With the recent Canola complications with China, many are wondering what to plan for in the next couple of years. Pulses were affected 2 years ago with the agreement in India souring, but many have persevered and continue to see the pulse farming steady.

Sean Madsen Southland Pulse Operations Manager out of Estevan, "We buy pulses from around the area, local not too far away about a 100-mile radius. Our pulses are peas, lentils, chickpeas, and we do process it by cleaning it and were just taking the dockage out. We do not split them, we ship them out whole and we load them in either bulk hoppers or we do some bagging as well. The majority of that ends up at the Vancouver port and then distributed around the globe."

"It's definitely been challenging, I think most everyone has been following the India story for a while now. They have tariffs and they're trying to restrict the imports and that has caused us a lot of grief it has slowed everything down. Just recently, the China thing with the Canola has not affected us yet, they haven't actually switched anything over to pulses. There have been some rumors they might take a look at that, I hope they don't. Right now its been quite busy, in fact right now China has been buying a lot of our peas so that's where we have been shipping a lot of our peas so I hope it doesn't stop."

With regards to India Madsen explains, "They still have been taking some, it slowed us down for sure, despite the restrictions there have been some peas and lentils going in there. In fact, surprisingly their still one of the biggest importers even though they have the restrictions, they're still taking them. It has dropped from 600 tonnes of lentils to around 200 tonnes."

Will farmers change what they will put in the ground this spring, Madsen shares, "I actually don't think they're going to change much, especially with the canola it came too late so they already had everything planned. They've got everything figured out, there might be some minor adjustments. The problem is there isn't an answer, there isn't a good thing that you can look at and say "boy oh, boy I'll switch it into this" I don't expect a whole lot of change. You might see some increase in green pea acres just because that price has been strong, but I don't think it's going to be a big significant jump."