Canadian Special-Crops Exports 2026 — Four Publishers, Four Rulers, One Settlement Number.

The four publishers are not contradicting each other. They are counting four different things, on four different calendars, with four different populations. This brief decodes which figure measures what, and identifies the single specific quantity the market clears against. We anchor the decode to the most recent published numbers — AAFC's April 17 2026 Outlook puts 2024/25 dry-pea exports at 2,175 kt and lentil exports at 1,822 kt [Row 1: AAFC; Row 2: AAFC], against Statistics Canada's 2023/24-close readings of 2.5 Mt and 1.6 Mt respectively [Row 12: Statistics Canada; Row 13: Statistics Canada] — and show why those two pairs are not directly comparable even though they appear to describe the same trade.

AAFC's Outlook for Principal Field Crops is the only document that publishes export totals for all four special crops (peas, lentils, chickpeas, dry beans) on a unified crop-year basis with forecasts for the next crop year [Rows 1–11: AAFC]. Statistics Canada publishes two relevant series: stocks-of-principal-field-crops releases that include exports-to-date on a crop-year basis [Rows 12–15: Statistics Canada], and the Canadian International Merchandise Trade (CIMT) tables on a customs-declared, calendar-year basis under the HS 0713 dried-leguminous classification [Rows 16–20: Statistics Canada]. CGC's Grain Statistics Weekly publishes throughput from licensed primary, process, and terminal elevators on a crop-year basis (Aug 1 – Jul 31), with the most recent reading at Week 41 ending 2026-05-17 for the 2025/26 crop year in progress [Rows 21–24: CGC].

Pulse Canada's public-facing pages present industry framing — "Canada is the world's largest exporter of peas, lentils, chickpeas, dry beans and faba beans" [Row 25: Pulse Canada] — rather than an independent statistical series; the volume figures Pulse Canada surfaces typically aggregate Statistics Canada and AAFC upstream.

The data window for this brief: AAFC April 17 2026 Outlook [Rows 1–8, 10–11: AAFC], AAFC February 18 2026 Outlook for the inter-edition revision evidence [Row 9: AAFC], Statistics Canada Daily release dated 2024-09-09 covering crop year 2023/24 close [Rows 12–15: Statistics Canada], Statistics Canada Reference Guide to Canadian International Merchandise Trade Statistics, 2025 edition [Rows 16–20: Statistics Canada], Canadian Grain Commission Grain Statistics Weekly current week 2026-05-17 [Row 21: CGC], CGC Open-Government dataset record last modified 2024-09-25 [Row 23: CGC], and Pulse Canada public homepage as of 2026-05-26 [Row 25: Pulse Canada]. The Canadian Grain Commission's "Grain Statistics Weekly" methodology notes page was inaccessible during verification; the methodology framing for licensed-facility scope is therefore drawn from the CGC Statistics landing page and the Open-Government dataset description [Row 22: CGC; Row 24: CGC].

What this brief does NOT attempt: it does not adjudicate which publisher is "more accurate"; it does not produce a reconciled single-number estimate; it does not forecast the next monthly customs reading; and it does not interpret bilateral-trade-policy developments. The objective is methodology decode — to show the reader, line by line, what each publisher's headline measures, so the reader can choose the figure appropriate to their question. Cross-references throughout use the form [Row N: Publisher] and trace to RECEIPTS.md in the source folder.

AAFC's Outlook for Principal Field Crops publishes a single export number per crop per crop year. In the April 17 2026 edition, 2024/25 lentil exports stand at 1,822 kt and the 2025/26 forecast at 2,200 kt [Row 2: AAFC; Row 6: AAFC]. The Outlook discloses the rule the document operates under explicitly inside its tables: "Forecasts by AAFC except for area, yield and production for 2025-26, which are STC." [Rows 1–8 disclosure quote: AAFC]. That single sentence carries three structural facts. First, AAFC is the forecaster for exports — meaning the 2,200 kt 2025/26 number is an AAFC-built projection, not a Statistics Canada actual. Second, AAFC takes area, yield, and production for the current crop year from Statistics Canada — so the supply-side anchor is Statistics-Canada-final, but the demand-side and export numbers are AAFC-modelled. Third, the table cites four upstream sources by name across all crops: Statistics Canada, the Canadian Grain Commission, USDA, and the International Grains Council [Row 11: AAFC]. Crop year is defined explicitly: "the crop year starts on August 1 and ends on July 31" [Row 10: AAFC].

