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October 2014

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OCTOBER 2014

page

All in a day’s work

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1.6 million acres

8

The market challenge

12

Slowly on to traceability

16

Buzzing about bean yields

18

A look back at thicker soy stands

22

Two decades later

24

WHERE’S DOMESTIC PLAN?

W

hile soybean acres continue to surge across Canada, and while the sheer number of soybean acres threatens to explode in 2015, so much else about the crop is lagging.

The great breakthroughs that we have been promised in the past decade have not materialized. In fact, they seem as distant as ever.

It all means our soybean incomes are hostage to factors beyond our borders.

Most dangerously, we are still exposed to a shortfall in processing capacity that creates an uneasy vulnerability. By comparison, the West’s expanded canola crush capacity seems positively breathtaking.

No one thinks that new crushing facilities will absorb the entire Canadian crop. But soybeans are nervously becoming too much like pork and beef in their reliance on one or two corporate boardrooms.

Nor, despite decades of research, and a generation of talk, have soybeans made good on their potential to develop value-added, identity-preserved markets for specialty oils and proteins.

Since the 1920s and the introduction of soybean-based paints, we have known that soybeans have an incredible potential to fill myriad industrial roles, not to mention the potential food uses that have been explored, but that also haven’t been realized.

The upshot is that if the same unspectacular rate of progress that we see in crushing, or in

Soybean Guide, October 2014

industrial or specialty oil markets, also prevailed in food-quality exports, we’d still be sending exploratory cargoes to the Pacific Rim, waiting for the first real orders to come in.

Food-grade export premiums aren’t a lifesaver every year, of course. Perhaps they never rise to quite that height. But with the bears back in the pit at Chicago, who isn’t happy to know that the food-grade market has been developed so vigorously and so well?

Now imagine if similar progress had been made in other markets, especially in the domestic sphere.

Part of my complaint, I realize, stems from simple fatigue at having heard too many promises over too many years from one soybean group after another, especially when those groups have made their promises with an aloof and often condescending confidence.

Nor do I want to dismiss the good work that has been done in sectors such as biofuels, or the work that has stemmed from the incredible efforts of dedicated individuals on the farm, in the private sector and beyond.

Soybean growers are right, however, when they believe their crops have untapped use potential, and untapped market potential too.

2015 promises to be a year when such pontential could have paid off.

Tom Button, CG Editor tom.button@fbcpublishing.com 3

Soybean guide

All in a day’s work The Van Kessel family redefines what it means to ‘stay busy’

By Ralph Pearce, CG Production Editor

“The challenges to being a good manager never end.”

— Mike Van Kessel

Continued on page 6

4

Soybean Guide, October 2014

Photo credit: david Charlesworth

I

n the old days, farmers were kept busy finding enough hours in a day to get the planting and harvesting done, as well as all the other chores that went with running a farm and keeping up with the demands of day-to-day living. It was simply a fact of life in agriculture. If you don’t like working 16 to 18 hours a day during spring and summer, you’d better find a less-taxing, more orderly vocation — probably in town or in a city.

In many farming circles today, there’s still a wish there could be a few extra hours in a day, especially at the start and the close of the growing season.

But today, the story is the incredible amount of work that a farm family can do, and the unbelievable productivity of modern agriculture.

It’s a reality that today’s consumers would never guess at.

An example is the Van Kessel farmily of Warwick Township. In addition to cash cropping 2,400 acres, Van Kessel Bros. finishes approximately 35,000 hogs per year and, as if that’s not enough, it also runs an on-farm grain elevator which has undergone a recent expansion to a capacity of 1.4 million bushels.

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An expanded grain-drying and storage system creates marketing and income opportunities, but adds to management demands.

Continued from page 4

Farming is in the Van Kessel genes, actually. Mike’s parents came to Canada in 1951 from the Netherlands, and purchased some local farms in the years following their arrival. Mike has been farming with his brother Tony since 1980, and now, Tony’s sons Kyle and Brent are part of the operation. The brothers also have two fulltime employees, and Mike’s wife Jeannine is the bookkeeper for the farm.

On the crops side, Mike and Tony grow a conventional rotation of corn, soybeans and soft red wheat on a combination of owned and rented land, located largely within a triangle formed by the towns of Forest, Watford and Arkona.

“We try never to grow back-to-back corn or beans,” says Mike. “We prefer no till for beans and wheat, and conservation tillage for corn.”

On the livestock side, there’s a nearby farrowing unit, and Van Kessel purchases all of the early weaners under contract from that operation. The receiving elevator is an added advantage for local farmers to dry and store their crops through Lakeside Grain and Feed and its affiliation with London Agricultural Commodities (LAC).

6

Cost of production, Van Kessel says, is the foundation of good farm management.

Caring for the land One of the hallmarks of today’s agriculture is a heightened sense of stewardship and an eye on sustainability. It isn’t enough to simply expand an operation in the chase for “economies of scale.” Such growth requires careful consideration of what the land is capable of yielding.

Van Kessel understands that relationship, and purchased a variable-rate

dry fertilizer spreader in 2013, that he uses in connection with his grid-sampling program.

“Our consultant, Aaron Breimer at Veritas, makes prescriptions based on the soil test results,” says Van Kessel. “We’ve found that many of the unproductive areas didn’t require as much potassium or phosphate, as they had a buildup from years of blanket broadcasting.”

Soybean Guide, October 2014

“We’re extremely picky about when we drive on land.”

— Mike Van Kessel By comparison, Breimer helped the brothers determine that those highly productive lowland areas of their fields required large amounts of P and K. Lime and gypsum, it was found, were also needed as part of the prescriptions, but only in localized areas.

“It’s impossible to do a side-by-side comparison showing the effectiveness of this method of fertilizer application,” says Van Kessel. “But I firmly believe it’s working and that it’s beneficial.”

Part of the recipe for their fertility and nutrient management program is their proximity to their land. Specifically, their barns are close to their land base. The Van Kessels use Boere Irrigation, a local custom drag-hose operator, to apply manure to almost all of their land on a rotating basis, and Mike maintains that the addition of manure over the years has greatly improved the structure of the soil and enhanced its productivity.

“We prefer to drag hose as there’s much less soil compaction,” says Van Kessel. “We had one very wet fall and had to take off our crop in very wet conditions. We saw the effects of compaction from that harvest for many years, and now, we’re extremely picky about when we drive on our land.”

When it comes to challenges, Van Kessel has a unique vantage point. Mike and Tony are kept as busy as they are, managing such a diverse farming operation, yet when asked about the biggest challenge he faces, Mike points to the wind turbine issues that have made the district a focal point for the local battle that’s been developing for the past three or four years. It all comes down to a struggle between landowners with wind turbines on their properties, and those who don’t want them around.

