Canola Pulse & Special Crops Guide

NOVEMBER 2011

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AT THE MARGINS Argentine hybrid canola varieties have most of the acres — so why are researchers still looking at Polish varieties and new mustard-based variants?

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE VRT: HOPE OR HYPE? .....................PG. 14 LAYING SIEGE ................................PG. 20 WEED CONTROL AND CORN .............PG. 24

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CANOLA, PULSE & SPECIAL CROPS GUIDE

NOVEMBER 2011

CONTENTS

IN EVERY ISSUE

EDITOR’S NOTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 So long, and see you soon in a new format.

CROP CLIPPINGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Industry briefs from around the region.

MARKETS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 So what will a post-CWB world actually mean to your grain-marketing activities?

FEATURES

10 At the margins

Some small players in the canola genetics game offer intriguing possibilities.

12 Mixed signals for canaryseed industry

Your biggest customer may be out of the market, but that’s OK — there already appears to be a shortage.

14 VRT: Hope or hype?

Precision ag certainly looks like the next big thing.

But are we talking next season or next generation?

18 Mix it up

Rotation is still important but a new strategy might be even better for preventing weed resistance.

Welcome to all new subscribers.

We hope you enjoy each issue and tell your friends and neighbours if you do. Comments or suggestions?

Call us at 1-800-665-1362

20 Laying siege

Cracks are starting to appear in the walls of Castle Europe — but when will they finally come tumbling down?

24 The future of weed control in corn Our commitment to your privacy At Farm Business Communications we have a firm commitment to protecting your privacy and security as our customer. Farm Business Communications will only collect personal information if it is required for the proper functioning of our business. As part of our commitment to enhance customer service, we may share this personal information with other strategic business partners.For more information regarding our Customer Information Privacy Policy, write to: Information Protection Officer, Farm Business Communications, 1666 Dublin Ave., Winnipeg, MB R3H 0H1.

Occasionally we make our list of subscribers available to other reputable firms whose products and services might be of interest to you. If you would prefer not to receive such offers, please contact us at the address in the preceding paragraph, or call 1-800-665-1362.

Savvy Farmer’s Warren Libby looks at what’s in store in coming seasons.

26 On a roll

Zero till is a chemical question right now, but there might be an iron-based answer too.

29 For real

Not only is there plenty of existing demand for Nexera canola — it’s also growing fast, says a major customer.

The editor

Editor’s note

Goodbye, hello

C

hanges in magazines are usually incremental — you might fiddle a bit with the design here and there and maybe switch out columnists occasionally, for example, just to keep things from getting too stale.

Much rarer are the big seismic changes — but that’s exactly what we’re about to undergo here at C anola , P ulse and S pecial C rops Guide. In fact, right now you’re holding the very last issue of this title that’s going to be produced for the foreseeable future.

It’s not an ending though, so much as a new beginning for this title and our related publication, Wheat, Oats and Barley, which I’ve also edited for the past several years.

CPSC Guide began its run in the early 1990s as a spin-off of Country Guide to reflect the explosive growth of the canola industry. In subsequent years its mandate was broadened to include pulse and specialty crops.

Wheat, Oats and Barley came along a few years later with a mandate to cover the cereal crop industry.

But something has become more and more apparent — this distinction between two separate groups of growers is largely a false one. Perhaps there are a handful of them out there, but none of the farmers I know personally grow exclusively cereal or broadleaf crops.

Instead they grow a carefully managed rotation that at some point or another has included pretty much all of the crops that can be grown in the region.

Add to that trend the reality that one of the few things that distinguishes the cereals sector — the single-desk marketing system — is about to disappear and what emerges is a clear-cut case for change in the way we cover these crops and the issues the farmers that produce them face.

In order to meet these new challenges, Farm Business Communications and our staff members have spent a significant amount of time recently discussing, debating and perhaps even outright arguing (though always politely) about what the right course of action is. Eventually what emerged was the case for a single title that absorbed the editorial investment 4

CANOLA, PULSE & SPECIAL CROPS GUIDE

of both existing publications into a single title which would be a “one stop shop” for Prairie grain growers.

The next step, of course, was the discussion of a new title that reflected this reality. Should it be something bold and cutting edge? Or something a bit more subdued that wouldn’t distract from what we’re aiming to be a solid editorial package that will speak for itself?

Like the magazine that will result from this effort, we quickly realized that the title probably couldn’t be all things to all people. What we did decide, after much discussion, was that the title should reflect some of the proud tradition from which it comes, and in particular the pedigree through Country Guide. Therefore we ultimately reached the consensus that the new title would be Crops Guide, a free-standing regular publication for all crops produced in the Prairie region.

Beginning early in the new year, you’ll see the first issue of this new title appear in your mailbox. We hope you’ll read it carefully, benefit from the editorial content and that we will eventually earn the right to be considered one of the best farm publications that’s available anywhere.

That won’t be an easy task — after all, our readers are experts in the field we’re trying to cover. It means we’ll need to stay on our toes, work very hard and strive to make every word and photo that appears in Crops Guide meaningful and interesting to you.

I confess it’s not without a few mixed feelings that I say goodbye to our readers as the editor of CPSC Guide in this issue. However, at the same time I’m looking forward to the challenge of beginning something new and establishing a new relationship with our readers.

As they say, when a door closes, a window opens. We’re hoping that window will provide you with greater insight into the forces that shape your business and offer you the knowledge you’ll need to plan the next crop — and beyond.

So goodbye for now, and I’m looking forward to saying hello again in the very near future.

Gord Gilmour

gord.gilmour@fbcpublishing.com

EDITORIAL STAFF Editor:

Gord Gilmour (204) 944-5756 Fax (204) 944-5416 gord.gilmour@fbcpublishing.com

EDITORIAL OFFiCES Head:

1666 Dublin Avenue Winnipeg, MB R3H 0H1 (204) 944-5767 Fax (204) 944-5416

REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS Brad Brinkworth Richard Kamchen

David Drozd Gord Leathers

Ron Friesen Warren Libby

ADVERTISING SALES Cory Bourdeaud’hui (204) 954-1414 Cell (204) 227-5274 Email: cory@fbcpublishing.com Kelly Dundas (519) 619-2140 Email: kelly.dundas@fbcpublishing.com Head office: 1666 Dublin Avenue Winnipeg, MB R3H 0H1 (204) 944-5765 Fax (204) 944-5562 Advertising Services Co-ordinator: Ashlee Espenell (204) 944-5758 Fax (204) 944-5562 Email: ads@fbcpublishing.com Publisher: Bob Willcox Email: bob.willcox@fbcpublishing.com Associate Publisher/Editorial Director: John Morriss Email: john.morriss@fbcpublishing.com Production Director: Shawna Gibson Email: shawna@fbcpublishing.com Assistant Production Manager: Farrah Wilson Email: farrah@fbcpublishing.com Director of Sales and Circulation: Lynda Tityk Email: lynda.tityk@fbcpublishing.com Circulation Manager: Heather Anderson Email: heather@fbcpublishing.com Designer: Jenelle Jensen Contents of this publication are copyrighted and may be reproduced only with the permission of the editor.

Canola, Pulse & Special Crops Guide , incorporating the Nor’West Farmer and Farm & Home, is published by Farm Business Communications. Head office: Winnipeg, Manitoba. Printed by Transcontinental LGMC. Canola, Pulse & Special Crops Guide is published four times a year (February, March, October/November and December/ January) by Farm Business Communications.

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PRINTED IN CANADA Canola, Pulse & Special Crops Guide is printed with linseed oil-based inks Vol. 19, No. 4

Internet address: www.agcanada.com The editors and journalists who write, contribute and provide opinions to Canola, Pulse & Special Crops Guide and Farm Business Communications attempt to provide accurate and useful opinions, information and analysis. However, the editors, journalists, Canola, Pulse & Special Crops Guide and Farm Business Communications, cannot and do not guarantee the accuracy of the information contained in this publication and the editors as well as Canola, Pulse & Special Crops Guide and Farm Business Communications assume no responsibility for any actions or decisions taken by any reader for this publication based on any and all information provided.

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WINTER PULSES GIVE FARMERS ANOTHER OPTION

G RAINEWS field editor Lee Hart reports a growing interest in a new system that sees pulse crops planted in the fall, especially in light of difficult spring seeding conditions in recent years.

During an afternoon Crop Walk at Lethbridge in early June, about a dozen southern Alberta farmers had a look at field trials with winter crops being conducted by Farming Smarter (the new name for the Southern Applied Research Association) and Alberta Agriculture.

Both organizations have been look-

ing at the potential of winter pulse crops for the past few years. Spokesmen for both organizations say they have been impressed with performance of both winter pea and lentil varieties.

Ken Coles, research manager for Farming Smarter, says they’ve only had about three years of field trials, but winter lentils, seeded around September 15, have shown excellent winter survival in southern Alberta and have outyielded plots of spring-seeded varieties.