Statistics Canada's Daily release of 2024-09-09 publishes a different lentil number. As of July 31 2024 — i.e. the close of the 2023/24 crop year — Statistics Canada reports: "Exports decreased 25.4% year over year to 1.6 million tonnes." [Row 13: Statistics Canada]. The release also discloses where the underlying data comes from: "Commercial stock data originates from two sources: the Canadian Grain Commission for western crops and a survey of handlers and agents of special crops." [Row 14: Statistics Canada]. The on-farm-stocks side is anchored to the June Field Crop Survey, a survey of approximately 25,000 Canadian farmers run from May 15 to June 12 2024 [Row 15: Statistics Canada]. Two structural facts follow. First, the Statistics Canada lentil-exports figure is built up from the same upstream throughput data as CGC's series for "western crops", but layered with a survey of handlers and agents for "special crops" — meaning pulses sit on a hybrid statistical chassis that combines CGC-licensed flows with a separate special-crops handler survey. Second, the figure is a crop-year cumulative, not a single monthly read or a forecast.

Statistics Canada's customs-basis trade tables (the 12-10-0011 / CIMT family) publish a third lentil number, on a calendar-year basis, drawn from customs declarations. The Reference Guide describes the source directly: non-US exports are "compiled from customs declarations submitted to the CBSA via the Canadian Export Reporting System (CERS), G7 Electronic Data Interchange, or Export Summary Reporting program" [Row 17: Statistics Canada]; US-bound exports are sourced reciprocally from US Census Bureau import data under a Memorandum of Understanding [Row 18: Statistics Canada]. The definition the customs series operates under is explicit: "Customs-basis trade statistics measure the change in stock of material resources of Canada resulting from the movement of merchandise into or out of the country." [Row 16: Statistics Canada]. That definition is different from the AAFC and Statistics Canada Daily definitions in a specific way: it counts what crossed the border, declared to customs, regardless of who handled it inside Canada.

The CGC's Grain Statistics Weekly publishes a fourth number — throughput through licensed primary, process, and terminal elevators [Row 24: CGC], on a crop-year basis (Aug 1 – Jul 31), with the most recent reading at Week 41 ending 2026-05-17 for the 2025/26 crop year in progress [Row 21: CGC]. Throughput at a licensed facility is a step inside the supply chain, not at the border; volumes that move through unlicensed facilities, or that bypass elevator handling altogether (a portion of container-direct shipments, for instance), do not appear in this series at all. The container-vs-bulk modal split matters here: a meaningful share of pulse exports moves container-direct from inland loading facilities to port, and where those flows bypass CGC-licensed elevator handling, they do not register in Grain Statistics Weekly even though they appear in the customs-basis CIMT series.

Four publishers. Four definitions. The 1,822 kt AAFC lentil figure for 2024/25 [Row 2: AAFC] and the 1.6 Mt Statistics Canada lentil figure for 2023/24 [Row 13: Statistics Canada] appear to sit nearly 14% apart numerically, but that gap is almost entirely the calendar — they cover non-overlapping crop years — not a measurement disagreement. The 2,200 kt AAFC forecast for 2025/26 [Row 6: AAFC] and any future Statistics Canada actual for 2025/26 will likely sit closer together because they will share both a calendar and an upstream-data architecture; the gap that remains after the year closes is the residual difference between AAFC's forecast model and Statistics Canada's settled survey-plus-handler measurement.

AAFC, the Canadian Grain Commission, and Statistics Canada's stocks-of-principal-field-crops series all operate on the crop year August 1 – July 31 [Row 10: AAFC]. Statistics Canada's customs-basis CIMT tables operate on the calendar year January 1 – December 31 [Row 16: Statistics Canada, contextual]. The two windows overlap by five months — August through December of the year that crop-year names "year 1" sit inside calendar year 1; the seven months January through July sit inside calendar year 2. A trader who reads "Canadian lentil exports for 2024" without checking the publisher receives either an Aug 2023 – Jul 2024 number (crop year 2023/24, often labelled "2024" in casual usage) or a Jan 2024 – Dec 2024 number (calendar year 2024). The two figures cannot be compared and cannot be averaged.

The five-month overlap-and-non-overlap creates what we will call, for the duration of this brief, a "bilge" — a window of trade that is double-counted across two adjacent readings if a reader stacks one publisher's crop-year number against another publisher's calendar-year number, and a window that is uncounted if the reader does the reverse. The bilge sits between August and December. The trade that physically crosses the Canadian border in those five months belongs to one specific crop year (e.g. Aug–Dec 2024 belongs to crop year 2024/25, beginning Aug 1 2024) and to one specific calendar year (calendar year 2024). A reader who sources two figures from two different publishers — one crop-year and one calendar-year — and then sums or compares them is, in effect, double-counting the five-month bilge in one direction or zero-counting it in the other.