“The Green Energy Act has taken autonomy from the local townships and let non-farmers change the face of our countryside,” says Van Kessel. “There wouldn’t be one commercial turbine in Ontario if it were not for government subsidies, and it certainly doesn’t seem as though wind energy will ever bring down our energy costs.”

Yet whether it’s dealing with the vagaries of the weather, local issues surrounding wind energy or the frustrations from U.S. foot-dragging on country-of-origin labelling, Van Kessel puts it down to a case of “All in a day’s work.”

“The challenges of being a good manager never end,” Van Kessel says.

“Fluctuating commodity prices, weather, crop conditions — there’s always something that needs to be looked at. So I try to keep a handle on my cost of production for all the facets of our business, so we can see what areas we need to pay attention to.”

But farming today also means farming with the future in mind, Van Kessel says.

Not only do people need to eat, the list of products they need from agriculture is growing exponentially, as is the list of professions and careers relating to agriculture.

From a farming perspective, however, Van Kessel is impressed with the young producers entering the industry. They’re bright, energetic and eager, he says, and they’re bringing a lot to the industry. SG

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soybean Guide

1.6 million acres Manitoba’s soybean acres have exploded in 2014, and Saskatchewan farmers are close behind

By Ron Friesen

Y

ou can’t accuse Ernie Sirski of doing things by halves. In fact, he does them by twos, at least when it comes to soybeans.

In 2012, Sirski planted 200 acres of soybeans for the first time on his farm near Dauphin, Man. The next year, he doubled that to 400 acres, averaging an impressive 40 bushels an acre. This spring, despite cool, wet conditions which delayed seeding, Sirski planted 800 acres of soybeans, nearly a quarter of his 3,600 acres of cropland.

That’s still less than his acreage for wheat and canola. But consider this. Sirski’s yearover-year doubling of soybean acres is happening in northwestern Manitoba, four hours from Winnipeg, where soybeans until now have barely been on the radar screen as a commercial crop.

From a marginal crop hugging the Canada-U.S. border, soybeans have begun surging across Manitoba well beyond the Red River Valley, where roughly 80 per cent of the province’s soybeans are still grown. Non-traditional regions include places where soybeans would hardly have been considered a few years back.

According to the Manitoba Agricultural Services Corporation’s harvest production report, the two areas of the province where soybeans expanded the most in 2013 were Dauphin, Sirski’s home municipality where yields averaged 36 bushels an acre, and the regional municipality of Bifrost in Manitoba’s Interlake region.

What’s remarkable is the extent to Continued on page 10

Ernie Sirski has doubled his soybean acreage every year that he’s grown them, even though he farms ground that was thought too cold for the crop.

8

Soybean Guide, October 2014

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Continued from page 8

which Manitoba’s soybean acreage has expanded in a short time. Since 2011, when Statistics Canada predicted Manitoba farmers would seed 575,000 acres of soybeans, plantings have increased by 225,000 to 250,000 acres annually.

In 2014, StatsCan said Manitoba farmers planted an almost unbelievable 1.3 million acres of soybeans, a 24 per cent increase from 2013.

Next door in Saskatchewan, the acreage, although much smaller, has grown even more rapidly. In 2013, for the first time ever, StatsCan included soybeans in its spring planting intentions for the province. The figure was 170,000 acres. This past spring, growers nearly doubled the crop, planting 300,000 acres there.

Overnight, Saskatchewan has become Canada’s fourth-largest soybean producer, ahead of Prince Edward Island. That’s quite an achievement for a crop which seems to have come from nowhere in a province where wheat is traditionally king.

Normally associated with southern Ontario and the U.S. Midwest, soybeans are relatively new to Western Canada, and it’s fair to say their rapid rise has some farmers rubbing their eyes and wondering: is this for real?

Apparently so. From a minor crop 10 years ago, soybeans today are Manitoba’s third-largest crop behind wheat and canola. Last year the provincial average yield for soybeans was 39 bushels an acre, up from 36 bushels in 2012 and well above the 10-year average of 30 bushels.

There are two reasons for soybeans’ recent success. In the field, the arrival of early-maturing varieties has made them more commercially feasible. Meanwhile, strong prices and steady market demand have notched up the incentive for growers to give them a chance.

Not that long ago, the only soybean varieties available to Manitoba farmers were late maturing, which limited their viability during the province’s relatively short growing season. Since the early 2000s, however, the development of earlier-maturing varieties better suited to local growing conditions has helped the rapid expansion of soybean acres in Manitoba and even farther west.

“Genetics have brought us a long way, as far as shortening maturity,” says Kristen Podolsky, production specialist for the Manitoba Pulse Growers Association.

“That’s led us into this progression and it’s going to continue.

“My No. 1 concern about limitation may come down to variability in weather and climate,” Podolsky says.

Ah, yes, weather and climate — two factors which could yet send a promising crop into a tailspin. Even though some soybean boosters tout Manitoba as the next Iowa, the fact remains that growing conditions north of the 49th parallel are different from those to the south.

Although new improved varieties have reduced the number of days to maturity, soybeans are still a late-season crop. Producers harvest them in September, and there’s no way around that. That makes soybeans more vulnerable to an early frost than some other crops. And in Western Canada frost can

“The real benefit of soybeans is that they allow a warm-season crop into our rotations.”

— Martin Entz

10

and does come early while unharvested crops are still in the field. The average date for the first fall frost in Winnipeg is around September 21. Near Dauphin, where Sirski farms, it’s more like September 12.

For that reason, farmers must seriously consider if they want to play dice with Mother Nature before going into soybeans, says Dennis Lange, a farm production adviser specializing in pulse crops for the Manitoba Agriculture Ministry.

“When they’re planting soybeans, they have to realize it is a late-season crop,” Lange says. “At the end of the day, if they realize there’s potential for a frost in September and beans aren’t going to be mature at that time, they might rethink how many acres they’ll grow in the future.”

Soybeans can be a pretty forgiving crop, able to withstand both wet and hot conditions reasonably well. But even they have their limits. Soybeans require enough precipitation in early August to set seed. If they don’t get it on time (as happened in western Saskatchewan in 2013), yields are affected. Manitoba growers also remember 2004 as the year with no summer which saw cool weather, lots of rain and a killing frost in August. The average provincial soybean yield that year was just eight bushels an acre.

Since then, for the most part, growers have dodged the weather bullet. True, the last two years have seen cool, wet weather in spring, which delayed seeding. But a series of late, warm autumns extended crop development and stretched harvesting into late September and even early October.

Favourable fall weather and earliermaturing varieties are the two main reasons for successful soybean crops in recent years, says Lange.