Similarly, winter peas, seeded in September have performed well with yields 50 per cent higher than springseeded varieties.

Alberta Agriculture research scientist Ross McKenzie says they have seen reasonably good success with both winter peas and lentils at research trials at Bow Island, Brooks, Lethbridge and Lacombe. But it appears soil temperatures are just too cold at Edmonton to make current varieties viable in that area.

Last year, for example, winter peas at Brooks yielded about 80 bushels per acre, which was considerably higher than spring-seeded varieties.

The key to the success of winter pulse crops obviously hinges on winter survival. Both peas and lentils can

SMALL MANITOBA SUNFLOWER CROP FACING EXPORT COMPETITION The size and quality of Manitoba’s sunflower crop is still very much up in the air, but the lack of acres planted this spring will keep supplies on the tight side and should underpin the domestic market.

Manitoba accounts for nearly all of Canada’s sunflower production, and the provincial crop is currently estimated at only 16,400 tonnes by

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CANOLA, PULSE & SPECIAL CROPS GUIDE

Statistics Canada, which compares with 67,500 tonnes a year ago. Wet conditions in the spring were said to have limited how many acres of the long season crop were able to go in the ground.

Widespread frost the morning of Sept. 14 and 15 likely caused only minimal damage to the few sunflower fields in the province, many crops were thought to be quite mature.

From a marketing standpoint, prices in southern Manitoba are strong at 35 cents per pound for confectionery and up to 40 cents per pound for oilseed sunflowers, according to industry participants. While the spread between the two varieties typically favours confectionery seed, the relative tightness in the oilseed market was accounting for the relative strength there.

NOVEMBER 2011

handle winter soil temperatures as low as minus five degrees Celsius, but survival is limited or doubtful if temperatures reach minus eight to minus 10 C. McKenzie says even though the 2010-2011 winter seemed long and cold, the average winter soil temperature monitored at Lethbridge was in the minus four to five C range.

Syngenta’s early shot falls short in biotech corn suit

Grain handling giant Bunge won’t have to accept a type of biotech corn at its elevators while the corn’s developer prepares to take the handler to court.

Bunge North America reported recently that a ruling from a U.S. Federal District Court denies Syngenta Seeds’ request for a preliminary injunction in the suit it filed against Bunge in August.

The court’s ruling “is consistent with and validates Bunge’s decision to reject (Syngenta’s) Agrisure Viptera corn at all of our locations as a legitimate and reasonable business decision,” Bunge said in a statement.

Bunge quoted the court’s ruling as saying the public interest would be better served in “fostering export markets for U.S. corn, in allowing business to make legitimate business decisions, and in allocating the risk of commercialization of a new transgenic corn trait upon the party that commercialized the trait.”

Bunge said it doesn’t expect the court’s final decision to vary from the preliminary decision and believes the court “will ultimately confirm its ruling that Syngenta’s case is without merit.”

Syngenta alleged in August that Bunge had singled out its insectresistant Viptera corn, along with a type of soybean from DuPont’s Pioneer Hi-Bred seed business. Bunge said its elevators couldn’t accept the crops because they don’t have necessary international approvals from major export destinations.

Bunge’s action is illegal, Syngenta alleged in its suit, noting Viptera corn already has approvals for export to “major” export destinations, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, Korea and Taiwan.

But the corn does not yet have approval for China, which has been increasing its purchases of U.S. grain.

Syngenta has said it expects China to accept the Viptera trait package early next year.

November 2011

Genome shows path from hempseed to weed A team of Canadian researchers say they’ve cracked the genome of the plant that gives us both industrial hemp fibre and a burgeoning black-market grow ops sector.

The crop, Cannabis sativa, depending on the strain, is known for its industrial or illicit recreational uses.

One genetic switch is likely responsible for the production of THCA (tetrahydrocannabinolic acid), the precursor of the active ingredient in marijuana, plant biochemist Jon Page of the University of Saskatchewan said in a recent media release.

The cross-country team compared Purple Kush, a “potent” marijuana variety, with the Finola hemp variety grown for seed production. Hemp lacks THCA, but does contain a non-psychoactive substance, cannabidiolic acid (CBDA).

“Detailed analysis of the two genomes suggests that domestication, cultivation, and breeding of marijuana strains has caused the loss of the enzyme (CBDA synthase), which would otherwise compete for the metabolites used as starting material in THCA production,” project co-leader Tim Hughes, a professor at the Terrence Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research at the University of Toronto, said in the same release.

“The transcriptome analysis showed that the THCA synthase gene, an essential enzyme in THCA production, is turned on in marijuana, but switched off in hemp,” Page said.

Put simply, over thousands of years of cultivation, hemp growers selectively bred Cannabis sativa into two distinct strains: one for fibre and seed, the other for medicinal use.

Crops such as rice and corn have already seen their genomes mapped, but this marks the first such mapping for a medicinal plant, Page said. Marijuana has been used medicinally for more than 2,700 years, and continues to be explored for its pharmaceutical potential.

The researchers, whose work was published in the journal Genome Biology , said they expect sequencing the Cannabis sativagenome will help answer questions about the biology of the plant and encourage development of its various uses.

That would include development of high-producing industrial hemp plants, hemp seed varieties to produce high-quality edible oil, and strains for pharmaceutical production.

About 25,000 acres of the crop were sown in Canada in 2010, mostly in Manitoba, according to the Canadian Hemp Trade Alliance. Farmers must be licensed through Health Canada to grow hemp.

C A N O L A , p u l s e & s p e c i al c r o p s G UI D E

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11/11 - BCS11026

Canola

by Gord Leathers

At the margins Polish canola and mustard-based canola might not be the category killer Argentine varieties are — but they do offer some intriguing possibilities

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C A N O L A , P U L S E & S P E C I A L C R O P S G ui d e

I

f you farm in Western Canada, the likelihood you’re a canola producer is approaching 100 per cent these days.

It’s a crop that’s seemingly come from nowhere to capture an enormous amount of acres since its humble beginnings in the 1960s and ’70s.

And these days when we say “canola” everyone knows what you’re talking about. But back in the day, as they say, things weren’t so clear cut.

To begin with, it of course wasn’t always canola. It began life as rapeseed, an unfortunately-named plant that was used primarily as a machine lubricant and fuel source, not an edible food product. The issue was elevated levels of euricic acid and a pair of industrious breeders from the region quickly took up the challenge.

The modern canola crop was developed by either Keith Downey at the University of Saskatchewan, if you’re an Agro (emphatically NOT an Aggie) or Baldur Stefansson, if you’re an Icelander from Manitoba. Preference for the home team aside, the truth of course is that both were instrumental in its development.

Then in the early days, up until the 1990s, two separate subtypes of the new canola existed side-by-side. There were the Argentine varieties and the Polish varieties. In the field the differences were subtle — Argentine canola flowers were a pale yellow, Polish a deeper and richer hue. The Argentine varieties had looser collections of flowers, while the Polish blossoms were more tightly clustered.

It was at harvest that the differences really emerged, with the Argentine varieties clearly giving the best results season after season. They might have taken 95 days or so to maturity, versus the roughly 85 days of Polish canola, but their higher yield potential and greater oil yield made them the winner over time. Little surprise too.

This is a strain that serves us very well. Manageable and productive, the hybrid Argentine GM canola of today is the clear king of this crop. It regularly captures about 90 per cent of the canola acres and has no significant challengers for the crown.

Still, lurking on the periphery is the other 10 per cent. Polish canola, Oriental mustard or B. juncea and other forms of Brassica have their place within the fields of Western Canada and, with changing environmental conditions and markets, they may serve more important roles in the future. Polish canola, or Brassica rapa, is case in point.

“The acreage has been growing for a number of years now,” says Agriculture Canada research scientist and canola breeder Kevin Falk. “It used to be the dominant species in Western Canada in the ’70s but it was in the early ’90s when the switch to Argentine happened in a big way.”

Polish canola appeared in Shellbrook, Sask. in 1936 when one of the local farmers received a parcel of seed from a relative in the old country. He liked the early maturity and started selling the seed to his neighbours at the onset of the Second World War. It became an important source of rape-

N o v e m b er 2 0 1 1

seed oil during the war and became the dominant form of rapeseed until the early in the 1990s.

One of the principal reasons for the change to Argentine canola was herbicide tolerance. Once the herbicide resistant strains of Argentine became effective there was no commercial interest in developing the same traits in Polish. There are still some farmers growing Polish canola so it hasn’t completely disappeared. In fact, it has some really fine traits that are well worth preserving and pursuing according to Falk.

“First of all it matures early, typically within 80 to 85 days and that’s about two weeks earlier,” he said. “Napus (Argentine) is a cool-season crop but rapa (Polish) is heat and drought tolerant, and shatter tolerant and therefore can be straight combined.”

