How the canola board crush margin is worked out

Last updated Nov 13, 2026. Latest data: week ending Nov 8, 2026, crop week 14. This page is rebuilt every week.

What is the canola board crush margin?

The canola board crush margin is a number ICE Futures publishes each trading day for each canola contract. It compares the value of the oil and meal a crusher gets from a tonne of canola with the price of the canola seed, using futures prices. Markets Lab shows it in Canadian dollars a tonne.

Crushers press canola seed into oil and meal and sell both. The margin is a futures calculation of the gap between what the products are worth and what the seed costs. It is not any one plant's profit.

How does Markets Lab work out the margin?

Markets Lab does not calculate the margin. It copies the Canola Board Margin Index close from ICE's public daily report, in Canadian dollars a tonne. For each crop week it keeps the value from the last trading day of the week. The rules below decide which value is used.

• Each crop week uses the last trading day of the week, on the nearest delivery contract that has a value.
• A week with no trading day shows as not available. A holiday, when ICE prints #N/A for every contract, is skipped and never read as zero.
• The change from the week before compares the same contract, using the newest trading day 7 to 11 days earlier. A change of front contract is not counted as a move.
• A day is used only if ICE had published it by the time the week's data was final.
• Last year and the five-year average use the same crop week of each earlier crop year, each on its own nearest contract. The average needs at least three years.

What oil and meal yields does the margin use?

Markets Lab uses no oil or meal yield of its own, because it does not calculate the margin. ICE sets the yields and the weights inside its index. This page does not repeat them, because they have not been confirmed from an ICE document. One index uses one set of assumptions for all plants.

Worked example: the margin in crop week 14

On Nov 6, the last trading day of crop week 14, ICE reported a canola board crush margin of C$254.72 a tonne for the contract it labels November/Dec-2026. A week earlier, on Oct 30, the same contract was C$259.94, so the margin fell C$5.22 on the week.

In the same crop week the median Prairie canola basis was minus C$60.92 a tonne. The basis is not part of the margin. It is the gap between a Prairie cash bid and futures, and its method is on its own page.

What does the margin leave out?

The margin leaves out basis, freight and plant costs, so it is not a crusher's profit. It uses futures prices, not the prices a plant pays for seed or receives for oil and meal. Markets Lab calls it the board margin to keep that clear, and it does not say who gains or loses when the margin moves.

Canola crush margin and crush volumes in Canada. Canola bids and basis. Where to find Prairie grain prices.

Sources. Canola board margin: ICE Futures, Report Center, report 2. Canola basis: PDQ (Price and Data Quotes).