“We haven’t had any detrimental weather in fall, like an early frost in September. Things have been moving along, and growers have been quite successful at choosing varieties that are suited for their region,” Lange adds. “Part of our expansion has just been due to the fact that we’ve seen some good varieties come along, we’ve seen some good yields, and the weather has co-operated.”

Podolsky believes soybeans are still a high-risk crop on the Prairies, despite advances in genetics. For that reason, she says producers need to consider multiple agronomic factors when selecting a soybean variety, as producers do in any region. But one factor overrides them all: days to maturity.

“Growers should really focus on inforSoybean Guide, October 2014

Dodged another bullet mation about days to maturity because it takes into account all the factors,” Podolsky says. “Regardless of how it gets to maturity, it’s really the number of days it takes that matters.”

Martin Entz, a University of Manitoba plant scientist who specializes in sustainable agriculture, observes that soybeans still represent a small acreage in Western Canada and will probably never rival wheat and canola. But because it’s a commercially viable legume crop, which fixes its own nitrogen, soybeans can be a good fit in crop rotations.

“The real benefit of soybeans is that they allow a warm-season crop into our rotations,” says Entz. “That gives us some risk management options because canola is very much a cool-season crop. If we have both canola and soybeans on the farm and if we get a cool year, the canola will respond. And if we have a hot year, the soybeans will respond.”

But Entz warns against using soybeans to replace other crops.

“If we’re just going to move from a canola-wheat rotation to a soybean-wheat rotation, then perhaps we haven’t made any progress,” Entz says.

Entz also expresses concern about what soybeans may do to zero- or minimum-tillage systems. Soybeans require warm soil to germinate, and some growers have been known to abandon zero till and cultivate soils black in order to warm up the ground faster.

“That can really come back to hurt us,” Entz says. “Farmers need to think really carefully about that.”

Another concern is the fact that most soybean varieties grown in Manitoba are glyphosate resistant. Entz warns that, with the arrival of second-generation Roundup Ready soybeans, the continuous use of glyphosate will create greater selection pressure and increase the presence of glyphosate-resistant weeds. A rotation which also contains Roundup Ready canola only adds to the risk.

While welcoming the arrival of soybeans in the West, Entz says it should be seen mainly as an opportunity to diversify crop rotations. He encourages producers to approach soybeans carefully and not to treat them as a new Cinderella crop.

“If you grow some, get some experience with it. Grow varieties that are suited to your length of season,” Entz says. “And if there are no varieties suited to your length of season, maybe you should be considering whether you even want to grow them.” SG Soybean Guide, October 2014

M

anitoba soybean producers narrowly escaped a crop disaster this September when early frosts caused only minor damage to the ripening crop.

But it was a wake-up call to warn growers that Manitoba is not Iowa,

and that soybeans remain a high-risk crop the farther north you go.

“It’s a reminder that we are growing a long-season crop in Manitoba,” said Dennis Lange, a Manitoba Agriculture Food and Rural Development farm production adviser. “Even with early-season varieties, we are still growing a crop you’re not going to be harvesting in August. You’re going to be harvesting in mid- to late September.”

Lange said the frost which swept across Manitoba in mid-September caused “very minimal damage” to soybean crops. Temperatures dipped to only -1 C in most locations, although some regions reported readings as low as -3 C. Most crops experienced some browning on the upper leaves but no damage to ripening pods. A few crops, though, saw damage to the bottom of the plant.

Lange said an estimated 75 per cent of Manitoba’s soybean crop was in the R7 growth stage by the second week in September. That’s when a plant contains at least one mature brown pod.

2014 was a challenging growing season for Manitoba soybean growers, beginning with a late spring which delayed seeding, excessive moisture in June, cool weather in early summer, a dry spell from mid-July to early August, and then the mid-month frost in September.

Despite erratic growing conditions, the crop outlook has been generally positive. Just before harvest, Lange was predicting an average provincial soybean yield of around 32 bushels an acre, down from a record 39 bushels an acre in 2013 but still close to the provincial 10-year average yield.

Manitoba growers insured just under 1.3 million acres of soybeans in 2014, another record for the province’s most rapidly expanding crop.

Lange said the difficult season proved once again that Manitoba’s extreme climate requires special strategies for growing soybeans, which, despite early-season varieties, are still more suited for southern regions than northern ones. He stresses three key recommendations: 1. Plant varieties suited to your growing region.

2. Plant when soil temperatures are best for emergence (at least 10 C).

Base planting decisions on how many acres you have. If you have only 160 acres of soybeans, you can afford to wait until the ground warms up enough. But if you have several thousand acres, you may have to push the envelope to get them all planted in May. 3. If you start pushing your seeding into June, harvest may be delayed and your risk of frost increases. You’re going to be combining soybeans in late September no matter what. You don’t want to wait until October, when overnight frosts can occur regularly.

11

soybean guide

The market

challenge S

As the world stumbles into 2015, the job for soybean producers is to figure out where to look for market rallies

By Philip Shaw

12

oybeans are often called the great liars, a reputation they get because sometimes the crop looks tremendous in the field, but then fails to yield as much as expected. On the other hand, the yield is sometimes very surprising compared to how poor a soybean stand might look.

It’s for this reason that soybeans can sometimes be the great wild card in our production estimates.

Soybeans have been the great favourite in 2014, with farmers across the huge North American Corn Belt shifting more acres to soybeans this year. Of course, that had as much to do with the decline in corn prices as with any strength in soybeans.

The USDA has pegged American soybean acreage at 84.8 million acres in 2014, which is an 11 per cent increase from the year before and a new record.

That new record wasn’t set by just a little bit, by the way. This crop is a whopping seven million acres bigger than anything we’ve seen before.

The expected harvested acreage in United States in early fall was set at 84.1 million acres with an expected yield of 45.4 bushels per acre, although these numbers will be massaged as we get further into harvest.

At the same time corn acreage was projected at 91.64 million acres, which is the smallest corn acreage since 2010, but still the fifth largest since 1944.

So soybeans are winning the day in the battle of the acres in the United States.

It is the same in Eastern Canada with Ontario soybean acres this year projected at 3.03 million acres, up from 2.495 million acres last year. The projected yield by Statistics Canada is 43.2 bushels per acre.

Quebec has an estimated 836,500 acres, up from 710,400 last year, and the expected yield there is 43.5 bushels per acre.

As in the U.S., the great loser in this

surge in soybean planting has been corn acres, as well as a smaller-than-expected wheat planting in Ontario in the fall of 2013.

New crop soybean pr ices have responded accordingly, based on the projected acreage, heading down to the $10-bushel range, which is clearly much lower than last year.

