012 — on the list of Washington’s Top 40 Agricultural Commodities.
That’s right, you awesome conventional growers — what with your vast, traditional crops of apples, hops, potatoes, wheat, and other old-school harvests. Don’t look now, but canola is coming into its own as one of our state’s fastest-“growing” agrarian enterprises.
For those of you unschooled in Canola World, this relatively new crop was developed 40 years ago at Canada’s University of Manitoba. It’s put to use as an oil, meal, planting seed, condiment, and in other industrial applications. Seventeen eastern Washington counties are home to canola, rapeseed, and mustard growers, according to the Washington Canola and Rapeseed Commission. As reported earlier this year, Washington canola-producers had plans for planting at least 25,000 acres in the 2013 growing season. That’s a whopping 67 percent upsurge in acreage over what these canola people planted for last year’s canola season. 
Canola’s moving up a spot on Washington’s Agricultural Commodities list, however, is only half the story. The crop’s recent and extremely impressive growth in what’s called “Farm Gate Value” (the actual crop-price a grower gets before the harvest leaves his or her farm) is nothing short of spectacular. Canola’s profits in this key department grew by 64.2 percent in just one
season — from $4.3 million in 2011 to upward of $7.2 million in 2012. Only two other commodities in our state’s top 40 (barley at just under 69 percent and dry edible beans at just over 79 percent) registered a more impressive percentage-change than canola.
Fun Fact: Planting canola has been found to be a very helpful strategy in at least one farmer’s crop rotation. Note this Columbian story relaying information from a farmer in Ritzville, Adams County. Says the newspaper item: “(The farmer states that) adding canola to his crop rotation helped him save about $15 an acre on chemical weed-control costs. Subsequent wheat crops also yield at least 20 percent better after canola, when compared to wheat after wheat plantings …”
Also see the Washington State Department of Agriculture.