TCM West - November 2012

TOP CROP MANAGER

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TOP CROP

MANAGER

By Bruce Barker PLANT BREEDING

10 | 38 new varieties in 39 years Lacombe breeding program has gone from the kernel of an idea to a highly productive program.

By Carolyn King

PLANT BREEDING

52 What is new in Canola?

By Bruce Barker

CROP MANAGEMENT

6 Feed the crop and not the weeds

By Carolyn King

FLAX

18 eco-friendly phone case with flax fibre and shive

By Carolyn King

SPECIAL CROP

56 Higher-yielding varieties with improved quality

By Carolyn King

FIBRE CROPS

60 Making the business case for growing trees

By Tony Kryzanowski

26 | Cropping system affects root and crown rots

Integrated approach helps reduce disease pressure.

By Carolyn King

MARKETS AND MARKETING

22 another marketing option for canola growers

By Carolyn King

STORAGE

32 Management tips for safe grain storage By John Dietz

BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

36 Diversification for success By John Dietz

63 Caution on the road to retirement riches

By John Dietz

ISSUES AND ENVIRONMENT

44 getting a little more help from farmers’ many-legged friends

By Carolyn King

38 | Measuring harvest loss in canola Losses can be surprisingly high.

CANOLA

68 Tight canola rotations impacting yield By Bruce Barker

76 Innovative methods for managing flea beetles in canola

By Juliana J. Soroka and Bill Elliott, AAFC

MACHINERY

48 Don’t mix tall farm equipment and power lines

By John Dietz

THE GRAIN GUARDIAN

72 Increase effectiveness and efficiency

FROM THE FIELD EDITOR

4 Is the bloom coming off canola? By Bruce Barker

Readers will find numerous references to pesticide and fertility applications, methods, timing and rates in the pages of Top Crop Manager. We encourage growers to check product registration status and consult with provincial recommendations and product labels for complete instructions.

BRUCE BARKER | WESTERN FIELD EDITOR

iS ThE BlOOM cOMiNg

Off caNOla?

The year started off so promising. a record 21 million acres seeded to canola, up 2.4 million over 2011, and a sixth consecutive record for canola acres. The spring weather was relatively conducive for seeding and early crop growth, and then July came along. Sclerotinia stem root, blackleg, aster yellows, and heat stress kept chinking away at the yield potential. a final straw was the massive windstorm that blew through the prairies, taking swathed canola along with it.

In the end, Statistics Canada estimated in September that actual canola production would be down 8.1 percent, despite a 12.8 percent higher seeded acreage. average canola yield dropped to 28.2 bushels per acre, the lowest since 2007, and more on par with yields in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This despite the impressive advancement in canola genetics over the last 12 years.

This disappointing production would be easy enough to write off to bad weather conditions, and it was most certainly a major culprit, but word coming back from across the prairies also points to emerging disease problems. Blackleg is back and the disease has mutated to overcome resistant genes in some areas. Sclerotinia was an issue in traditionally drier areas that have not had problems in the past. a ster yellows were widespread.

Tighter rotations bring increased disease pressure, and as this issue’s article on tight canola rotations shows, tight rotations come at the expense of yield. o f course, all crops compete for acres based on profit potential, and after years of marginal economics for many crops, growing more of the most profitable crop is hard to resist. Whether canola becomes a victim of its own success remains to be seen, but as the old saying goes, “There’s no cure for high prices like high prices.”

But if canola prices do stay high, pushing for increased canola acres again in 2013, the question becomes, ‘are high prices for canola enough to overcome the agronomic risk of tight rotations?’ That will be the question debated by many farmers over the coming months.

Diane Kleer, Vp production/group publisher, annex Business Media is pleased to announce the appointment of Janet Kanters as editor for Top Crop Manager West.

Janet is a national award-winning writer with over 20 years of professional experience as a journalist, editor, photographer, communications and public relations professional. She was the western field editor for Top Crop Manager West between 1996 and 2005. She brings to this position an in-depth knowledge of provincial, national and international agriculture.

