Canola

Canola is an oilseed, a yellow-flowering crop bred from rapeseed, and a reminder that "the grains" complex is really grains and oilseeds. Crushed, it yields two products: canola oil, the third of the big four vegetable oils (palm, soybean, rapeseed/canola, and sunflower, together more than 90 percent of world vegetable oil, see the breakdown pie) and prized as low in saturated fat, and canola meal, a protein animal feed. A third use has come to dominate the price conversation: biodiesel and renewable diesel feedstock, which has tied canola, like soybean oil and palm oil, to the energy market.

Canada is the dominant exporter of canola, grown across the prairie provinces, while the same plant is grown as rapeseed (and colza in French) across the EU, Ukraine, and Australia. The naming hides a real distinction: canola is specifically the "double-low" food grade, bred to be low in both erucic acid and the bitter glucosinolates that once made the meal unfit for animal feed, so all canola is rapeseed but not all rapeseed is canola. Plain rapeseed still names the species and the deliberately high-erucic (HEAR) varieties grown for industrial lubricants and slip agents, which is why both words survive: Europe kept the old name, and "rapeseed" still covers the inedible industrial grades. Demand is split between food crushers and, increasingly, biofuel plants, and the market is sensitive to trade politics: when Chinese buying of Canadian canola fell away in 2025 amid trade tensions, prices came under pressure with one of the largest buyers stepping back.

There are two futures contracts. The global benchmark is the ICE Futures canola contract in Winnipeg (ticker RS), 20 tonnes a lot, quoted in Canadian dollars per tonne and physically delivered against Saskatchewan canola; the European cousin is the Euronext rapeseed contract in Paris, 50 tonnes a lot, in euros per tonne. ICE canola ran roughly 580 to 800 Canadian dollars a tonne across 2024 and 2025; Euronext rapeseed roughly 450 to 540 euros.