The great challenge for producers is to measure just where we are now with regard to the soybean market structure and prices. As we look toward the spring of 2015, will the soybean market need to bid aggressively to keep the acres away from the corn market?

Or will the corn market have to bid aggressively to take back all those soybean acres that have gone in at its expense over the last two years?

There are other questions too. Which underlying factors will be the key market determinants as we head into 2015? Will the corn market rebound, making it easier to take all those acres back from beans?

And will the value of the Canadian dollar change everything?

As the 2014 production year comes to an end, much will depend on the actual soybean yield that comes out of the field.

Yes, the USDA has spoken with its projected yield of 45.4 bushels per acre, but late-season diseases and the lack of rainfall may cause this number to drop.

Or, there is always a chance that this number will rise. Weather will remain the key.

With the total projected supply of 3.971 billion bushels of soybeans in 2014-15, USDA is projecting demand to be 3.541 billion bushels with ending stocks of 430 million bushels.

That ending stock figure is more than three times higher than the ending stocks of 2013-14 of 140 million bushels.

That statistic alone has contributed to the USDA projecting cash prices to American farmers from $9.35 to $11.35 a bushel, far below the $13 and $14 enjoyed Soybean Guide, October 2014

by American farmers last year. With ending stocks that high, lower prices would seem to be in for the long term.

Of course any discussion about soybean prices in Canada has to involve the value of the Canadian dollar, which is currently trading at .9151 U.S., boosting basis values. As of early September, oldcrop basis levels were approximately $2.75 above the November futures price, and new-crop basis values ranged from 25 to 35 cents over the November 2014 futures price.

The soybeans priced in Canada have a more direct connection to the U.S. dollar, making them very sensitive to foreign exchange. Any movement in the Canadian dollar can have a huge effect on cash pricing. In fact, the lower loonie in September 2014 has mitigated some of the price decline over the last year.

The Canadian dollar affects our cash prices greatly. However, often overlooked is the effect on grain futures prices by a change in the value of the U.S. dollar.

The U.S. dollar is the world’s default currency and any appreciation in its value makes these commodities more expensive in the world’s currencies. On September 4, the U.S. dollar index reached a 13-month high in response to the European Central Bank cutting interest rates. If the U.S. dollar remains high, it will act as a drag on futures price appreciation.

The switch to soybeans was not and is not restricted to North America. As we all know, South America produces more soybeans than North America and it will be planting soybeans in October and November of 2014 for its upcoming season. While last year Argentina produced 54 million metric tonnes (MMT) and Brazil 87.50, in 2014-15 USDA is projecting the same 54 MMT crop in Argentina but boosting Brazil’s crop up to 91 MMT. It’s all theory now, but the spectre of big South American crops weighs on the market.

Darin Newsom, senior grain analyst for DTN/Progressive Farmer in Omaha, Nebraska believes 2015 could be a makeor-break year for soybeans. South American production is set to rise in 2015, making all producers so much more dependent on Chinese demand and the Chinese economy. There are logistics problems in Brazil as well as Soybean Guide, October 2014

“Despite the bearishness of late 2014, there will be marketing opportunities ahead.”

Argentina, but if all of these beans do come to market, it will have a significant negative impact on soybean prices.

Of course all this news sounds very negative for soybeans as we look into 2015. Many farmers follow their rotations closely, but the rise in soybean acres over the last year is very telling.

Clearly, farmers also planned with their pocketbook.

Corn is much more expensive to grow, with simple variable costs of between $400 and $500 an acre.

After you pay those costs, fixed costs must be accounted for and there isn’t a lot left from $3.50-$4 corn prices. So strictly from an agricultural economic perspective, unless things change there will be a movement away from corn into soybeans in 2015.

At least, this is what it looks like now in the early fall of 2014. But this is agriculture, and we know that not everything stays the same.

While this year the United States had a very healthy-looking soybean crop, that may not necessarily hold true in South America this winter. Even though its crop potential is huge, you have to

consider whether it will actually happen or not.

China remains an almost insatiable source of global demand for soybeans.

Chinese demand has risen almost fivefold over the last 20 years and its imports now are over 70 per cent of the U.S. crop.

However, it also imports many South American soybeans. This demand is growing and will continue to grow.

It is hard to imagine Ontario planting more soybean acres in 2015 than the record 3.03 million planted in 2014.

Much will depend on wheat planting in the fall of 2014 and on any price strength in corn over the winter season.

The challenge for soybean producers is to take advantage of market rallies as the different market conditions shift into 2015. Demand for non-GMO soybeans remains strong.

The only constant in agriculture is change. That goes for the soybean market too.

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Soybean guide

Slowly on to

traceability T

he word gets rolled out every time there’s a scare about foodborne illness, or when a meat or vegetable recall hits the headlines. It’s traceability.

On the food side of the agri-food industry, it’s a word that instils confidence and trust. Yet on the agricultural side — at least, on the crop side — it too often instils doubts, impatience and talk of unkept promises.

In livestock production as well as in much of horticulture, traceability is becoming part of the cost of doing business in Canada. In grains and oilseeds, it’s nowhere.

Or so it seems.

“Admittedly, soybeans are maybe further along than most commodities are, although wheat is quickly catching up to it,” says Martin Vanderloo, president of Huron Commodities in Clinton, Ont. “There are so many different traits in the same crop, whether it be protein or seed size or taste or sucrose content,” Vanderloo says. “Every variety is different, and there are many different applications for the soybeans. Therefore you have to have some sort of system in place

to be able to assure the client that yes, that’s what you’re getting.”

Seed certification is one aspect of the IP sector that Vanderloo insists on, with a copy of either the bag tag or the seed invoice as proof. It’s the way he’s done business for a number of years, and given the perception of Canada in other countries, he believes even the suggestion of traceability is worth the added effort. He refers to a conversation he had with a customer in Japan a few years ago, about branding of Canadian soybean products and how valuable it was to have the Canadian flag and logos on the packages.

“The wilderness and fresh water, and everything that’s good about nature ‘is’ Canada,” the buyer told Vanderloo. “If I can put the Canadian flag on my package of tofu, I think that’s a good bargaining tool, and I think I’m going to gain market share.”

Such reactions are why the Canadian government launched its Canada brand, with the only stipulation being that processors and manufacturers show that Canadian soybeans are being used. If a processor or manufacturer can prove that — through contracts and seed tags

The low percentage of certified seed used in cereal production is a concern, particularly in moving traceability initiatives in the cereals sector forward.

16

Traceability may be inevitable, and it may even be welcomed by farmers, but it is arriving in baby steps

By Ralph Pearce, CG Production Editor — then they can use the logo, and look for a premium.