Janet will be working from her home in Strathmore, aB. P • 403.499.9754

E • jkanters@annexweb.com

WeSTerN

meDIA DeSIGNer Katerina maevska vP ProDucTIoN/GrouP PublISher Diane Kleer dkleer@annexweb.com

PreSIDeNT michael Fredericks mfredericks@annexweb.com PUBLICATION MAIL AGREEMENT #40065710 reTurN uNDelIverAble cANADIAN ADDreSSeS To cIrculATIoN DePT. P.O. Box 530, Simcoe, ON N3Y 4N5 e-mail: subscribe@topcropmanager.com Printed in canada ISSN 1717-452X cIrculATIoN e-mail: subscribe@topcropmanager.com Tel.: 866.790.6070 ext. 211 Fax: 877.624.1940 Mail: P.O. Box 530, Simcoe, ON N3Y 4N5

SubScrIPTIoN rATeS Top crop manager West - 8 issuesFebruary, march, mid-march, April, June, october, November and December1 Year - $44.25 Cdn. plus tax

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fEE d ThE c ROp a N d NOT ThE WEE dS

Tips for integrated weed management.

by Carolyn King

Fertilizer management strategies can be designed with both the crop and the weeds in mind. Through fertilizer timing and placement, you can inhibit weed growth, reduce dependence on herbicides, and reduce weed populations over time, while increasing crop yield and quality. That’s what research studies on the Canadian prairies over the past decade show.

Many of those studies have been led by Dr. Bob Blackshaw, a weed scientist with a griculture and a gri-Food Canada (aaFC) at Lethbridge, often working with other aaFC researchers for an integrated look at fertilizer-weed-crop interactions.

Blackshaw explains that his initial studies looked at whether weeds even responded to increased fertility. “In some cases there was the perception that weeds are scavengers of nutrients and don’t require a high nutrient load, so fertilizer wouldn’t make much of a difference. That may be true for some weeds in non-agricultural areas, but many of the weeds growing with our crops have either adapted to respond to fertilizer or they are there in the first place because they do respond to increased fertility.”

He conducted greenhouse experiments to assess the response of various weed species to some of the major nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus. “We found a general trend that most species responded positively to those nutrients, and one of the surprises was that some of them responded more than the crops, such as wheat or canola.”

His next step was to carry out several field studies to see how fertilizer placement and timing could be used to help the crop and discourage the weeds.

Apply fertilizer close to when the crop needs it

The fertilizer timing studies compared nitrogen applications

in o ctober and at planting in May, for a spring wheat crop in a zero-till system at Lethbridge. The results showed that, for general weed management, it is usually better to apply nitrogen fertilizer at the time of seeding than in the previous fall. The spring-applied fertilizer treatments tended to have less weed growth and better crop yields.

“We’ve shown that fall fertilizer application can increase the germination of weeds by breaking weed seed dormancy. as well, if your field has winter annual weeds that are germinating in the fall and surviving the winter, then they will be taking up some of that nitrogen,” says Blackshaw. In addition, nitrogen is subject to losses due to leaching, volatilization and denitrification, and a fall application puts it at risk of being lost for a longer period before the crop has a chance to use it.

He notes, “There may be less application of fertilizers in

ABOVE & INSET: Greenhouse experiments to evaluate weed species’ response to phosphorus applications of 0, 10, 20, 30, 40 and 60 kg/ha found differing patterns. For instance, hairy nightshade tended to grow more and more with each increase in phosphorus, while kochia’s growth tended to plateau around 30 kg/ha.

Seek Treatment

25, 50, 75, 100

the fall than there used to be, but farmers are still interested in it for time management. If they can apply nitrogen in the fall, then it’s one less task to do in the spring. also, in the seeding operation, the first thing farmers have to stop their drill for is to fill their fertilizer tank, not their seed tank. and they don’t want to stop because they have large farms and many acres to cover. [The risk of higher nitrogen losses with a fall application] may be acceptable to them because of the other advantages they see in fall applications.

“But when they factor in all those things to decide on fertilizer timing, they are probably not thinking about weeds at all. Weed management is one more piece of information to consider in that decision.”

Band fertilizer to favour the crop

In Blackshaw’s fertilizer placement studies, he compared broadcasting on the soil surface, banding three to four inches below the surface and placing fertilizer in the seed row. In comparison to broadcasting, banding reduced the competitive ability of some weed species, especially shallower-rooted species, and it gave the crop seedlings early access to the nutrients.

“Those fertilizer placement studies show that if we could put the fertilizer near to where the crop seed was germinating and emerging – but not too close to the crop seed because that can sometimes cause injury [when higher nitrogen rates are used] – then that gave an advantage to the crop,” explains Blackshaw.

The advantage of banding in comparison to broadcasting is especially true for zero-till systems. He says, “In the zero-till situation, the

weed seeds remain on the soil surface. If we put the fertilizer three or four inches deep in the soil, away from where those weed seeds are geminating, that gives the crop a head start in being able to access those nutrients.”