This is certainly important to a lot of famers in brown soil areas of Saskatchewan where they don’t grow Argentine as a matter of habit. With the possibility of warmer, drier summers on the Prairies a heat- and drought-tolerant plant may be perfect for emerging conditions. Even with our advancing knowledge of genetics and genomics we aren’t yet at the stage where we can completely reprogram Argentine canola to behave like Polish canola under hotter and drier conditions.

“They’ve tried it. We’ve done some work at AAFC over the last few years across Canada to look at different species related to canola, mustards and the like, and found out that not one species is everything to everyone,” Falk says. “I’m convinced that I’ll have a job for years to come because rapa matures early, it behaves differently with stress environments, it’s second only to the mustards for heat and drought tolerance. Whereas napus, I’ll be honest, I don’t see that (environmental tolerance) happening any time soon.”

Juncea

What about the mustards? It might seem counterintuitive, but these new edible oil varieties are considered canola too. That’s because canola refers to the oil, not the plant, and the oil they produce is indistinguishable from rapeseed-based canola.

If heat and drought tolerance are important in some of the drier areas of the Prairies now, it stands to reason they’ll become more so if warmer, drier summers are on their way. Viterra has been working with Brassica juncea, or juncea mustard, for a numNovember 2011

Polish canola hasn't completely disappeared. In fact, it has some really fine traits that are well worth preserving and pursuing ber of years. Monte Kesslering, vicepresident of seed and crop protection, explains that it can be a very good crop for brown soil zone farmers for exactly that reason.

“You hear a lot of talk about abiotic stress or resistance to heat, resistance to short-term drought, those type of characteristics are actually in juncea to begin with,” he says. “Similarly you have a lot of people trying to develop shattering resistance so straight-cutting napus is more feasible. Well juncea, by nature, has that resistance to the pods opening so it can be direct harvested.”

And straight-cutting canola really has become a holy grail of sorts, with more and more farms in the region only hanging onto a swather for their canola acres. A reliable system to straight cut these crops could capture a lot of acres in a hurry and it’s a clear advantage of both rapa and juncea canola. The fragile pods in Argentine canola are prone to shattering if the plants are shaken either by the wind or by a combine. Then your harvest winds up on the ground and, while this works well for canola’s wild ancestor, it’s a disaster for a farmer.

Having a plant that ripens without shattering saves the trouble of swathing so an entire operation is eliminated.

Juncea is also available in a herbicidetolerant variety.

“We launched the first Xceed or Clearfield varieties in 2007 so it works with a herbicide that’s fairly well adapted to Western Canada,” Kesslering says.

“Once that was done, the next challenge was to help the farmers who have come to expect the performance they see with hybrids. We’re actually at the stage where we’ll have some of the first experimental hybrids on farmers’ fields and we hope to have material ready for registration and launch in 2013.”

New polish varieties

Falk is also narrowing the yield gap between rapa and napus and he’s doing this through the use of synthetics, a sort of mid-point between

open-pollinated and hybrid varieties.

At present it’s the only way to go with rapa since it can’t self pollinate, it will only outcross, making traditional hybridization a non-starter. He has three new strains of synthetic Polish canola that have just come onto the market.

“One is called Early One and that’s being commercialized and distributed by Mastin Seeds out of Sundre, Alberta. The other one is called Synergy and that’s distributed by SeCan, “he says. “The third one hasn’t been named yet but will be distributed by Mastin Seeds.”

There’s another species of brassica that Falk works with that may figure in drier areas in the future. About 60 per cent of his time is dedicated to developing Brassica carinata, or Ethiopian mustard, as a potential crop in Canada.

“A graduate student from Ethiopia, Getinet Alemaw, was working on it in the late 1980s and found it was well adapted to the heat and drought prone areas in Western Canada,” he says. “The brown soil zones where canola typically is not grown. I spent the first 10 years getting it to mature within a week of the Argentine canola.”

As the name suggests, this plant is from Ethiopia where it was cultivated as an oilseed crop and for the mild-flavoured leaf greens. The meal is very high in glucosinolates and oil in erucic acid, so while it’s not a desirable source of edible oil for the North American market it’s useful in industrial applications such as paints, plastics and biodiesel.

Falk is currently working with the Saskatchewan Mustard Development Commission under a government funded program to develop B. carinata into an industrial platform crop.

So while Argentine canola isn’t going anywhere, there are some interesting things beginning to appear at the periphery. But only time will tell if a new king of canola emerges from this work in the future. c C A N O L A , p u l s e & s p e c i al c r o p s G u i d e

11

Markets

Commodity News Service Canada

Mixed signals for canaryseed industry

S

trict Mexican restrictions on canaryseed imports that recently came into effect will likely limit Canadian exports to the country, until supplies in the normally major importer tighten and the issue is revisited, according to an official with the Canadian Special Crops Association.

Mexico is traditionally a customer for 25 per cent of Canada’s canaryseed exports, but a dispute over weed seed tolerance in shipments is making many Canadian exporters reluctant to deal with the country.

A transition period expired Aug. 15 with no agreement reached between the two countries, so Mexico went forward with imposing its own restrictions.

Currently, a shipment of canaryseed to Mexico must be certified as having zero weed seeds per kilogram when leaving Canada, with a tolerance of 15 seeds per kilogram on arrival. Under the transition period that tolerance had ranged from 100 down to 50 seeds.

“Fifteen is a very difficult standard to meet, although there are a few exporters who feel they can meet that,” said Carl Potts, director of market access and trade policy with the CSCA. While some Canadian exporters are still trying to meet the new requirements, the risk of being turned away at the border creates too much risk for many others.

Potts said the flow of canaryseed will slow down under these conditions, as Mexican buyers filled up on supplies before the new stricter requirements came into place.

Potts was hopeful that once those

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stocks are worked through, Mexican importers may put pressure on their government to loosen the restrictions, in order to make it easier to bring in more Canadian supplies.

Plant protection agencies from the two countries continue to be in contact, although Potts said there were no official negotiations currently.

Canaryseed bids currently top out at about 27 cents per pound in Western Canada, according to the latest Prairie Ag Hotwire report.

Tight supplies

But despite issues with Canada’s largest canaryseed customer, the small supply of canaryseed this year may not be able to meet other world exports, an industry official reports.

“There’s a whole lot of stuff going on with different facets people are trying to sort out,” said Kevin Hursh, executive director of the Canaryseed Development Commission of Saskatchewan.

Canadian exports to Mexico were brisk right until the recent standards changes, as concerned Mexican buyers snapped up canaryseed before the restrictions on quarantine weed seeds came to effect, said Hursh.

If the situation continues, with the new restrictions the export market would be still be very limited, he said.

Even given other importing countries such as Belgium, Brazil, Spain and Colombia, more trade to other countries would not increase exports as world demand is constant, he said.

Even with a flat export market for canaryseed outside of Mexico, the biggest factor in the market is the very tight supply of the crop.

Even with the Mexican issues, current canaryseed projections may not be able to meet the export demand, he said. Recent Statistics Canada numbers point to estimated production of 77,100 tonnes, plus Aug. 1 beginning stocks of 39,000, leaving the total supply of canaryseed at 116,100 tonnes, far below the five-year export range from 152,000 to 204,000 tonnes.

While it is a low StatsCan estimate, Hursh said, it could be hard to question those numbers considering some areas, including the Regina and Moose Jaw area where flooding issues could have hurt the canaryseed crop.

StatsCan’s 2010 canaryseed crop production numbers were revised higher because the balance sheets did not work out, otherwise the numbers would have shown negative supplies, said Hursh.

While he questions the overall handling of last year’s canaryseed crop numbers, Hursh said it could be the fault of producers for not reporting the numbers, so they could push the crop price up.

While the overall crop of western Canadian canaryseed is projected to be down for this year and exports to Canada’s largest exporter are in limbo, Hursh said it is difficult to predict if farmers will grow more or less canaryseed.

Market price signals are the largest contributing factor, pointing to StatsCan supply and demand figures which should push the current price of 26 cents a pound upward.

If the signal is right, farmers are likely to grow more canaryseed, and if not they will grow less of the crop. c N o v e m b er 2 0 1 1

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By Brad Brinkworth, Meristem Media

VRT: Hope or hype?

V

ariable rate technology (VRT) has spawned enough “Next Big Thing” headlines and excitement among the farm consulting community that a producer might think it’s rush time to become an early adopter and start reaping the rewards.

Not so fast, say two western Canadian applied researchers on the front line of assessing the potential of VRT. There’s no doubt the long-term potential is strong and the technology has progressed in leaps and bounds, says Mike Bevans, engineer at the AgTech Centre in Lethbridge.

But that’s only half of the picture.

Getting value out of the technology requires feeding it with sophisticated, field-specific information. That’s something that just isn’t there right now, says Bevans. In fact, it’s years away, with piles of work to get there.

“The technology is great. The potential is high. But producers who expect to flip a switch and get dramatic benefits today are going in with the blinders on,” says Bevans.