“Sometimes we sell ourselves a little short here,” says Vanderloo. “The Japanese consumer has a good impression of Canada and all that’s good about it. It’s to the point where the manufacturer in Japan wants to make use of that as a marketing tool, and I say, ‘Great! Go for it!’”

Double the effect As a farmer, as vice-president of sales and marketing for Pride Seeds and also as a past president of the Canadian Seed Trade Association (CSTA), Steve Denys also believes traceability is getting more entrenched in the crop sector.

As a farmer, he grows some of his crops under contracts that let him apply some sprays, but not others, based on terms laid out by the buyer. He signs those contracts and abides by the conditions, which represents a form of traceability.

But as a seed company executive and former CSTA director and president, Denys is concerned with the certified seed issue, especially in the cereals sector where bin-run usage is still a huge issue.

“It’s a bigger problem out west than it

Certified seed has been a starting point for traceability, particularly in IP soybeans and genetically modified corn and soybeans for nearly 20 years.

Soybean Guide, October 2014

Contracts for edible beans specify which chemical sprays can be used, pointing to another level of traceability in the row-crops sector.

“The consumer in Japan views Canada as big and the wilderness and fresh water, and everything that’s good about nature ‘is’ Canada.”

is here,” says Denys, who farms just outside of Chatham, Ont. “What’s interesting about it is the broader debate with western cereals, where you’re sitting at less than 20 per cent in certified seed.”

Denys believes farmers need to adopt certified seed in order to continue getting the kind of new genetics that will help keep Canada one of the world’s best and most competitive wheat growers.

But he also sees implications for traceability. “We’re at a fork in the road, and some — like myself — are saying, if you don’t have certified seed, you’re never going to be able to have traceability, because you cannot guarantee that you’re dealing with a homogenous source.”

— Martin Vanderloo, Huron Commodities

Traceability and sustainability From David Sparling’s vantage point, traceability is inevitable. It’s happening in other countries, says Sparling, professor of agri-food innovation at the Ivey Business School at Western University in London, Ont. Sparling says it’s only a matter of time before it migrates into North America and Canada on a more visible, definable level.

“What’s amazing to me is how slowly it’s coming,” says Sparling. “I worked on the Can-Trace project in 2003, and we’re still asking many of the same questions as we were then. And it’s partly because with the exception of the food safety driver and some of the economic drivers Soybean Guide, October 2014

around things such as free range and organic, there just hasn’t been enough of the need, and certainly not enough of a recognition of the value in traceability.”

The greatest potential Sparling sees for traceability is the North American “mimicking” of what’s happening in Europe and other regions. Markets for free range and organic often have a secondary impact on retailers, encouraging other stores to push traceability through the value chain.

In that scenario, Sparling believes there’s more urgency on the part of retailers to implement a traceability system than any pressure from consumers. The first is regulatory; there can be food safety reasons for putting traceability systems in place. In some sectors, he says, there has been significant progress, but not necessarily in crops, primarily because there aren’t large issues pertaining to food safety.

“The other motivator that we’re seeing deals with the question, ‘Can you add value through traceability?’” says Sparling. He cites IP soybeans as a first step, not a complete trace-back to the farm, but definitely a process to establish assurance and consistency. “So there’s been a market value piece to it, but with most of the row crops, there hasn’t been either an economic or a food safety motivation to move ahead with this.”

Where traceability could see more application to row crops may be in the

rapid evolution of sustainability, and being able to prove that a crop was produced according to a certain set of criteria, and that it was produced for instance to be carbon neutral.

Precision pays One game changer could be precision ag technology. Variable-rate systems, data management, and precision planting could all help growers derive value from information that many are already gleaning from their operations.

“To me, this is where the sustainability piece will come,” says Sparling.

“They’ll start to collect more information on what they use in terms of inputs, where they put it, and that’s just good management practices for field crops.

But it also provides a lot of the information that you need to be able to do much more full-chain traceability.”

In more ways than one, that’s good news for farmers, Sparling argues. In effect, he says, traceability will work hand in glove with efforts to become a more productive, more profitable farmer.

Says Sparling: “One of the things that gets missed in the whole traceability equation is that if you actually know where all of your material is all the time, and track it all the way through the chain, you should be able to achieve higher quality and efficiency.” SG 17

Soybean guide

Photo courtesy of Adam Varenhorst, Purdue University

Determining whether bees affect soybean yield is not only complex, but it could take years of research.

Buzzing

about bean yields

S

ome call it serendipity. Others say it merely proves the old adage that you make your own luck. Either way, some of the world’s biggest scientific breakthroughs have come when the researcher was actually looking for something else. Think penicillin, for example.

Matt O’Neal is more a member of the group that says it all boils down to hard work, and knowing how to make use of what you find. As an assistant professor of entomology at Iowa State University, O’Neal has been involved in several studies on bees and their impact on, unexpectedly, soybeans.

Despite the long-held view that soybeans are self-pollinating and therefore don’t need an insect to move their pollen about, O’Neal has been looking at conservation practices using prairie plants and other species that could entice beneficial insects.

The work started with searching for beneficials to combat soybean aphids.

Now, it’s directly focused on what impact bees might have on soybean yield.

But it isn’t an overnight project. It started a decade ago, and continues today.

“I started at Iowa State in 2004, and I was hired during an outbreak of the soybean aphid,” says O’Neal, adding that some of his early work examined landscape factors that could help researchers

18

understand where and when an aphid outbreak was occurring.

“One thing we learned in the first five years — from 2004 to 2009 — was that the landscape around soybean fields helped predict the risk for a soybean field. And what we learned over the course of several studies was that there’s a community of beneficial insects — predators — that will feed on the soybean aphid, and if given the chance, under certain conditions, can prevent outbreaks from occurring.”

At the same time, another group of researchers were taking a comprehensive look at incorporating strips or small areas of prairie plants into a watershed or catchment area that grows corn and soybeans.

Their goal was to see if those strips would reduce the amount of sediment loss coming off those fields, and reduce the amount of nitrate and phosphorus moving out of those fields as well.

A second question would then be, if you have these prairie strips, would you see more beneficial insects in them, and would their benefits spill over into adjacent crop fields?

Beneficial insects include pollinators such as bees, and some of the sampling techniques that O’Neal and his students used caught bees almost by accident.

The research is preliminary, but early results suggest that some bees might be good for soybean crops

By Ralph Pearce, CG Production Editor Mistaken identity It’s worth noting that nearly two years ago, there was a citation in a U.S. farm publication of a similar Canadian study on the effect of honeybees and higher yields on food-grade soybeans. But O’Neal says that the particular citation was incorrect, and that the work was actually done in Brazil.