Weed species makes a difference

Blackshaw’s research also shows that some weed species with a high response to fertilizer become increasingly competitive as the fertilizer rate increases, and their growth can be at the expense of crops like wheat, which is only moderately responsive to nitrogen and phosphorus.

The studies also showed that, for a high-nutrient-response weed species, placing the nutrient away from the weed’s germinating seeds can be especially effective in reducing weed growth.

examples of weeds with a high response to nitrogen include redroot pigweed, wild mustard, and lamb’s quarters. examples of weed species that are very responsive to phosphorus include round-leaved mallow and hairy nightshade.

Blackshaw suggests several ways farmers could use such information about weed species response to nutrients. “The first one is to just be aware that some weed species may really like a certain nutrient, and those species could be a greater problem if you apply that nutrient. Then you can do a better job of monitoring those fields and planning your control measures. one example in southern alberta is the

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38 NEW VaRi ET i ES

iN 39 y Ea RS

Lacombe breeding program has gone from the kernel of an idea to a highly productive program.

by Carolyn King

The backing of producers and peter Lougheed provided a great start for alberta’s feed grain breeding program in 1973. now almost four decades later, the program has registered 28 barley varieties, nine triticales and a winter wheat. and it continues to work on making these crops even better for growers and end-users.

Dr. Jim Helm has led the breeding program from the very beginning and guided the development of the facilities, bringing together scientific and technical staff while working with growers to set breeding priorities. along the way, he’s received such prestigious awards as Life Time Membership awards from the Canadian Seed growers association and the alberta Seed growers association in 1998, alberta Science and Technology award in 2001, alberta agriculture Hall of Fame in 2002, alberta Centennial Medal in 2005, and Distinguished agronomist award from the Canadian Society of agronomy in 2012.

Helm’s vision and drive to provide practical benefits for

producers have been crucial to the breeding program’s success.

In the beginning

It all started in 1972 when pork producers persuaded premier peter Lougheed and agriculture Minister Dr. Hugh Horner to create a feed barley breeding program. Helm, a young plant breeder, was hired to head alberta agriculture’s new Feed grain Development program in 1973. He came with over 5000 lines of germplasm from all around the world -- winter and spring barley, winter and spring wheat, and triticale.

The breeding program was initially based at the University of alberta until alberta agriculture purchased land for a research farm near Lacombe. “When we moved to Lacombe in 1977 to start

TOP: Field Crop Development Centre the staff in June 2012, with Helm (in the centre, with the white beard)

INSET: Helm (far right) with Alberta’s Agriculture Minister Verlyn Olson and Deputy Minister John Knapp in July 2012

building the Field Crop Development Centre [FCDC], it was just land that we had bought. We built it from nothing,” notes Helm.

“o ur first planter, our first tractor, our first truck and trailer -- all of that was money put up by livestock producers, primarily the hog producers. Without producer support, we would have never made it. In fact, I think the odds the g overnment had at the time were that we would be lucky to last three years!”

He adds, “I told producers that as long as they continued to support me, I would be here to work for them. and they have supported me and the program over the years, not just with money but politically also.” Currently groups like the alberta Beef producers and alberta Barley Commission are providing support for the program.

FCDC’s growth and changes

The Field Crop Development Centre has come a long way since 1977. Today it is a world-class research centre that includes the research farm, laboratory and cold seed storage facilities in downtown Lacombe, and plant growth facilities at the James H. Helm Cereal research Centre. and while barley breeding programs at many other research centres in western Canada have been discontinued or in decline since the 1980s, the FCDC has increased its breeding staff.

“It took phenomenal effort and foresight to create the Field Crop Development Centre, the breeding program, the facilities. It was Jim’s vision; he was the driving force behind it. What a solid foundation he has laid for us!” says Dr. pat Juskiw, the FCDC’s two-row barley breeder. She notes, “Without Jim, I wouldn’t be here; Dr. Joseph nyachiro, [six-row and hulless barley breeder], Mazan aljarrah [triticale and winter wheat breeder], Dr. Mary Lou Swift [feed quality scientist], our biotech group, our pathology group – none of us would be here if it wasn’t for Jim.”