This is not a hypothetical. AAFC's 2024/25 dry-pea export figure of 2,175 kt [Row 1: AAFC] covers August 2024 through July 2025. Statistics Canada's calendar-year 2024 customs figure for the same crop covers January 2024 through December 2024. The two windows share five months (Aug–Dec 2024); the remaining seven months of each window are unique to that window (Jan–Jul 2024 for the calendar year; Jan–Jul 2025 for the crop year). The shape of the 2025 export curve — which has not yet closed — substantially determines how those numbers compare. A trader seeking a directly-comparable year-over-year reading picks one publisher and stays there; a trader seeking the most timely reading accepts that the timeliest publisher (CGC weekly) measures licensed-handler throughput, not customs-declared border crossings.

The structural reason the publishers do not converge their calendars is that they are answering different questions. AAFC's audience is the federal-policy and grower-association reader, who plans against a planting-to-harvest-to-export biological cycle that doesn't respect the calendar. Statistics Canada's CIMT audience is the trade-balance and balance-of-payments reader, for whom calendar consistency with the rest of the customs-data world is non-negotiable. CGC's audience is the grain-handling-industry reader, for whom the licensed-facility crop-year corresponds to operational planning windows for elevator capacity, freight bookings, and rail allocation. The calendar misalignment is not an editorial choice that could be reconciled by a single publishing decision — it is a function of which question each publisher exists to answer.

The point of convergence is the upstream architecture. AAFC's Outlook draws "area, yield, and production for 2025-26" from Statistics Canada [Row 11: AAFC], and the Outlook's tables explicitly name Statistics Canada and the Canadian Grain Commission among its sources [Row 11: AAFC]. Statistics Canada's quarterly stocks-of-principal-field-crops Daily release draws western-crops commercial-stocks data from the Canadian Grain Commission directly [Row 14: Statistics Canada]. The CGC's licensed-handler data flows into Statistics Canada's stocks releases and, in turn, into AAFC's modelled forecast. Pulse Canada's framing draws on Statistics Canada and AAFC. The dependency graph is hierarchical: CGC measures licensed throughput → Statistics Canada combines that with a special-crops handler survey and the June Field Crop Survey → AAFC builds a forward forecast on top → Pulse Canada frames the result. Where the four numbers appear to diverge, they often share more architectural DNA than the divergence suggests. Independent industry projections (Saskatchewan Pulse Growers' Mercantile Consulting series) sit alongside the four government-anchored series as a non-government cross-check [Row 26: Saskatchewan Pulse Growers; Row 27: Saskatchewan Pulse Growers].

The point at which the market actually clears, by contrast, is the customs-basis monthly reading. Importing-country trade desks — Indian procurement agencies, Turkish state grain buyers, UAE re-export hubs, Bangladeshi millers — settle commercial paper against customs-declared volumes, because customs declarations are the trade document of record at the border. The customs-basis Canadian export series under HS 0713, published monthly by Statistics Canada's CIMT program, is the figure these counterparties verify against [Rows 16–20: Statistics Canada]. The Statistics Canada Daily on stocks-of-principal-field-crops [Row 13: Statistics Canada], with its quarterly cadence and crop-year framing, is read by the same trade desks as directional confirmation, not settlement reference. AAFC's Outlook [Rows 1–8: AAFC] is read primarily by domestic Canadian audiences and grower associations; importing counterparties read it as a forecast, not a basis.

This split — upstream architectural convergence, downstream calendar divergence, market settlement on a specific customs-basis monthly series — is the substance of the brief's central question. "Canadian lentil exports up X%" produces different X values across publishers because each counts a different population on a different calendar. The X foreign buyers settle against is the customs-declared monthly reading under HS 0713. The X Canadian policy and grower planning moves on is the AAFC Outlook forecast. The X grain-handling firms operate against is the CGC Grain Statistics Weekly. The X Pulse Canada surfaces is whichever of the three is most timely; the framing layer is not an independent measurement.

The single most consequential reading discrepancy at the time of this brief is not between publishers — it is the inter-edition revision inside AAFC's own Outlook. The February 18 2026 edition of the AAFC Outlook published a 2025/26 lentil-export forecast of 2,100 kt [Row 9: AAFC]. The April 17 2026 edition revised that to 2,200 kt [Row 6: AAFC]. The 100 kt revision over two months is a measurable change in the federal forecaster's view of how the current crop year will close. AAFC does not publish a narrative explanation of inter-edition revisions inside the Outlook tables themselves; readers track those revisions by stacking successive editions, as we do here.

Each publisher's headline is internally consistent — none of them is reporting an error. The headlines diverge because the publishers are not measuring the same thing. The table above is the smallest single object in this brief that contains every divergence dimension on one page.