In those trials, researchers set up beeproof cages in large soybean fields during flowering, says O’Neal. The team then compared yields from plants that were caged against plants that were visited by bees. They found about a six per cent increase in yield when the bees had access to the flowering soybeans.

These bees would be a combination of several species, not limited to honeybees.

So in another part of the field, they placed eight honeybee hives and they repeated the experiment.

With the honeybees nearby, the soybean yield was 18 per cent higher.

On the surface, the take-home message would be that soybean yields Continued on page 20

Soybean Guide, October 2014

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Continued from page 18

respond to bees, and that when researchers controlled for the type of bee, they could get a different yield response.

But there was a problem, O’Neal says, because the research wasn’t adequately replicated. There was one large field and the “replications” were the caged plants, not another field test conducted under the same specifications.

O’Neal says he’d regard that study as successful in indicating some evidence to support the hypothesis that bees can improve the yield of soybeans. But it’s mainly a starting point, not the basis for making specific changes in farm management practices.

“How do you tell a farmer in Iowa how to take advantage of that?” asks O’Neal.

“How many honeybee hives would it take, and for how long should the plants be exposed? Think about science breaking down between biological and management when it comes to agriculture. Biological studies show what’s possible, but when it comes to management, you have all kinds of questions how. It’s kind of not yet ready for prime time to think about how we would incorporate honeybees into soybean production.”

In the last three years, O’Neal has been studying the community of bees that visits soybeans and corn, and honeybees are there, but they’re not the most abundant bee in the soybean-growing region in North America. In fact, O’Neal has seen a community that encompasses at least 40 or more bee species. And not all of them forage on flowers.

Even so, when O’Neal and his colleagues focused their attention on the most abundant bee species, anywhere from 20 to 30 per cent had soybean pollen on them.

That suggests that bees do use soybeans as a food source, even though there are probably forage sources out there that they prefer. It seems that if better food isn’t readily available, they’ll go with what they can get.

“There can be, at times, a lot of soybean flowers available to bees, and not just honeybees. There are probably some species that can do well in those landscapes,” says O’Neal. “But that’s a huge black box that nobody knows much about, and we’ve only scratched the surface. When we look at the bees that we capture, a subset of them has corn and soybean pollen on it, and that gives us some insight that, yes, these bees are probably there for the corn and soybeans.”

Not all the reaction to his research was positive, but as he has continued to pull 20

“Biological studies show what’s possible, but when it comes to management, you have all kinds of questions how.”

— Dr. Matt O’Neal, Iowa State University evidence together, more researchers have gotten involved, and now there is interest in Ohio, Kansas and Manitoba — even in China — for doing local research.

What’s interesting, especially in North America, is that they’re finding many of the same species of bees everywhere they look. In conducting the research in other regions, O’Neal learned that Manitoba has the greatest number of honeybees in its soybean fields, while Kansas has the most diverse community of bees.

Asked if the preliminary results indicated any sign of a yield bump in soybeans due to the presence of bees, O’Neal replies that the research wasn’t designed to do that. Instead, it would provide an understanding of the bee community and the best way to measure its abundance and diversity.

Indiana research Christian Krupke, associate professor of entomology at Purdue University is leading an effort among north-central entomologists focusing on which species of pollinators are present, and how far they fly into the field.

One of the perceptions about bees revealed in the recent debate concerning neonicotinoid-based seed treatments is the assumption that all bees are honeybees, which is not true. Determining whether they are a native species or if they are domesticated can create multiple layers in the research for both Krupke and O’Neal. If the bees are native, as O’Neal states, there are as many as 40 different potential species.

“There are many species of native pollinators that have been here since long before we got here, and are specialized on crops and flowers of different sizes and shapes,” says Krupke. “In many cases, they’re more efficient than honeybees because they’re tiny, they can get right into that flower, they can buzz their wings to pollinate and they’re far more adapted to certain plants.”

Yet little is known about these species.

Nor do researchers know how to raise them in large quantities. As well, it’s hard to determine where they are, and the kind of a nesting habitat they like.

The other problem is that most of them are solitary species, which makes it difficult to increase their numbers and use them for agriculture of any scale.

“If we go 100 metres, 200 or 500 metres into a field, the number of bees may drop dramatically, because that’s a long way to go into a crop that doesn’t offer a lot of resources to a bee,” says Krupke. “If they do have an impact, it may be restricted mainly to the edges of large fields, because they just can’t go far; they’re too small and there aren’t enough of them. If we don’t find any bees in our surveys that extend 500 metres into the field, then there’s the answer — they’re probably not affecting yield.”

Stretching the limits O’Neal believes there’s much more to the issue of bees and soybean yields, which is why he’s looking into the diversity created within a comprehensive management program. Working with other researchers as part of the STRIPs group — Science-based Trials of Row-crops Integrated with Prairies — he hopes to develop an overall approach that looks at the impacts of surface-water management, erosion control and prairie strips.

“The trick is, you’re looking for those efficiencies that you can build along similar lines,” say O’Neal. “For me, if I had a menu of practices and I was trying to select ones that are most important for pollinator conservation, habitat and improved forages would be at the top. Below that would be reducing the exposure to pesticides, and below that cover crops.”

There is definitely a soil-health component to growing cover crops, but O’Neal suggests it may be minimal advantage to conserving bees. Cover crops scavenge residual nutrients and they might provide a little microclimate that’s better than bare soil for ground-nesting bees, but in the end, the cover crop will be “burned down” or tilled.

As for incorporating prairie strips on a farm, the challenge is to prove there’s a payback for farmers. Right now, the STRIPs group has some 20 farmers interested in taking part in this research.

However, U.S. farmers also have access to local, state and federal programs, including the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) that can help offset the value of production being set aside for the prairie strips. In Canada, a similar opportunity isn’t as readily or widely available. SG Soybean Guide, October 2014

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Soybean guide

A look back at thicker soy stands

S

ometimes it’s best to take a quick look in the rear-view mirror before considering where to go next. In farming, of course, it isn’t that simple.

The weather next year will never be exactly the same as it was this year, and pest and disease pressures will vary too.

Still, it’s essential to look for lessons, and if the 2014 growing season has taught farmers, retailers and extension personnel anything, it’s that planting conditions and cool summer weather can combine in the worst ways.

In turn, that means the big lesson this year is all about the risk of lower seed populations.

Seeding rates Seeding rates have been a hot topic for the past three to five years. Then, with a drop in soybean prices in the forecasts last spring, many growers shaved their rates in order to cut their production costs.

Yet cutting your seeding rate isn’t for the faint of heart, and Horst Bohner for one isn’t a strong advocate of the practice.

Bohner understands the theory — beans are genetically good at compensating for low populations — and under ideal conditions, he says, it’s always good to keep an open mind about basic practices like populations.