Helm emphasizes, “ none of this would have been possible without the help of a fantastic team, some who have been with me for over 30 years.” Some of those people include: Dave Dyson, who was invaluable in developing the facility and the program team; the late Dr. Donald Salmon, who was instrumental in advancing triticale; Bill Stewart, lead barley technician who ran the barley breeding program; the late Manuel Cortez, germplasm development scientist; and Stan Hand in research Farm o perations.

Feed grains, especially barley and triticale, have remained the primary focus of the breeding program, but the program now also includes barley breeding for malting and food uses. a significant step forward for barley breeding came in 1993 with the signing of the alberta/Canada Barley Development a greement to develop new barley cultivars for alberta and the peace river region of British Columbia. The agreement is currently between a griculture and a gri-Food Canada (aaFC), alberta a griculture and rural Development (aarD), the alberta Barley Commission and the alberta Crop Industry Development Fund. In terms of research roles, aarD’s FCDC is responsible for variety development and genetic resources, while aaFC focuses on plant pathology, agronomy and field testing.

This agreement isn’t the only area of collaboration for the FCDC. Both Helm and Juskiw emphasize that the breeding program is part of a national effort. The FCDC also works closely

The Field Crop Development Centre’s breeding program emphasizes high-yielding varieties that do well across a range of soil and climate conditions.

with the two other western Canada barley breeding programs, one at the Crop Development Centre at Saskatoon and the other at aaFC’s Brandon research Centre. and it collaborates with a triticale breeding program at aaFC’s Lethbridge research Centre. The breeders test and screen each other’s breeding lines, share germplasm, and exchange ideas and information.

Improved germplasm

“The real strength of our breeding program has been the introduction of new germplasm for improved yields, disease resistance, and so on,” says Juskiw. For instance, Helm worked closely with Dr. Hugo Vivar at ICar Da – CIMMYT in Mexico, and introduced Vivar’s high quality, disease-resistant barley germplasm into Canadian breeding programs, leading to the release of varieties like Seebe and Vivar. Twenty-two of the twenty-eight barley varieties developed by the FCDC have this international germplasm as a base.

The FCDC’s breeding program has always emphasized development of high-yielding varieties that do well across a diverse range of soil and climate conditions. The varieties released over the years also have a range of additional traits such as early maturity, strong straw, feed value, and resistance to diseases like smut, scald and net blotch.

Juskiw has seen some changes within the overall breeding objectives over the years. o ne example is disease resistance. “Disease resistance has always been a high priority, but the diseases have changed. We didn’t even talk about diseases like fusarium head blight and stripe rust 20 years ago because they weren’t here. But now they are prevalent, so they are in our breeding objectives.”

For Darcy Kirtzinger, policy and research Coordinator for the alberta Barley Commission, one of the program’s key aspects is that it develops varieties to meet the needs of both growers and end-users. “Through Jim’s leadership over the years, he knows everyone in the industry, and he understands the requirements of the different end-uses – feeding, malting, human food and different niche markets, like shochu. and he has constantly been in touch with alberta farmers through the Barley Commission to ask: is this the direction you want me to be going

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in? He’s got committees within the breeding program that take input from all the different groups and then he incorporates that into the program objectives.”

Selection of breeding material has been advanced through the use of near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy ( nIr S), a tool to rapidly measure feed and malt quality. Helm has been at the forefront of the use of nIr S in agriculture, pioneering its use in breeding programs and in feed testing, and working to develop accurate calibrations of the technology for different quality traits.

nIr S uses near-infrared light to scan a whole grain sample. The data from the scan is related to data from traditional evaluation techniques, like chemistry tests or feeding trials, to predict quality characteristics. although nIr S requires careful calibration, it offers a lot of advantages over those traditional techniques.

“p lant breeding, in a way, is like playing roulette – the more numbers you cover, the better your chances are that you’re going to win. Using nIr S for quality analysis instead of going through the very expensive and long process of using wet labs for everything gives us a better chance of finding those lines that will be the winners,” says Helm. “Without nIr S, you could take a maximum of about 2000 lines a year through a lab for malt quality because you have to malt each sample and then run it through all of the quality analyses. With nIr S, we’re evaluating over 40,000 lines a year in our program.”