Four keys to doing it right

Imagine paying a premium to get the best new vehicle in the showroom, with all the upgrades. Then finding out its best performance takes a special fuel that won’t be available for a few years.

“Prescription maps are the fuel that VRT runs on,” says Bevans.

“Right now we just don’t have information to make quality maps. The engineering side has given us a new machinery and technology model, but we don’t have anything to run it anywhere near what it’s capable of.”

That may be unwelcome news 14

C A N O L A , P U L S E & S P E C I A L C R O P S G ui d e

The potential is real, but farmers who invest in variable rate capacity today may be waiting much longer than they expect for the payoff to many farmers who have heard a different story, says agronomy researcher Ross McKenzie of Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development.

In particular, that group would include a small but growing number of producers who are already paying for prescription fertilizer maps.

“There are some companies already doing variable rate fertilizer maps for farmers,” says McKenzie.

“Quite frankly, I think those maps have huge holes in them. We have a lot to learn better before we are able to provide good, accurate prescription fertilizer maps.”

1. Don’t gloss over complexity

McKenzie has seen a number of Next Big Things over the years. He believes VRT is the real deal and will eventually live up to the hype. But he also knows the agronomic side has a real marathon to run before that happens.

“There’re probably about six equipment dealers that manufacture seeders that have excellent technology to deliver variable fertilizer rates or seeding rates ‘on the go’ in fields, which is great,” says McKenzie. “But unfortunately, from an agronomic standpoint, it’s much more complex to decide where you should put on a higher seeding rate or a lower seeding rate and where you should put on more fertilizer or less fertilizer.”

And that’s just scratching the surface, he says. Getting real value from VRT will take going a number of steps beyond the broad “more versus less” questions to truly optimize soil nutrient conditions with the crop.

“For example, should you be putting on more nitrogen in one spot and less phosphorous, or vice-versa, as you go across a field?” he says.

“The next level of questions is really where it becomes very complex.

From what I’ve seen, a lot of people tend to gloss over that complexity.

They figure they can just collect data from a couple different management areas and that will cover it. I can tell you from my agronomic knowledge and experience that will not remotely do the job.”

Various types of information are being used to make decisions on field variability and then to decide fertilizer application rates. Some examples include crop yield maps, remote sensing imagery and topographic maps. But each has significant limitations, says McKenzie.

2. Fill the agronomic knowledge gaps

There are no short cuts to filling in the knowledge gaps, he says.

There has been a real shortage of research to understand the agronomic dynamics involved in variability, and then get that information down to a level where it’s practical and manageable for the farmer.

Like Bevans, McKenzie is based in Lethbridge. The two are working together on a new multi-component, multi-year, province-wide study to help fill some of the VRT knowledge gaps. The project is funded by the Alberta Crop Industry Development Fund, Alberta Innovates — BioSolutions, the Alberta Canola Producers Commission and Agrium.

McKenzie is the overall study leader focused on collecting, examining and drawing correlations from dozens of agronomic factors. Bevans in his AgTech role is heading up a key component using GPS technology to collect yield data and build topographic maps for each research site.

N o v e m b er 2 0 1 1

“ The technology is great. The potential is high. But producers who expect to flip a switch and get dramatic benefits today are going in with the blinders on.”

— Mike Bevans, AgTech Centre to a more sophisticated level of fieldspecific information.

“It’s not something we’re going to learn about quickly,” says McKenzie.

“There won’t be a ‘Eureka’ moment where we’ve figured everything out. I see it as an area of incremental gains, where our knowledge and recommendations are going to be evolving really over the next 15 to 20 years and beyond. Within a few years I expect we’ll be at point where we have a nice start to work with. But the advantages will be very modest at first. Making progress will require trial and error on specific fields, and will grow slowly and steadily over time.”

4. B uilding the information base critical to success

The basic thrust of the study is to understand and develop bench marks for the many agronomic factors relevant to soil and crop variability. A key focus initially is examining the dynamics relevant to fertilizer rate decisions. The study involves 12 to 15 benchmark test sites per field, each with 14 different fertilizer treatments. “As a first step, we’re trying to get a sense of how we can understand the variability involved and how crops respond to the variability,” says McKenzie. “This can then lead us more into the area of developing recommendations for the farmer.”

The study is in early stages, with data collected in 2010 and 2011, but is already yielding results that point to the need for greater sophistication. “My understanding is most of the companies that are making variable rate fertilizer applications to farms are just varying nitrogen,” says November 2011

McKenzie. “Our work so far is indicating that nitrogen is typically only modestly variable across the field.

It’s variable, but not as variable as phosphorous or potassium or sulphur. Those three are, by far, much more variable, and that must also be taken into consideration.”

Other important factors to consider that can influence crop response to fertilizers include variability of soil texture, water-holding capacity, soil organic matter and soil pH, he says.

3. Slow and steady wins the race

VRT progress as a whole will take time, with studies such as this helping to move things forward. The dynamics unveiled by this study and others like it will help lead to recommendations that can be applied across the Prairies. However truly getting the most out of VRT will require going

Building a knowledge base one field at a time may seem painstaking but is really the only way forward, says Bevans. “We have 25 million acres in Alberta that are cropped annually, with a huge range of soil types and agro-ecological factors.

Each field needs its own customized prescription map.”

One thing producers can do right away to make their operation more VRT friendly is to keep good, detailed records, says Bevans. This information can be used to support higher quality prescription maps and to determine the difference any VRT approach is making.

“The more years and detail your records cover, the better,” says Bevans. “Having the best base of information you can is the best way to decide if a VRT approach is delivering a benefit worth the investment.

Don’t simply take someone else’s word for it. Keep the knowledge and the management decisions in your hands.” c Meristem is a Calgar y-based communications firm that specializes in writing about western agriculture, food and land use. More articles at www. meristem.com.

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herbicides

by Ron Friesen

Mix it up Herbicide mixtures top rotations for resistant weed control

18

C A N O L A , P U L S E & S P E C I A L C R O P S G ui d e

F

or years, extension specialists have recited the mantra of “rotation, rotation, rotation” as the way to prevent the buildup of herbicideresistant weeds in fields.

Now, as it turns out, there may be an even better strategy.

A recent research paper suggests tank mixes are more effective than rotations in limiting herbicide resistance in weeds.

The paper, co-authored by Hugh Beckie, an Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada weed scientist in Saskatoon, is being hailed as confirmation that herbicide mixtures are a key component in managing the growing problem of resistant weeds in crops.

In reaching their conclusion, Beckie and his colleagues conducted

a four-year experiment at two sites in Saskatchewan to compare the impacts of both herbicide rotations and mixtures on stinkweed.

The result?

“After four years, the mixture prevented any development of resistance, whereas the rotation, even as infrequent as once in four years, dramatically increased the level of resistance,” says Beckie.

If you think that means throwing out herbicide rotation as a weed management tool, Beckie urges caution.

“We’re not saying rotations aren’t working. We still recommend rotation,” he says.

“But the results of the paper show that mixtures may be more effective in delaying resistance than rotations are.

“The results suggest that rotation, N o v e m b er 2 0 1 1

at best, is going to be a short-term solution.”

There are over 20 different groups of herbicides, classified according to their unique modes of action. Only about six herbicide groups are used in Western Canada. Currently, much of the weed resistance occurs with Group 2 herbicides, also known as acetolactate synthase (ALS) inhibitors (so called because they inhibit the ALS enzyme in a plant). Group 2 products act primarily on broadleaf and grassy weeds.

It’s long been known that agricultural pests, including weeds, can develop resistance to chemicals used on them repeatedly over a number of years.

In fact, industry surveys show some weeds begin to show resistance after seven uses of a Group 2 herbicide.

What wasn’t widely known, until it happened, was how rapidly such resistance can spread.

The first documented case of weed herbicide resistance in Western Canada occurred in 1988 and involved green foxtail in Manitoba.

Today, says Beckie, 40 per cent of the fields in the province contain at least

“Sometimes you can get good control with a product one year and weed failure the next. It can happen that fast.”

Up to now, the standard practice for avoiding resistance has been to rotate products between herbicide groups. For example, instead of using Group 2 products continuously, producers can employ a Group 4 product also registered to control the same weed in the same crop.

But that practice is changing with the realization that herbicide mixtures delay resistance longer than herbicide rotations because of their multiple modes of action (MMA).

A prime illustration is Dow AgroSciences Canada, a leading pesticide manufacturer, which no longer sells stand-alone Group 2 products. Since 2001, the company has sold MMA combinations (e.g., Group 2 and Group 4 products mixed together).

The logic is that if one product doesn’t take care of the weed, the other will.

“Our decision was to put our Group 2 products on the market in combinations with other active (ingredients),” says Kelly Bennett, Dow AgroSciences portfolio marketing leader for cereal herbicides in Calgary.

products easier. In 2009, the Pest Management Regulatory Agency allowed companies to sell tank-ready mixes as long as the individual products contained were registered to control weeds in the same crop.