But Bohner, soybean specialist for the Ontario agriculture ministry says this year, conditions weren’t at all ideal in most fields.

“You can solve a lot of agronomic problems by simply increasing the seeding rate or keeping it at a relatively high rate,” says Bohner. “An acre of land needs a certain minimum number of plants for maximum yields. If you fall below that, you will give up yield.

“By keeping seeding rates reasonably high,” Bohner explains, “you increase the chances of an acceptable stand. Problems associated with soil crusting, poor depth control, excess corn residue, insect feeding or a little bit of phytophthora are reduced by putting down enough seed.”

Yes, he adds, under ideal conditions

22

and a long growing season, and by selecting the best tall and bushy variety for a specific zone or field, it’s possible for a grower to get away with a lower plant density.

“But this 2014 growing season is a perfect example of why it doesn’t always work,” says Bohner. “We had problems with plant stands, and with pod-set per plant.

“What we care about is the number of seeds per acre and the size of the seed. We don’t care about how many plants you have out there, but if every plant can only bear so much in a given year…”

So when planting rates go down, each of the plants is responsible for an even larger share of the overall yield, and there are also fewer plants to fight against any of the challenges that are almost bound to come up.

In other words, you’re heading into “whatever can go wrong will go wrong” territory.

Of course, fields can be overplanted too, especially where there’s a history of white mould, or when overplanting results in lodging.

Is 2014 proof that we’ve been going in the wrong direction with soybean populations?

By Ralph Pearce, CG Production Editor “Within management strategies,” Bohner says, “there is a huge range, and there are producers who make lower populations work for them, and good on them — why not?”

But, he adds, just because it can sometimes happen doesn’t mean that it’s always a good idea: “It certainly takes a higher level of management when you get into those more unique strategies.”

The long and the short of it is that the growing season, even in extreme southwestern Ontario, is relatively short, and the goal is to capture as much sunlight as possible.

“If you go to wider rows and reduced populations, you just don’t have the leaf area to catch the sunlight,” Bohner says.

Diseases — East and West As might be expected, sclerotinia (white mould) has been a problem both in eastern Ontario and in the southwest this year. For Clare Kinlin, sclerotinia is a constant issue in the east, one that was so bad in 2014 that in some fields he could see it from the highway.

In a growing season such as 2014, bumping seeding rates can overcome poor stands, planting issues, even poor pod-set.

Soybean Guide, October 2014

White mould was a definite challenge, both in eastern and southwestern Ontario.

“You can solve a lot of agronomic problems by simply increasing the seeding rate.”

— Horst Bohner, OMAFRA Unfortunately, Kinlin says, the disease isn’t likely to go away any time soon, given the trend in rotation practices.

“We’re growing more and more soybeans every year,” says Kinlin, sales manager of the crop division for MacEwen Agricentre, based in Maxville, Ont. “We’re really starting to turn into a corn-soybean rotation.”

More beans in the rotation mean more pressure from white mould, especially in a moderately wet climate like eastern Ontario.

On the positive side though, growers are hungry for more information on how to overcome or compensate for the disease.

“They’re saying, ‘OK, we’re trying to get a tonne and a half out of these fields, so how do we get these beans to yield?’” says Kinlin. “There’s a real desire to get beans to yield, and the really frustrating part with soybeans is trying to get them to respond to anything.”

Plant populations in the region are generally 180,000 to 200,000, which was a slight increase for 2014. There’s also a greater tendency to move to 30-inch rows, a practice that’s gaining ground as more growers get rid of their drills and switch soybeans to their planters. The move is giving them better everything — better depth control, better emergence, better stands and less white mould.

Soybean Guide, October 2014

“White mould is the big one, and it’s bad, it’s here to stay and that’s nothing new,” says Kinlin, setting his sights on 2015.

Asked if there’s anything to combat sclerotinia going forward into 2015, Kinlin says it all comes down to one thing: “Residue management — that first pass for next year is the combine this fall.

We need to do a better job of (corn) residue management, in terms of spreading it or working it in uniformly and consistently. With 200-bushel corn and that leaves a lot of residue, and beans struggle with that.”

Six-hours’ drive west and south, Dave Curry faced the same problem in 2014. As agronomist with Parkland Farms near Sarnia, Ont., Curry oversees the operation of several thousand acres each year. And like Kinlin, he’s seen more white mould than he’d care to, although he would have expected to see more, given the cooler and wetter growing conditions this past year.

“We’re usually pretty good about planting the right variety in a field that we know has a history of white mould, where we tried to make sure we were going in with wider rows and actually planting with lower seeding populations, and planting a variety with a good genetic resistance to it,” says Curry.

Still, Parkland’s soybeans were largely planted during the last week of May and

early June this year, so the crop wasn’t as lush and the onset of white mould was slower. “There was the odd pocket,” Curry says, “but I didn’t come across as much as I would have expected.”

Another sign of the cool, wet weather that Curry had to deal with was a higherthan-usual incidence of rhizoctonia on the wet spots that had some compaction issues in heavier clay. Despite the wetterthan-normal conditions, even in spite of the later planting, phytophthora wasn’t a problem, and sudden death syndrome was only an issue later in the season.

Curry was busy taking notes late in August, and mapping out the cropping plan for 2015, and perhaps eyeing 2016 in an effort to stem the spread of all of the diseases he saw.

“With certain diseases they’re going to last a lot longer,” says Curry, noting that the sclerotia associated with white mould can remain viable in the soil for years.

“It’s not a matter of if you rotate away for a couple of years, it’s gone,” Curry says.

“We need to plan it longer term so that when we go back in with soybeans, we make the proper management decisions.”

Curry adds that it’d be great to be able to break the disease cycle completely by putting in a forage crop for three or four years, but for most growers, including his operation, that’s not an option. Many farmers he knows are moving to tighter rotations, although he’s maintaining his three-crop plan because he says he gets upwards of a five-bushel-per-acre yield rotational bump on his soybeans.

Curry also tries to manage the farming operation with very little tillage, yet he acknowledges there’s the temptation to bury the sclerotia associated with white mould, even to reduce the pressure for a year. But research from the U.S. suggests that given the long life of those mould spores, it’s possible that when you try to bury one year’s sclerotia, you bring other, still viable sclerotia back up to the surface.

Curry’s other concern is fungicide resistance. According to reports from the U.S., populations of two diseases, frogeye leaf spot and rhizoctonia have been confirmed to be resistant to strobilurins, and he’s watching that situation.

It’s still a long way from his Ontario ground, but Curry says that he knows of sugar beet farms in Lambton County and in Michigan that have run out of answers to the Cercospora resistance problem.