Big benefits from breeding

The varieties released by FCDC and the other barley breeding programs have provided many benefits, including contributing to the upward yield trend. For instance, in 1973 in alberta, barley yielded an average of 39.0 bushels per acre. In 2011, it yielded 67.0 bushels per acre.

according to Helm, several studies have assessed the economic impacts of the FCDC’s breeding program. For instance, a study in 2002 found an internal rate of return of nearly 30% on the investment in FCDC’s feed barley development program from 1973 to 2001. another study estimated that the program’s impact to farmers was over $5 billion in 2005, and the benefits have likely grown since then. The rest of the barley value chain – from crop input suppliers, to the trucking, feeding, processing, and retailing sectors – also gains economic benefits from varietal improvements.

o ne small example of the program’s benefits comes from Mastin Seeds in Sundre, alberta. Mastin Seeds is the distributor for Sundre barley, a variety bred by the FCDC and registered in 2006. This smooth-awned, six-row barley has high grain and silage yields, strong straw, good kernel plumpness and scald resistance. Sundre barley was the first variety that Bob Mastin bid on when he became a seed distributor, and its success helped get his business off to a good beginning.

“That little variety has done more for me than I could ever imagine. It looked good when I applied for it, and it has turned out to be even better,” says Bob Mastin. not only has Sundre barley been very popular in western Canada, but he says the russians have found that it performs very well in their conditions and it is now a registered variety in russia. Sundre barley also appears to have good potential for the Japanese barley tea market.

Mastin currently distributes varieties from various breeding programs, including several other FCDC varieties. He notes, “I’m impressed with the quality of the people at the Field Crop Development Centre, the quality of the breeding, and what they have in the pipeline for the future. It’s a world-class breeding institution.”

Challenges, opportunities ahead

Breeding programs need to set their breeding objectives to suit the conditions that will exist in about 10 or 20 years because it takes many years to develop a variety. Trying to predict the future is a big challenge, especially these days.

Plant breeding, in a way, is like playing roulette – the more numbers you cover, the better your chances are that you’re going to win.

“I think the real challenge ahead for the program is to adjust to what the market changes will be. The Canadian Wheat Board is not a single desk any more. How will that change things? are we going to see more feed wheat, or is barley still going to have a role there? Will triticale still have a place, especially for the work we’re doing in swath grazing?” asks Juskiw.

“and what will happen in the livestock industry? It’s really challenging right now with the drought in the U.S. What about biofuel production? Biofuel was very strong at the beginning of this century, but now people saying biofuels are taking away from food production and asking if that is viable in a world that will soon have 9 billion people. and where is our climate taking us? How do we best respond to extreme weather conditions? How long will our growing season be in 20 years?”

The Barley Commission’s Kirtzinger notes, “We really don’t know the impact of the open market just yet on barley. Certainly a lot of world forces are at play affecting the volatility of grain prices. I don’t know how that will play out in terms of the future for barley here. We’ve seen some declines in barley acreage over the last five years in western Canada, and whether or not farmers will see enough incentive to grow more barley or to grow other grains at the expense of barley, it’s too early to tell.”

From Helm’s perspective, one of the biggest challenges ahead for all crop production is that very few young people are going into crop breeding in Canada and worldwide. “I know of crop breeding positions that have been open for two years, internationally, and they can’t find people.… everything has gone to the biotech side of things, and nobody has been training practical plant breeders, people to be in the field and look at it from the viewpoint that the farmer will look at it down the road.”

However Helm sees some intriguing prospects ahead as well. “When I started, we were way ahead of the medical field in terms of genetics and understanding things like disease resistance. now the medical field has moved way ahead of us. Some of their advances will relate to other living things like plants. I think we could learn a lot from each other if people in the medical field and people in the plant field would start talking to each other. That’s where I think there is huge potential: getting young, smart and interested people working on the molecular biology behind disease resistance in crops.”

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 8

Weed seedbank at end of 4-yr study – N placement

After four years of nitrogen applications, the weed seedbank is much larger for surface broadcasting than for the subsurface placement options.

spreading of manure from the feedlot industry. Manure is reasonably high in nutrients but it’s especially high in phosphorus. When manure is spread, some of these species that respond highly to phosphorus have a tendency to take off in those fields.”

He notes, “a second option is that, if you know you have that weed in your field, then you could think about the best way to disadvantage it in terms of the nutrient. That might involve how or when you apply your fertilizer.”

another possibility, if you’re dealing with high-nitrogen-response weeds, is to grow a legume crop, such as peas or lentils. “The legume crop would fix its own nitrogen, so it would be getting nitrogen. and you wouldn’t be applying any nitrogen fertilizer in that case, so the weeds wouldn’t be able to get the nitrogen,” explains Blackshaw.