This means companies need not spend the extra time and expense of submitting fresh data to PMRA to get product approval.

“It is certainly less onerous to be able to get to the market with a combination, or being able to recommend one, without going through all the regulatory hurdles,” says Bennett.

Of course, companies must still do due diligence to ensure the products combined in a mixture work together as they should, says Beckie.

He urges extreme caution and careful research if farmers decide to mix their own herbicide cocktails instead of buying them ready-made.

“You don’t want to combine partners that antagonize one another. In other words, one reduces the effectiveness of the other,” he says.

“You want to make sure there isn’t going to be crop injury as a result of those combinations. Even though individually they’re recommended,

“ We thought it made sense to ensure that if the straight Group 2 wasn’t affecting the plants all by itself, it had another active in there.”

— Kelly Bennett, Dow AgroSciences some green foxtail plants resistant to either Group 1 or Group 3 products.

At least 60 per cent of Manitoba’s fields harbour resistant wild oats (40 per cent in both Saskatchewan and Alberta).

Part of the reason for the rapid spread is farm machinery. Weeds such as cleavers, wild buckwheat and kochia can produce thousands of seeds per plant. Blow those seeds out the back of a combine and you scatter them far and wide, including the ones from resistant plants. That’s even more the case if an improperly cleaned combine moves from one field to another.

As a result, it can take as little as two or three years for resistant weeds to take over an entire field, says Beckie.

November 2011

“We thought it made sense to ensure that if the straight Group 2 wasn’t affecting the plants all by itself, it had another active in there.”

Bennett says about 80 per cent of Dow’s products are sold as co-packs, in which two or more components with different ingredients come separately in one package. The farmer mixes the ingredients together in the sprayer tank. The remaining 20 per cent are pre-formulated (everything together in one jug).

Bennett insists combinations are not necessarily more expensive than single products. He says some broadleaf herbicide combinations start as low as $7 an acre; others are above $16 an acre.

Recent changes to Canada’s regulatory system make marketing such

there might be a chance that together they might injure the crop.”

Bennett stresses that even though a product has multiple modes of action, it is viable only if those modes all act on the same weed.

“For example, we are seeing concerns with the development of Group 2 resistance to cleavers in northeastern Saskatchewan,” says Bennett.

“When farmers use a product with more than one mode of action but only one acts on cleavers, they are not getting the benefit. In this case, a different herbicide or rotation needs to be considered.”

Bennett says his company is devising charts to show which weeds are affected by MMAs in various products. The charts should be available in spring. c C A N O L A , p u l s e & s p e c i al c r o p s G u i d e

19

MARKETING

By Richard Kamchen

Laying siege Breaching the walls of Europe’s GMO fortress

T

he cracks have already appeared in the walls keeping genetically modified shipments out of Europe, but nobody knows for sure how long it’ll take before crops like Canada’s canola totally breach fortress EU. Many, however, have grown confident it will indeed happen, and that it’s only a matter of time.

“They’re going to have to eventually,” says Rick White, general manager of the Canadian Canola Growers Association, arguing GM technology will become increasingly necessary to feed a burgeoning world population.

“It’s an issue that’s getting more and more prevalent, and therefore the pressure is on internationally to come to grips with it.”

Europeans for the most part hadn’t seen much need to allow any GM crops into their countries and had shut Canadian canola out of its markets for a decade. But their hardline position softened sometime after traces of CDC Triffid wound up in

20

CANOLA, PULSE & SPECIAL CROPS GUIDE

imports of Canadian flaxseed in 2009.

That not only resulted in Canadian flax growers seeing their European markets dry up, but also highlighted the fact that trace amounts of GM can disrupt reliable chains of supply.

When the EU eventually bent its GMO rules with the so-called “technical solution” earlier this year, it was internal concern rather than international pressure that drove the discussions and change.

“This technical solution has been brought about largely as a result of concern from the agriculture sector, the feed industry and the cattle feeding industry,” says Jim Everson, the Canola Council of Canada’s vicepresident of corporate affairs. “They need to have predictable importation of foreign supplies of feed protein, and that was going to be increasingly difficult in a zero tolerance world because of the number of countries that are moving to genetically modified products” Europe’s technical solution essentially allows for a low level presence

(LLP) for imported feed and industrial-use products. Under the new rules, an eligible product that’s unapproved in the EU but is safety assessed and approved in another jurisdiction can enter the region at a threshold level of up to 0.1 per cent. But there is also a “level of uncertainty” built into the rules that takes into account differences in importing and exporting testing lab results, creating a sliding threshold of up to 0.3 per cent.

“The ‘technical solution’ will help reduce the likelihood of a disruption in feed supplies by boosting legal certainty for animal feed imports into Europe,” the voices of Europe’s agritrade — known by the alphabet acronyms COCERAL, FEDIOL and FEFAC — said in a joint statement. “This more pragmatic approach takes account of the dynamics of international trade and allows European farmers continued access to vital protein feed imports.”

A victory of sorts, although access to the food market remained closed.

But for how much longer?

“The governments over there have NOVEMBER 2011

00G, is the ola hybrid, VT5 he prefix n ca R R N E G .T yielding ding program Viterra’s big n robust bree w e exclusive o th r u h o it f w o a lt

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opted to not necessarily give consumers choice but have taken the route of basically not allowing those products into the country. And that comes down to a situation based more on politics,” says White. “It’s certainly not based on science, because these traits that we’re talking about in canola are scientifically proven to be safe.”

He suggests the best way to help change EU minds and hearts is to take our own advice, namely, Canada adopting domestic LLPs for unapproved products.

“Canada is starting to lead the way on this by looking at our own domestic policies which aren’t all that unlike others — if it’s not a product that has been approved here in Canada, we have a zero threshold policy on that too,” says White. “The bottom line is we have to show leadership in the world and get some kind of a science-based template for the world to use, and that could come through international standard setting bodies like Codex.”

The EU’s big guns COCERAL, FEDIO, and FEFAC also desire the LLP scope enlarged to include food — and fast. They cite the European Commissions’ Research Joint Research Centre that predicts the number of world GM events commercially cultivated to leap from 30 today to over 130 by 2014.

“Many of these products could find their way into the European food and feed supply chain, and it is therefore important that a practical threshold level for GM products Continued on page 22 NOVEMBER 2011

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21

Continued from page 21

“ Canada is starting to lead the way on this by looking at our own domestic policies which aren’t all that unlike others.”

— Rick White, General Manager, Canadian Canola Growers’ Association not yet authorized in the EU is set,” they say. “Many EU member states have indicated support for the inclusion of food in the scope of the technical solution.”

“It’s very difficult in the bulk commodity handling and transportation system that exists in North America and in Europe to always segregate food use from feed use from industrial use,” Everson points out.

White recognizes these lobbying efforts to relax regulations, but insists the politicians will first and foremost listen to the consumers because it’s they who elect them. And for now, they remain very sceptical of GM crops.

But if the EU feed supply worries showed the rest of the world anything, it’s that those countries will alter their policies when they need to.

And if LLPs are to be established for food markets, it might take, say, significant production shortfalls and/or burdensome prices on grocery store shelves to set progress in motion.

A reduced German rapeseed crop this year and expanding needs of a biofuel industry that has been tasked to meet aggressive goals may already be turning up the pressure.

“When they shut off import avenues from Canada and the U.S. due to genetic modification concerns, they are shorting themselves from access to product and, of course, that drives up the internal price for them,” says White. “Their industry is not in sync with the rest of the world’s prices. That is not a sustainable long-term situation that they should be in.”

GLYPHOSATE IN LENTILS

Canada has also been busy trying to make the EU see things its way when it comes to glyphosate in lentils.

Unfortunately for growers here, 22

C A N O L A , P U L S E & S P E C I A L C R O P S G ui d e

Europe’s Maximum Residue Limit (MRL) for glyphosate in lentils is a mere 0.1 parts per million, which was low enough to cause Canadian shipments to be rejected earlier this year when testing found levels exceeded that.

That’s a problem: The EU is Canada’s second-largest buyer for lentils and worth about $111 million in sales, based on 2010 numbers. It’s also a consistent buyer that demands high quality and is willing to pay for it.

In no previous year had Canadian lentil shipments been red flagged, and according to Carl Potts, director of market development at Pulse Canada, it may have been an outcome of last year’s weather.

“You have to remember that 2010 was a very odd year, a very different year than what we would normally get. We had a lot of wet conditions, we had uneven crop maturity, so you may have had some plants that were somewhat immature, but others that were relatively mature at the time the product was applied,” says Potts.

“That impacts how much residue was effectively taken up by the plant and deposited in the seed. So that might be why you had higher-than-normal levels of residues in lentils last year.”

