A pair of recently released reports from the American Malting Barley Association (AMBA) show that the domestic barley market is continuing to rebound from a brutal 2021 crop year.
AMBA’s barley crop report, based on the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service data, indicate that overall production was up almost 6 percent in 2023 over the previous year, increasing from 175 to 185 million bushels. Average yield also was up almost a bushel per acre.
Ashley McFarland, vice president and technical director at AMBA, says the numbers—which reflect data as of December 1 and will be slightly refined—show a strong trend of growers and maltsters continuing to replenish barley supplies. Farmers seeded 5 percent more acres in 2023, and they harvested 4 percent more, after seeing production dip 30 percent in 2021.
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“I think we’re getting back to what we would consider normal,” she says. It’s a continued response from 2022, which also saw numbers jump after that intense drop. However, barley stocks—malting barley stored in various locations, on- and off-farm—are continuing to recover from a 2021 crop year that experienced a combination of higher protein, pre-harvest sprouting, and lower yields because of widespread drought and late rains in some areas. “Production was just down [in 2021] because we saw big hits in yield, but we also saw acreage just get abandoned in places,” McFarland says.
Continuing demand amid the shortfall almost entirely depleted the barley stocks. The 2022 crop year was a rebound, but it didn’t necessarily replenish stocks entirely.
“Production and stocks have stabilized from that big hit in ’21, although if you look year-over-year, I don’t know if we’ve actually gotten back to ’19 levels,” McFarland says. She notes that 2019 was the last year that wasn’t affected by either the pandemic or massive environmental stressors. Meanwhile, the broader industry trend has been to move toward lower and lower stock levels, and the 2021 shortfall took up a lot of the slack in the system.
“Over time, we’ve definitely moved toward a system with lower barley on hand, and that’s just the system in general,” McFarland says. “Nobody wants the burden of holding on to grain for very long, and so barley especially has moved to this just-in-time system. Folks want to be able to harvest and get that into the malthouse very quickly.”
That’s why the coming year may trend slightly downward compared to 2023, she says, despite historically low barley stocks. “This is probably going to temper enthusiasm going into the ’24 planting season,” she says. “We’re going to probably see acreage come down a little bit. It’s a bit of a bummer, but stability is what we should be shooting for, not just high production.”
Malt companies will start locking in contracts with farmers in the coming months, and farmers may end up reducing acreage amid softening prices. Another option to put downward pressure on the market is to ask farmers to sit on their barley for longer, which comes with pricing support—but they may not have the desire or capacity for that.
“It ties up bin space, and barley is a fickle crop to store—you have to store it at good conditions, or you lose that germination ability,” McFarland says. “Not all farmers have the best infrastructure to store it.”
Broadly, however, the post-2021 recovery in the barley market is well-established, and it’s left the brewing and distilling industries on solid footing when it comes to pricing and supply. “We’ve got enough barley on hand, we’ve got the stocks replenished to a certain degree, and we’ve also got demand for beer slightly trending down, and that’s still the biggest user of barley,” McFarland says.
New Varietals, and a Future for Winter Barleys
Meanwhile, AMBA’s recent list of recommended barley varietals for 2024 also continues existing trends. The list held steady at 41 varieties this year, but the association removed three six-row varietals while adding three more two-rows for 2024. In all, there are a half-dozen six-row varieties and 35 two-rows.
More than half the barley acreage contracted in the United States comes from just a few varietals: ABI Voyager and AAC Synergy for AB InBev, and Moravian types plus Bill Coors 100 for Molson Coors. “Even though we’ve got good diversity on our list, only four of them are taking up really half of the acreage,” McFarland says. “That tells you how difficult it is to get new variety adoption and uptake. Not only do farmers need to learn how to grow a new variety, but then, when that variety comes into a malthouse, you have to adjust process.”
A good example of this is the roster of winter barleys, which now consists of 10 varietals. Winter barleys offer a chance to put a productive crop into the ground at a time when fields are often bare. Having any sort of cover crop in place helps to reduce erosion and build soil fertility; winter barley adds a more direct economic benefit to an already beneficial practice. However, these barleys remain tiny slivers of the market.
Thunder is one such varietal. “It might be 16-plus percent of the barley acreage in Oregon, but Oregon barley acreage is super-small,” McFarland says. “I think Great Western [Malting] is the only one taking up a lot of acreage of Thunder.”
Wintmalt, a winter varietal grown in Idaho, where there’s much more acreage overall, represents just 1.6 percent of the reported acreage in that state.
It’s a long game, says McFarland, who recently participated in the Barley Improvement Conference and discussions there about what barley needs to look like in the next 10 to 20 years. “There is a lot of enthusiasm around winter barley,” she says. “I still believe that’s the future. I know that people are very motivated to figure winter barley out. A lot of excitement around breeding efforts are focused on that.”
Breeding Out a Carcinogen
Another big piece of the breeding puzzle is to create more varietals that don’t contain glycosidic nitrile—such varietals are also known as GN-null, or GN0. Glycosidic nitrile is a precursor for the carcinogenic compound ethyl carbamate, which can be concentrated in distillation.
This issue has been on AMBA’s radar since 2017, and the association included it in their target specs for distillers’ malt and as part of a broader change in breeding guidance in 2019. Until then, distillers had not been heavily engaged in the barley discussion, and the compound is still unregulated in the United States.
However—as with moving toward winter-hardy barleys—it takes years to make a shift. It can take a decade or more for a new varietal to make its way through the research pipeline into commercial availability, followed by the hurdles of adoption.
While still occupying small slivers of domestic barley production, Genie and Odyssey likely represent the greatest domestic GN0 acreage at the moment, though more varieties are in the trial phase. The issue is still relatively new to the United States, and McFarland says there may be types on the recommended list that have yet to be tested. In the United Kingdom, however, new malting barleys are required to be GN0. U.S. researchers and affiliated organizations are trying to get ahead of any potential regulatory issues.
AMBA includes GN0 in their breeding guidelines, which are reviewed and updated every few years. However, change is slow. Even recent advancements in genetic selection and identification of genetic markers—in the research-and-development process for the past five to seven years—haven’t focused on selecting out GN0.
“We’re still going to be turning out these new varieties that are GN-positive, but I think it’s going to be in maybe the next seven or eight years where we’re going to be able to see that turnover, where the GN-null trait becomes synonymous with our recommendations like it is in Europe,” McFarland says. “I think a lot of people are trying to figure out how can they better move their breeding programs toward meeting the needs of distillers.”
Regional Trends
Various local barley-breeding programs are also working toward introducing varietals that would grow the footprint of malting barley, even if they don’t necessarily appeal to farmers in major barley-growing areas.
One new variety on the recommended list is Avalon, a winter cultivar that came about from industry members partnering with public breeding programs. Developed in Virginia, it’s been bred for states where barley hasn’t thrived because of weather and agronomic issues.
“People are really excited about Avalon [in] places like Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, where people are like, ‘Can we grow barley here?’, especially thinking about the whiskey market,” McFarland says.
She highlighted Oregon State University’s breeding program as another program that is pursuing varietals that might be geographically appropriate to specific areas or to specific markets. Thunder and another winter variety, Lightning, were products of the OSU program, as were naked (hull-less) barleys Buck and Streaker, plus newer GN0 varieties that have yet to be registered.
“We have breeders that definitely want to be working in this industry and see the potential there,” McFarland says, “so I think that we’re going to see more of these geographically relevant programs gain strength.
“It might not meet this large-acreage potential, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter as long as your program is sustaining itself and you’re getting varieties out. That’s a win-win.”