Perseverance pays

“It was very consistent in all of our studies with nitrogen and phosphorus that the big advantage is if you do the practice for several years in a row,” says Blackshaw. “Maybe you saw only a small effect in the first year, but it was more in the second year, more in the third year, more in the fourth year.”

That is, if your fertilizer practices disadvantage a weed species in one year, then those weeds will be smaller and produce much less seed, so there will be less weed seed to germinate in subsequent years. If you continue to disadvantage that weed species year after year, you can have a significant effect on the weed seedbank.

He adds, “Many of these non-chemical weed control methods [such as fertilizer management practices, crop rotations and higher seeding rates] do not have as big an effect on weeds as herbicides, and their real power is sometimes not evident until several years after you switch to that practice.”

Ec O -f Ri EN dly phONE ca SE WiT h flax fi BRE a N d ShiVE

Spinning new market opportunities for flax.

by Carolyn King

In the old fairy tale, rumpelstiltskin spins flax straw into gold. o n the Canadian prairies, o pen Mind Developments is transforming flax straw into eco-friendly i p hone cases. This innovative idea could blossom into a much bigger opportunity for the Saskatoon-based company, and help augment efforts to grow the flax fibre industry in the province.

Flax’s tough, durable straw can be a residue management challenge for oilseed flax growers. The straw is slow to break down and the long fibres can get tangled around field implements. In the past, growers usually burned the straw. Fortunately there are other options these days, including some opportunities to sell the straw.

Developing value-added opportunities to use flax straw offers economic, environmental and societal benefits, explains Linda Braun, executive director of the Saskatchewan Flax Development Commission, or SaskFlax. “If we look at the economics from a producer’s point of view, complete plant utilization adds increased net returns per acre for his flax crop. a second economic reason is that new farmers are hesitant to grow flax because dealing with the straw can be a challenge. When the process becomes more profitable, farmers become more interested and are willing to adapt some of their harvest practices to realize the value of that straw.

“From an environmental perspective, we’re seeing around the globe a very growing trend to use biological, biodegradable, renewable products, from natural fibres in the plastics industry to textiles to the auto industry. Flax fibre is both strong and light so, for example, the auto industry is interested because using it in car parts makes the vehicle lighter, which helps increase gas mileage ratings. By incorporating those fibres, the auto industry uses something renewable and also decreases pollution.”

From a societal viewpoint, Braun says developing the flax fibre industry in Saskatchewan would increase job opportunities in businesses along the value chain, ranging from custom baling and transport, to primary processing companies, to secondary processors, like o pen Mind.

Starting small for a growing idea

o pen Mind president Jeremy Lang came up with idea for the phone cases: “I have a bachelor of science in agriculture from the University of Saskatchewan, and I’ve always thought flax fibre was neat and I thought it was a shame that the straw often gets burned in the fields. I also knew that bioplastics are made from biopolymers, which are made from plants, while conventional plastic is derived from crude oil. But currently, biopolymer products aren’t typically made to be tough; they are made into single-use items like utensils.

“So my idea was, instead of burning the flax straw, to add it to biopolymers to add strength to them and to give them a unique appearance.”

Lang was able to get some funding assistance from the Canadian a gricultural adaptation program and the Saskatchewan a gri-Value Initiative for a feasibility study and a business plan for his unique concept. He has developed a proprietary formula for mixing flax fibre and shive (the non-fibre part of the flax stem) with biopolymers to create a distinctive-looking, ecofriendly bioplastic, with the trademarked name Flaxstic.

To make Flaxstic, o pen Mind uses flax straw grown in Manitoba and Saskatchewan and processed by Biolin research in

Saskatchewan and Schweitzer-Mauduit Canada in Manitoba. The biopolymers come from the United States. according to Lang, “The biopolymers are made from annually renewable, non-food source plants. They have a smaller carbon footprint than conventional plastics.”

The case for the i p hone 4 and 4S is o pen Mind’s first product made from Flaxstic. “I wanted to start with a very simple product that could showcase the technology, to prove that it can be done. The i p hone 4 cases are simple, and they require only a small amount of the biopolymer, which is our big cost. and ip hones are purchased by a demographic that we reach very easily with online marketing,” explains Lang.

o pen Mind markets its phone case under the product name pela. Lang says, “The Spanish word ‘pela’ loosely translates as ‘peel’, so the phone case is like an apple peel, or a natural peel or cover for your apple product. and like an apple peel, it biodegrades and goes back to the earth. and our logo for pela is a crosssection of a flax seed capsule, a pentagon shape with 10 seeds in it.”

o pen Mind’s first version of the pela case came out in September 2011. It was a hard, form-fitting case. Since then,

the company has been working with different biopolymer manufacturers to improve the biopolymer to meet o pen Mind’s specific needs.