Anomaly or not, Canada’s pulse industry didn’t want to take any future chances on an MRL that was well below that of peas (10 ppm), a result of glyphosate never having been approved for use on lentils in the EU when glyphosate was originally registered and MRLs were applied for. But unlike the GMO situation, the EU has a remedy to fix what’s more or less a regulatory gap. “(The process) is different. It can follow a more scientific route with less public debate around MRLs for crop products compared to the whole

GM debate in Europe, which is more politically sensitive,” Potts says.

Pulse Canada and its U.S. counterparts met in April with a number of customers in Europe, who voiced their concerns about continued access to not only Canadian but other foreign origin products, like the U.S. With an already established and defined process in place, Pulse Canada was able to apply to the EU to have an MRL established at a more reasonable level last May. A decision is likely in November or December, Potts says. He hopes for an MRL similar to that of Canada’s 4 ppm, and one that will be enforced by the time next year’s lentil crop is ready for export.

For the 2011 crop, Pulse Canada recommended growers not use glyphosate as a pre-harvest weed control if they wanted their lentils to be marketed to the EU. Potts says there was a wide divergence in what growers ended up doing, as some chose not to sell to the EU and focussed their marketing strategies elsewhere.

In addition to its EU application, Pulse Canada has looked to make alterations in Codex rules, which some countries look to for guidance in setting their own regulations.

“Codex does not have an MRL established for glyphosate in lentils either, so we have worked with others to have an application made through Codex, and recently found out that a Codex committee has recommended an MRL be established at five ppm,” Potts says, noting the process is moving in a positive track as well.

Ultimately, the approval will come from the Codex Alimentarius Commission, which should probably happen next summer, at which point it would come into effect, Potts says. c N o v e m b er 2 0 1 1

G 9 5 5 9 at

news brief REGINA TO HOST NEW PULSE, DURUM PROCESSING PLANT

An expansion-minded international pulse packing and export firm has pledged up to $50 million for a new Saskatchewan plant to process pulse crops for flours and food ingredients and durum into semolina for pasta.

Alliance Grain Traders (AGT) recently announced construction work on the plant is to begin in 2012 in the Global Transportation Hub (GTH), a new Regina industrial development devoted to transportation and logistics facilities needing central road, rail and intermodal access.

The AGT complex is planned as a milling facility to process durum for the production of its Arbella pasta brand in Canada, and to process pulse crops into pulse flours, starches, proteins and fibres.

AGT expects its distribution centre, to be built at the same site, will capitalize on the availability of ocean containers, trucks and intermodal container units at the Global Transportation Hub for domestic and export shipments.

Canadian Pacific Railway has previously announced it will build a new intermodal facility at the GTH. Upon the completion of the new plant, expected in mid-2012, the AGT facility is expected to generate 60 full-time jobs, the federal government noted in a separate release Friday.

“We have always been focused on creating value through origin-based processing, locating our processing facilities where high-quality crops are grown,” AGT CEO Murad Al-Katib said in the company’s release.

“We seek to create value for our farmer suppliers and our shareholders by shipping finished food products and not just the raw basic commodities to markets around the world.”

Arbella pasta, for instance, is a brand owned by the Arbel Group, an AGT subsidiary based in Turkey, where the company’s pasta is currently produced.

Canada, Al-Katib said, is a “dominant world supplier of durum wheat and pulses. With our strong Canadian base built over the past decade, Western Canada was a logical choice for our new processing complex.”

Furthermore, he said, the GTH “will provide a competitive freight advantage for us that makes this a sensible investment.”

The Regina facility is expected to “solidify” AGT’s pasta milling capacity in Canada and move the company “further up the value chain in our pulses platform,” AGT chairman Huseyin Arslan said in the same release.

NOVEMBER 2011

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herbicides

by Warren Libby, Savvy Farmer

The future

of weed control in corn

T

he future of weed control in corn may well be found by digging into its past‌ or more accurately, by combining tried and true weed control practices with emerging, state-of-the art technology.

In the 1970s and ’80s, most herbicides were soil applied and either incorporated with some form of tillage or left for a rain to move them into the weed seed zone. These residual products, like Sutan+, Lasso, Dual and AAtrex, provided season-long control — as long as Mother Nature co-operated with a timely rain. As farms got larger though, it became more and more difficult to find time to lay down pre-emergent herbicides as growers became increasingly concerned with getting the crop planted.

24

C A N O L A , P U L S E & S P E C I A L C R O P S G ui d e

Enter the era of post-emergent herbicides. Growers could now focus on seeding all their acreage and then consider weed control once the crop and weeds emerged. Sulfonylurea type grass herbicides, such as Accent and Ultim, combined with post-emergent broadleaf products like Banvel II, Marksman and Pardner, gained in popularity as growers warmed to the idea of waiting to see what weeds emerged before choosing a herbicide treatment. The enthusiasm for post-emergent weed control proved to be relatively short-lived, however, as once again Mother Nature intervened: a wet spell after planting often meant that either the crop or the weeds grew beyond the proper treatment stage before growers could get equipment into the field. Once the N o v e m b er 2 0 1 1

weeds were past this early post-emergent spray window, options to control them became pretty limited, allowing them to rob valuable nutrients from the growing crop.

The Magic Bullet

Then some magic came along… Roundup-Ready corn.

Corn growers already had years of good experience using glyphosate on their Roundup-Ready soybeans. So they were chomping at the bit to apply the same technology to their corn. While there was still a lot of grumbling about the high cost of Roundup-Ready seed and those dreadful Technology Use Agreements, most corn growers did choose to take advantage of the simple, low-cost, and effective weed control provided by glyphosate. Never before had weed control in corn been so easy and fields been so clean at harvest. Glyphosate seemed like a magic bullet, so much so that many pesticide manufacturers dramatically cut back on corn herbicide research. It seemed unlikely at the time that they could ever invent a new herbicide capable of outperforming glyphosate at such a low per-acre cost.

But Mother Nature still had a few more tricks up her sleeve.

Strange New Weeds

Some of the weeds that glyphosate was so effective at controlling started to adapt. Among the billions of weed seeds that germinate in a field each year, there are always a few mutant types, including some that may be resistant to herbicides that have routinely been used in that particular field for several years.

So, let’s assume that after years of using glyphosate in corn and soybeans, one glyphosate-tolerant giant ragweed plant survives. That one plant may produce 5,000 seeds by harvest. Even if only 10 per cent of these germinate the following year, the result could be up to 2.5 million seeds with in-bred glyphosate resistance. With all other weed competition held in check, growers could soon be looking at a field of shoulder-high giant ragweed rather than a field of corn. This is not a hypothetical example. Herbicide-resistant giant ragweed has now been confirmed in Canada and there are at least 12 other weed species resistant to glyphosate in North America. The days of controlling weeds in corn with one or two sprays of glyphosate are definitely limited. Fortunately, some new weed control strategies are on the horizon.

Mixing it up

It is unlikely that growers will abandon the use of glyphosate in corn, even as more species of resistant weeds emerge. Glyphosate will continue to be the workhorse of corn weed control, but total reliance on it can only lead to reduced effectiveness. Today, the most reliable way to ensure sustainable weed control in corn is to apply a tank mix of glyphosate plus one or more herbicides that control a wide spectrum of weeds, but especially weed species suspected of being resistant to glyphosate. In fact, most pesticide manufacturers recognized long ago that the repeated use of glyphosate would result in the emergence of resistant weed species and have registered complementary treatments with most glyphosate brands. In corn there are already over 700 registered glyphosate tank-mix treatments which can be applied pre-seed, pre-emerge, or post-emergence. Although the selection is somewhat more limited in Western Canada, there are still well over 400 glyphosate tank mix options available for corn.

To make this strategy more convenient, several pesticide November 2011

manufacturers are creating pre-mixed formulations or copacks of glyphosate plus a complementary herbicide. While growers have the option of simply buying and mixing the chemicals separately, the custom-designed pre-mixes and copacks may be more convenient, and, in many cases, less costly.

GMOs to the rescue?

Looking a few years down the road, there is little doubt that the talented genetic engineers working for the multinationals will release new corn hybrids with resistance to more than just glyphosate or glufosinate. Already, there is news that Monsanto will soon launch a glyphosate + dicamba-tolerant corn. Dow, for its part, is working on a glyphosate + 2, 4-D and a glyphosate + fop herbicide resistant corn hybrid. Once these hit the market, growers will have additional tools to fight broadleaf and grassy weeds, even those which are resistant to glyphosate alone. These developments are extremely positive since these new hybrids will allow growers to use some relatively inexpensive products to manage any herbicide-resistance concerns they may have.

In the foreseeable future, there is little doubt that glyphosate will continue to be the backbone of most corn weed control programs. Yet total reliance on glyphosate will inevitably lead to some very nasty weed problems.

Growers who haven’t already done so should give serious thought to adding a soil-applied residual chemical or a post-emergent herbicide to their weed control tool box.

And if a few suspicious weeds appear next spring and summer, they shouldn’t be afraid to sharpen up the hoe and rogue them out, just like in the good old days. c

Are You Ready For An Open Grain Market?

