Good Year for Pulse Crops

Good Year for Pulse Crops. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

Pulse crops are harvested for their seed and are an important rotation crop. Here in the Pacific Northwest dry peas, lentils and chickpeas make up a significant part of the nations pulse crop. Tim McGreevy, Executive Director for USA Dry Pea & Lentil Council says that 2010 was a good year for growers.

MCGREEVY: Well actually the pulse industry has done pretty well this year. We actually had increased acreage over last year and what I’m really talking about is really dry peas, lentils and chickpeas. So last year we had a slight increase in acreage in dry peas. About 842-thousand, 843-thousand acres that was harvested here of dry peas and we saw a little bit of a drop off in our prices from last year but pretty close to the same so we’re still running about - depending on whether you have yellow or green peas we’re still running about .09 to .10 or .09 to .11 per pound.

He says that is really above their 10-year average by a couple cents a pound.

MCGREEVY: We had a big increase in lentil production in this past year. We moved from 407-thousand acres of lentils to 639-thousand acres of lentils across the United States so a significant, over a 200-thousand metric ton shift into lentils and surprisingly because Canada just had a wreck this year in terms of weather. They had really good yields but they had poor quality.

Lentil prices have been up a lot as well.

MCGREEVY: Prices for all of the lentil crops have been above .30 cents a pound which is well above our 10-year average.  Chickpeas is the last and in chickpeas we had a pretty significant increase in acreage from about 94-thousand acres in 2009 to 135-thousand acres in 2010. And again prices due to the Canadian weather pattern have remained very strong. They’re also above .30 center per pound, heading towards .33 to .35 cents per pound.

McGreevy said all-in-all it was a good year.

MCGREEVY: Of course it doesn’t hurt to have the corn and wheat market moving up as well. That has some influence on our prices, the overall commodity price index is up and  that does have some effect on the pulse crops so 2010 is actually shaping up to be a pretty good year for pulse producers.

More tomorrow.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.