So now o pen Mind has a new, improved case. “In September 2012, we’re launching a new pela case for the i p hone 4 and the i p hone 5. It is a soft case, almost like a rubber. It’s a better designed, more protective case, and it’s backyard compostable. We’re pretty excited about that,” says Lang.

So far, the phone cases have been available online (pelacase.com) and in SaskTel corporate stores in Saskatchewan. Lang is working with distributors in Vancouver and Toronto to get the product into more stores when the new case is released.

Flaxstic opportunities

Lang sees the potential to use Flaxstic for a lot more than phone cases.

“My plan is to promote using Flaxstic to distinguish bioplastic in the marketplace and help separate it in the recycling stream. So any eco-friendly, biodegradable, compostable bioplastic would have a natural flax shive in it to give a special look,” he explains.

“Separating bioplastic from regular plastic in recycling facilities is impor-

tant because bioplastic needs to be treated differently than regular plastic, so a product made from biopolymers can’t get mixed in with regular plastic. There has been a lot of money spent on trying to figure out an easy way to separate it in the recycling stream, like using nearinfrared technology. g iving bioplastic a distinctive appearance would help to separate it.”

Lang adds, “That special look is also how we’re trying to stand out in the marketplace. There are a couple of other eco-friendly i p hone 4 cases made from biopolymers, but they look just like regular plastic. o ur idea is, if it’s going to be eco-friendly, then it should look ecofriendly, so people rethink plastic and help to promote the use of more sustainable plastic and products.”

This fall, o pen Mind will be increasing its efforts to market Flaxstic to other industries, like companies that manufacture shampoo or detergent containers, sandals, consumer electronics and pet products. Lang says, “We’ll be able to manufacture other people’s products with Flaxstic or license the formula to other industries.”

Advancing the flax straw value chain

“We use Jeremy Lang’s i p hone cases as speaker gifts for a lot of our events,” notes SaskFlax’s Braun. “It’s Saskatchewan-made, it’s easy to take home if you’re flying, it reminds you of innovation, and it’s a great example of what you can do with flax straw.”

She believes Saskatchewan has the potential to lead the agricultural fibres industry in Canada. “We grow the most flax, and we have the potential to increase net returns to growers. We have the potential to develop successful primary processing facilities, and there’s a whole host of value-added businesses coming forth, like o pen Mind Developments, naturally advanced Technologies, which has a technology for using flax and hemp straw to produce fibres, and advance Fibrenomics, which is looking at setting up a plant early in 2013 to use natural fibres in building products like insulation.”

Through a number of initiatives, SaskFlax is working on developing the feedstock portion of the flax straw value chain. Braun highlights some examples.

Flax shive, the non-fibre part of the flax stem, can be used for things like mulch, animal bedding, and filler in plastics and bioplastics.

For instance, the producer group has undertaken research to determine the percentage of fibre in various flax varieties. Braun explains, “For example, if you live in an area in southeast Saskatchewan where we currently have buyers for flax straw, you could grow varieties with a higher fibre content in the straw. If you’re in an area where there is no po -

tential to sell the straw, then to make life easier with your chopping equipment, you could plant varieties with very low fibre.”

another example is SaskFlax’s effort over about the past 10 years to develop flax fibre and shive standards under a STM International, a globally recognized voluntary standards organization.

SaskFlax has developed standardized terminology and standard testing procedures for things like fibre colour and fineness. “The development of these standards will help secondary manufacturers understand what our flax fibres can do, and then we can give them specific fibres for specific tasks. …It will help the value-added players understand how flax can fit into their product development,” explains Braun.

The producer group is also working with a Quebec manufacturing company. This project involves testing ways to manage flax straw so the fibre can be used for clothing, a high-end opportunity that requires ‘retting’ in the field by the grower. retting involves having the straw come in contact with the soil so soil microbes will slightly decompose the straw, causing the fibre to start separating from the shive. SaskFlax is comparing various treatments to prepare the straw for retting. Then the retted straw from the treatments will be sent for processing and the resulting fibres will go to Quebec where some spinners and fabric makers will test them to see if the fibres might meet their needs.

These types of initiatives and the efforts of innovative entrepreneurs like Lang are all part of advancing the flax straw value chain and providing flax growers with more opportunities for complete plant utilization.