As we move towards an open market, western Canadian grain farmers need to ensure they have all the tools required to capture the best possible price for their wheat, durum and malting barley.

If you’d like to learn more about what will change & what an open market might mean to your grain sales, please consider attending one of our free online presentations by calling 1-888-274-3138 or sending an email to info@ag-chieve.ca. You may also sign up online at www.ag-chieve.ca.

Independent, unbiased grain marketing advice you can trust!

C A N O L A , p u l s e & s p e c i al c r o p s G u i d e

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researh

by Gord Leathers

On a roll It may be back to the future if the costs climb and efficacy slips for chemical weed control

I

t might seem like a prehistoric artifact in today’s world of crop chemistry and genetic modification, but for thousands of years farmers had just one way to cope with weeds — physically removing them from their crops.

At first it was the preserve of brutal hand-weeding, then later the realm of mechanical tillage prior to seeding and using the once-familiar summerfallow system.

But in our lifetimes all that’s changed in Western Canada. These days it’s all low-disturbance seeding and chemical controls. In many parts of the region classic tillage has been all but eliminated in favour of glyphosate and genetic modification.

That’s hardly surprising when you consider both the economics and agronomics of the situation. Glyphosate weed control is cheap, crops that are resistant to it make weed control easier than ever, and as a nice little bonus adopting zero-till practices eliminates the hassle, labour and expense of several field operations in the spring.

Over the longer term, however, nature and economics may have other ideas.

Petroleum is the rootstock of all this industrial chemistry and lately the price has fluctuated unpredictably due to its strategic importance in an unstable world. Petroleum analysts suggest the price of oil will likely continue its upward trend since petroleum can only become less plentiful and more valuable.

Weed genetics don’t lie still either.

The selective pressures brought about by herbicides leave fields of noxious interlopers that bathe in all manner of chemistry and, not only do they survive, they thrive. It might not be a problem that’s looming today but over the longer term it raises some troubling questions about how Prairie crop agriculture is going to respond.

One unconventional but fascinating hint may be found in some interesting iron that can be seen making the rounds of fields at the University

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Simple flail mowers and blade rollers may provide a low cost, energy efficient tool for conventional farmers to supplement their chemical arsenal and a development that’s nothing short of revolutionary for their organic brethren of Manitoba’s research farm near Carman, Man. They’ve become the testing ground for a group of grad students in the University of Manitoba’s natural agriculture program. What they’re finding with simple flail mowers and blade rollers may provide a low-cost, energy-efficient tool for conventional farmers to supplement their chemical arsenal and a development that’s nothing short of revolutionary for their organic brethren.

“You know they have those eHarmony programs where they’re trying to match people?” asks Martin Entz of the University of Manitoba. “This is the eHarmony for metal and biology. One of the things we’ve been able to do here is to figure out what combinations of plants and machines will give us the desired outcome.”

This work aims to settle one of agriculture’s last frontiers, conservation tillage for organic producers.

Pre-Green Revolution farmers dealt with weeds through tillage and summerfallow which effectively reduced weed seed banks but left topsoil vulnerable to erosion. Since they can’t use herbicides, organic farmers have to practice judicious tillage, rotation from annual to perennial crops or planting fall rye for its weed-suppressing effects. No matter what the method, their crops are planted into tilled land.

“The problem is that we’re using tillage too much in organic systems,” Entz says. “We were trying to reduce the frequency of tillage and so we have Continued on page 28 N o v e m b er 2 0 1 1

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gone to a number of different ways of killing vegetation.”

The most novel is the blade roller, a drum on an axle with chevron-style blades along its surface. It attaches onto a hitch on the back in this case and, as the name says, it’s rolled over the standing vegetation. The plants are pinned to the ground and flattened. As those chevron blades pass over, they crimp each plant in several places along the length of the stem, leaving a green mat that decays into nutrient-rich mulch.

The idea for the roller came from Brazil where they’ve been using soil mulches for a long time. The first rollers were used by small-scale farmers in Central America and could be as straightforward as a log pulled behind a horse. It’s simple and very effective with some plants such as faba beans or buckwheat, where the fragile stem is easily broken effectively disabling the plant’s circulatory system. Some of the more fibrous plants need the crimping to finish the job so they can begin decomposing and form the nutritious mulch.

“We started working with the roller in 2007,” Entz says. “It doesn’t cut the stems, it crimps them every 20 centimetres and leaves them anchored in the soil much like a haybine where it crimps the hay to speed the drying.

It’s not for really short plants, it’s for full grown green manures.”

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This is where the system gets complicated. In an organic system the roller is the last step in a green manure crop such as beans or peas, something to fix nitrogen. In Carman they’ve been experimenting with a number of different types and combinations of manure crops particularly with complex mixtures of different plants that they call a “cocktail.”

At the heart of the cocktail is a legume and the current favourite is hairy vetch. The other species in the cocktail, such as oats or barley, provide carbon to the mulch and nourish the soil biota. They also provide a measure of diversity within the crop and lend a degree of ecological stability.

The actual weed control comes about in two ways. The physical action of rolling and crimping will kill many of them. Then the resulting mat of mulch actually acts like a blanket and the filtering of sunlight through this blanket keeps many of the seeds from germinating.

After that you can seed into the mat using a zero-till disc drill. Even thought the plants may be dead, they’re still rooted in the ground so they don’t get caught and dragged around by the machinery.

The idea may have a place in conventional farming as well. If conventional farmers have the flexibility to try mulching they may find it a useful way to reduce both the herbicide and

nitrogen bills while raising the level of soil organic matter. Renting out the forage cocktail to cattle farmers may even provide a little income on land not currently under crops while conserving phosphorus.

Another application that Entz and his technician are trying is to use a stripper head on cereal crops. This leaves a tall straw standing in the field. Then they run the blade roller over that.

“We started to play with that last year and it definitely works,” he said.

“Once you take all that straw and you push it down to create the mulch and you also have that mat that reduces the light. You get some weed control out of that.”

One of the other big advantages of the blade roller is the energy efficiency. Since the blades don’t actually penetrate the soil a tractor spends very little energy hauling it over the field. This not only means less fuel is used it also performs the operation a lot faster.

“There are some ways where we’re approaching zero till for organic farmers but we’re not quite there yet.” Entz says. “But if they can use a blade roller to reduce two out of their four tillage operations in that year, that’s already a help and we’re finding that you can probably reduce your tillage by about 75 per cent in a green manure year if you use a blade roller.” c N o v e m b er 2 0 1 1

canola

by Gord Gilmour

For real

Dow and Pepsico are travelling far and wide to talk about growing demand for Nexera canola

I

f you’ve seen the classic baseball and life movie Field of Dreams you’re familiar with its most famous line: “If you build it, they will come.”

Many an entrepreneur and innovator has adopted it as his or her personal mantra, an easily understood and pithy explanation of just why they were willing to take enormous risks to develop a business or product with no guarantee of a return on their investment of time, energy and money.

It was, in fact, the very real challenge that Dow AgroSciences faced in the late 1990s, when it was contemplating a project that would create a second distinct class of canola, aimed at a unique market segment.

The product, of course, was Nexera canola, one of the first of the “high stability” canola oils with elevated levels of oleic acid — and in the case of Nexera it also had the added bonus of a generally healthier oil profile high in omega-9 fatty acids (the good kind). It started small, but now industry sources say the oil class captures about 10 per cent of canola acres annually through two major competing programs and may ultimately make up 25 per cent of canola production.

In the end this project proved a sound business decision for Dow AgroSciences — but way back at the start there was no guarantee it was going to work. So what prompted the company to take that sort of gamble? In a nutshell, the company was watching the cutting edge nutritional science research being done on canola at the time and responding to what researchers were finding, says Dave Dzisiak, Dow’s North American head of grains and oils.

“That was when the initial research reports on transfats were starting to come out,” he explained during a recent visit to Winnipeg in the company of a Pepsico representative who’s a major customer for Nexera oil.

November 2011

“Those reports were basically finding that transfats were metabolic poison.”

For the canola industry of the time, it was going to prove a major challenge.

That’s because while natural canola oil is almost universally recognized as a healthier oil choice, if it was going to have a fit in food processing it needed to be stabilized through the hydrogenation process. Otherwise it simply didn’t have a long enough shelf-life or fryer life to fit into the modern food production system. And hydrogenation, unfortunately, creates trans fats.

“These oils essentially replace hydrogenation,” said Dzisiak. “It’s naturally stable without requiring that process.”

Generating the new oil profile probably couldn’t be fairly described as easy — any plant breeder can confirm that it’s always an involved process. But it was a relatively straightforward question of using classic plant-breeding techniques to alter the crop’s oil profile, in many ways a more refined echo of the initial work in the 1970s that created canola itself.

But once they’d created the first lines that became widely available in the late 1990s, they’d only completed the very first leg of their journey.