And he wonders if its spread into soybeans closer to home isn’t just a matter of time. SG 23

Soybean guide

Biotech is ready to turn 20, but still hasn’t won the public relations battle

By Ralph Pearce, CG Production Editor

“Science and safety still have to be — and must remain — our bedrock.”

— Chris Davison, Syngenta Canada

Two decades later

B

iotechnology has been part of the farm landscape for nearly a generation, becoming a staple of agriculture in North America and spreading around the world. Yet there is still a vocal minority of non-farmers who are opposed to biotechnology. And it can seem like their number and their power is growing.

Now the question is, are farmers inevitably going to be pushed backwards in time, losing their biotech gains at the very moment when the world needs more grains and oilseeds than ever?

A glance at the headlines seems to justify the concern. Anti-GM labelling campaigns, angry mothers lobbying Washington, China rejecting GM corn… such reports used to seem easy to dismiss as fringe, sensationalist or mercenary, but they’re not so easy to ignore anymore. Today, they’re in mainstream media, and they’re shaping the ground that farmers have to work in.

Need to stay positive Amid the negativity, there are good news stories too. The consensus in the agri-food industry, for instance, is that it

Advances in biotechnology have provided farmers, big or small, with access to elite hybrids and varieties.

isn’t a majority of consumers who are opposed to biotech. It’s still the vocal minority.

And the consensus is also that the majority can still be reached with relevant, factual and balanced information.

“What we are faced with is the fact that very few Canadians have the same connection to agriculture as they once had,” says Nadine Sisk, vice-president of communications and member services with CropLife Canada. “Our research indicates that people don’t even understand the impact of weeds in a field — so they don’t understand that farmers want to keep weeds out of their fields.”

For Sisk, educating consumers who know so little about the farm is now a complex, long-term process.

From Syngenta Canada’s perspective, there are two messages that agriculture must succeed in getting across, says Chris Davison, head of corporate affairs for the company. First is that agricultural biotech can and does improve productivity. In other words, if farmers are to have any chance of feeding our surging global population, they need biotech.

“Secondly, I would say that science and safety still have to be our bedrock,” says Davison. “We have a track record with biotechnology that supports that.”

There are other messages too, Davison agrees. “But we have to start with those.”

In other words, the discussion starts with agreement that we must feed the world, and also with the agreement that science is our best guide to ensuring we do it safely and wisely.

Such a conversation gets away from a polarized “either/or” start, Davison says, and it reframes the discussion in a spirit of dialogue and collaboration.

Farming came first Trish Jordan, public and industry affairs director with Monsanto Canada, concedes that in the early days of biotechnology, the agribusiness sector overlooked the consumer.

“That was probably a mistake on our part,” Jordan now says. “We were so busy Continued on page 26

24

Soybean Guide, October 2014

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focusing on our customer, who is the farmer, that we didn’t realize that the whole issue of food and farming and where your food comes from and how it’s grown was something that consumers wanted to know.”

Now, says Jordan, companies like Monsanto see the need to branch those discussions out, talking not only to farmers and shareholders, “but also talking to consumers like mothers, millennials, the food-minded — because that’s where these discussions are happening.”

When agriculture let the opportunity slip, other groups jumped in and started claiming that space. The result has been a mass of biotech misinformation.

Now, farmers and industry are tackling that challenge, often hand in hand.

And they have made a crucial decision.

That is to focus on those who are willing to listen, instead of trying to convert those who never will.

They are also getting more scientific.

Surveys in 2012 and 2014 by the U.S.based research group Sullivan Higdon & Sink found friends and family are more trusted as sources of information about f o o d p r o d u c t i o n t h a n t h e U. S .

Department of Agriculture (USDA) or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

In the 2012 survey, those numbers were 66 per cent for friends and family,

“Very few Canadians have the same connection to agriculture as they once had.”

— Nadine Sisk, CropLife Canada 59 per cent for the USDA and 57 per cent for the FDA. By 2014, each of those numbers had fallen, (57, 52, and 51 per cent respectively) but the relative rankings still held, with one exception.

Farmers and ranchers held 53 per cent of trust in both years.

That sparks a comment from Jordan.

Farmers have been urging the biotech companies to “do something” to help them. “But we also say, ‘Growers, you’re the most credible source of information available out there,’” says Jordan.

“You have to share your story, you have to partner with us, you have to find ways to get creative, you have to start blogging, you have to invite people out to your farm, you have to get out and talk to students in the classroom,” Jordan says. “And there’s a ton of that going on.”

But not enough.

It’s one more reason why there’s a growing consensus that agriculture needs to do more.

“The vast majority of people who have questions about GMOs want to know — they’re curious, ” Sisk says, but then adds, “they find it difficult to know where to go for information.”

Continues Sisk: “Once we start answering those questions and explain-

One of the standards of biotech innovation is that it has improved productivity, and continues to do so today.

For more info http://whybiotech.ca/resources/SpeakUpMessages.pdf www.croplife.ca 26

ing to them not only the reasons why plant biotech exists, but the potential for this technology to deliver benefits that are good for the world, people get much more comfortable, and are much more willing to accept the rationale for the technology and the fact that it’s regulated, it’s researched and it’s safe.”

Sisk says she has seen it work, seeing participants in focus groups who start out opposed to the technology change their views once biotech’s potential to reduce hunger or to prevent allergies or provide food-health benefits are outlined.

Davison says it helps too when consumers see why farmers opt for biotech.

“We’ve seen (biotech crops) go from in the neighbourhood of 1.7 million hectares (4.2 million acres) globally in 1996 to more than 175 million hectares (432 million acres) in 2013,” he points out.

“That’s been driven by farmer use of this technology.”

At the same time, adds Davison, there’s increasing public interest in where food comes from. Farmers have demonstrated their commitment to the technology, and agribusiness continues to support the technology; now comes the part where the commitment involves those who are interested in learning more about food production as well.

Says Davison: “That’s part of the stewardship of the technology.”

Sisk says people who aren’t communicators or may not have a stronger scie n ce b a c k g ro u n d c a n c h e c k o u t “Confident Conversations.” It’s an initiative designed to help such people have those conversations at the hockey arena or at a community barbecue. Sisk also points to individuals such as Mark Lynas, Hilary Clinton and Neil deGrasse Tyson as champions of genetic modification and GMOs, and that more has to be done to find such influential supporters.

As an advocacy group, there’s also the Council for Biotechnology Information and its Speak-Up Group, which is a collective of academics, media, teachers, farmers and dietitians for sharing insights on how to get the biotech across.

There’s no final report that comes out of these meetings, and no report card, says Jordan. They’re just a dedicated group of individuals pledged to stop the misinformation when they see it. SG Soybean Guide, October 2014

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