They’d built it. Now they needed to figure out how to entice customers and farmers to come over to it. One of the initial markets was bottled oil that went into the Japanese market and emphasized the product’s health benefits, but Dzisiak says the company

knew that wasn’t a large enough market or a long-term solution.

“The bottled oil segment is a really tough one,” he said. “In fact right now what we’re seeing is a lot of consolidation in that category.”

Later they added a number of fast food chains — QSRs or quick service restaurants as they’re known in the jargon of the industry — where the oil seemed a more natural fit. It allows the restaurants to use it for longer periods before it begins breaking down and becoming rancid due to a combination of time and temperature, Dzisiak said.

“Restaurants at that time were — and still are — getting very aggressive about offering healthier choices,” Dzisiak said. “Nexera oil not only provided them with a more stable oil, it’s also a healthier one.”

But even as large as the fast food industry is, garnering significant inroads into that market wasn’t the end game.

The largest market for oil products in the world is the “packaged goods” market — snack foods to the rest of us. In the past couple of years Pepsico Canada signed on as a major customer for their Frito Lay line of potato chips.

And while a bag of chips might seem like a small thing, the numbers add up fast. They’re among North America’s favourite snack foods and they consume a lot of oil. Close to a billion pounds Continued on page 30 C A N O L A , p u l s e & s p e c i al c r o p s G u i d e

29

Continued from page 29

last year alone through six production facilities throughout Canada, said Steve James, Pepsico’s director of strategic sourcing. Jones said that the decision to change any ingredient is a long and carefully vetted process that starts with a simple baseline.

“It has to produce a product that’s as good or better as the product we’re currently producing,” James explained.

So was it the quality that tipped the scales? Or the healthier nature of the oil? Or the simple fact that more stable oil meant a longer processing life and a healthier bottom line? All that helped, but none of them alone were the deciding factor, James said during a recent discussion.

“If there was a deciding factor, it was our need to have a secure and stable supply of oil,” James said.

Up to the change last year, the company had been using a subtype of sunflowers known as NuSun, which produces cooking oil with a similar mid oleic acid profile and stability. Companies using the product soon hit a major stumbling block however — production of the relatively small acreage crop simply could not keep up with new demand. That was strictly a question of acreage James said. Stats from the USDA peg total U.S. sunflower production last year in North America at under two million acres, with Canada adding just a few tens of thousands to that total, mainly in Manitoba. By comparison Canadian growers planted more than 16 million acres of canola last year across the country, and northern U.S. states are said to add about a million and a half acres to that total.

“If you look at the two crops, canola production is far larger and therefore a more reliable oil source,” James said.

But even so, part of the reason James has been on tour through the Prairies

this fall along with Dow AgroSciences staff is to convince growers to put even more of it in the ground — perhaps two million acres next season.

Dow has long touted the growth potential of the market, but brought a major customer like James along to talk to farmers and the media in an effort to amplify the message that the demand is real and growing.

“We need to show farmers that there’s someone on the other end of this conversation that needs and wants a lot of this oil,” James said.

In fact James says there is some potential for canola oil to displace sunflower oil at plants south of the U.S. boundary, and that the Canadian operation is in many ways a pilot project to test how the oil performs.

For farmers interested in growing the crop, Dzisiak says there are a few compelling reasons, not least of which is a premium of around a dollar a bushel, depending on which of the line grain elevator companies a farmer signs a contract with. He also stresses that new genetics and a major investment in Canola breeding by the company have also paid dividends — remember that talk of yield drag from the early years? It was real, Dzisiak conceded.

“It’s the nature of breeding, when you’re focusing so closely on the oil profile,” he said.

But now that the oil profile is well established, the company has turned its sites onto improving yield. So where’s that yield drag at today?

“Gone,” Dzisiak insisted. “Our latest genetics yield as well as any other variety in the market.”

Combining top yields with an extra buck a bushel make those varieties the best value proposition for canola growers, he said.

“We know farmers won’t grow it if it doesn’t make economic sense for them,” he said. c

news brief Native prairie thrives under climate change: Study

One might assume southern Saskatchewan’s native grasslands to have suffered stress under climate pressures over the past 30 years — and one might be wrong, a new study suggests.

The province’s south has experienced “much drier weather and some ver y significant droughts overall” in the past three decades, according to University of Regina geography professor Joe Piwowar.

However, he said in a recent media release, his research shows native prairie in the region has in fact been getting greener.

“This is totally unexpected,” said Piwowar, the university’s Canada research chair in geomatics and sustainability.

“My assumption going into this research is that the prairie grasses are responding to changes in climate. Second only to the Arctic, the Canadian prairie is one of the most sensitive areas to climate change.”

Given the dry climate conditions, he said, “I would have expected the prairie grasslands to be showing more signs of stress. Instead, there’s been more biomass, more vegetation growth.”

For his research, Piwowar has been studying Grasslands National Park, south of Swift Current on the province’s border with Montana.

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Markets

By David Drozd, senior analyst and president, Ag-Chieve Corporation

A

are you ready for an open grain market?

s everyone now knows, plans are underway to end the grain-marketing monopoly held by the Canadian Wheat Board (CWB), founded back during the Great Depression when our parents were children. According to the prime minister, “this is a historic change that is long overdue.”

While clearly not everyone agrees with the PM’s plan, Stephen Harper has made it very clear that the end of the line for the 68-year-old love-itor-hate-it mandatory grain-marketing institution is very near.

Speaking in Regina at the opening of a new durum wheat and pulse milling plant in early October, Harper said, “It’s time for the wheat board and others who have been standing in the way to realize that this train is barrelling down a Prairie track.

You’re much better to get on it than to lie on the tracks because this is going ahead.”

Agree or not, the future of marketing wheat, durum and malting barley in Western Canada is very likely about to change dramatically and for western Canadian grain farmers it’s definitely time to ask yourself the question, “Are you prepared for an open market?”

Though no one, possibly even including the government, really knows exactly what a new open-market landscape will look like, there are a few areas where things are sure to change quickly when the CWB monopoly disappears.

above all else, to move that grain into terminal position, to meet CWB sales.

The movement of grain in CWB producer cars is top priority. Line company grain, is given the lowest priority.

With the wheat board monopoly gone, producer car shipments will need to be accommodated by grain companies. Producer car loading sites owned by producers may have to negotiate with grain companies to handle and buy direct from producers against export sales.

Operations

If you’re a permit book holder, accustomed to selling your grain via either the Pool or PPO programs, chances are one of the first things you’ll miss is the help of your friendly CWB farm business representative (FBR). Currently the 16 FBRs who live and work in grain-producing communities all across the Prairies will come to your farm to advise you and complete grain-marketing paperwork, as well as explain how the CWB programs can best fit into your farm operation.

Their personalized one-to-one service is also supported by a toll-free call centre that manages and processes tens of thousands of calls from producers looking for grain-marketing information every month. Dealing directly with grain companies means increased competition for your grain. Expect new, inperson, telephone, online and mobile services to emerge from grain companies interested in attracting you as a supplier and customer.

Moving Grain

Pricing

It could be a challenge for producer car shipments to continue post-CWB. Currently, the producer car process starts with farmers’ application for rail cars to the Canadian Grain Commission (CGC). The CGC reviews the intended grain movement, as it is declared by the CWB, typically in four week periods, and producer cars are then given priority,

Farmers will have to learn more about the old poker adage of knowing when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em in an open-market system.

Deciding when to sell wheat in an open market will be a function of not only price outlooks, but also protein premiums, which can fluctuate on a daily basis.

At this time it is fair to assume

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marketing wheat in an open market could look similar to marketing canola. You would be quoted a price on a base grade plus or minus a grade premium/discount. Grain companies may use basis on wheat to “premium or discount” for immediate or deferred delivery.

If we look to Ontario for an example, a producer is offered a price based off the Minneapolis exchange plus or minus a basis for a #2 millingquality wheat. On October 11, 2011 the cash price of $9.76 per bushel included the futures price of $9.37 plus a positive basis of 39 cents.

The real opportunity for western grain producers will come as “valueadded” end-user enterprises are developed near them, creating more competition for their wheat. This will take some time, but just as the construction of canola-crushing plants and oat-processing facilities have benefited producers, so will the development of flour mills, pasta plants and malt houses.

As we move towards an open market in the coming months, western Canadian grain farmers need to be ready to adapt and ensure they have all the tools required to help them capture the best possible price for their wheat, durum and malting barley.

If you would like to learn more about the changes and what could be ahead please consider attending one of our company’s free online presentations by calling 1-888-274-3138 or sending an email to info@ag-chieve.ca. You may also sign up online at ag-chieve.ca. c David Drozd is president and senior market analyst for Winnipeg-based Ag-Chieve Corporation, a grain-marketing advisory firm representing hundreds of western Canadian grain farmers. The information contained herein is deemed to be from sources that are reliable, but its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. For information about grainmarketing courses and other educational tools call Ag-Chieve at 1-888-274-3138 or visit online at www.ag-chieve.ca.

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