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aNOT h ER MaRk ET iNg OpTiON f OR ca NOla g ROWERS

CWB offers a canola pool for the second largest crop in western Canada.

by Carolyn King

Although the Canadian Wheat Board – now known as CWB – has lost its monopoly for marketing wheat and barley with the recent Marketing Freedom for Farmers act, CWB has gained the freedom to market any crop. So on august 23, 2012, it announced its first canola pool.

“We have been hearing for some time, even back over the last few years, that some groups of farmers were keen to see the Canadian Wheat Board get involved in canola. now that the market is open in terms of our freedom to be involved in other crops, we feel canola is a good choice,” explains Ian White, CWB president and Ceo.

“Canola is the second largest crop in western Canada. running canola pools is very similar to running our wheat and barley pools, which is something we are very used to, so we felt we could be effective. and we felt we had a good fit with a range of customers that we currently service for wheat that were quite prepared to talk to us about canola.”

CWB’s pool return outlook is $640/tonne ($10.77/bushel) for number 1 canola, and $627/tonne ($10.48/bushel) for number 2. The initial payments for farmers are: $475/tonne for number 1, and $462/per tonne for number 2.

“our initial payments with all our pools will be about 75% of what we see as the expected pool return at that time,” notes White.

The sign-up deadline for the canola pool is october 31, 2012, with a marketing period that runs to June 30, 2013. CWB doesn’t own any grain handling facilities; at present it has 42 farmer delivery points for canola, negotiated with parrish & Heimbecker and

some smaller independent companies, but it hopes to add more locations. (CWB has already reached handling agreements for wheat, durum and barley with all the western Canadian grain companies.)

With the recent legislative changes, farmers must negotiate directly with the grain handling companies regarding the company’s fees for things like freight and handling of CWB-contracted crops. (Farmers who have been marketing their own canola will be familiar with canola prices that are based on the futures market minus the company’s local basis. The basis typically includes costs for things like handling, transportation, storage, hedging and a profit margin for the company.)

Risk management option

David Wong, a grain and oilseed market specialist with alberta agriculture and rural Development, explains the pooling concept: “a pool tries to capture an average of the prices, so you don’t get superpremium prices but you don’t hit the lows either. and hopefully you’ll get a slightly higher return than the average price because whoever is administering the pool will be looking for a good price when they start moving the canola.”

White says, “The canola pool is another option for farmers in terms of risk management. rather than a farmer taking a cash price, and trying to pick the day to take the cash price, the pool offers the

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opportunity to take a range of prices over time. Hopefully they will do as well as or better than they would if they followed the cash market.”

“I think anything that gives farmers an option is a good thing, including this canola pool,” says Brett Halstead, a Saskatchewan producer in the nokomis area and Board Chair of the Saskatchewan Canola Development Commission.

He adds, “Some people aren’t comfortable with doing the marketing or pricing. a canola pool allows them the option to have a group with some expertise do it, so they can concentrate more on production.”

CWB has over 75 years of experience in grain marketing, and it sells grain to over 70 countries. although canola is a new grain for CWB, it has been preparing for this opportunity. White says, “over the last couple of years, we had done some work on canola. We wanted to understand the relationship between prices being of-

fered to farmers and the futures markets. But that’s a very natural thing for us to do in terms of hedging wheat and barley, and we were able to decide that it was quite manageable.”

Starting in about June 2012, CWB began buying canola from handlers and processors and selling it. “We felt that would be a good way to start in the business. We saw opportunities to make canola sales and then investigated to see if there were opportunities to buy it to match those sales, and we found that there were. So we have traded some canola to some of our longstanding customers,” says White.

Wong notes, “Compared to a wheat pool, a canola pool should be much simpler to administer. Typically we only have two grades of canola, number 1, which is about 80% of alberta’s canola, and number 2, which is about 20%, barring those years when we have really bad fall weather. With the wheat pool, you can have up to four different grades and seven protein levels for

each of the top three grades.”

one of the challenges for CWB is to predict the degree of producer participation in the canola pool. “There is some level of unknown because it’s the first time a canola pool has been offered and it’s our first foray into the business,” notes White.

Wong says, “I guess one challenge with all the CWB pools, including the canola pool, is that we’re in a wait-and-see and learn-as-wego type of situation. We’re not sure how this will all settle out in the end, mainly because CWB has no grain handling facilities. also, if you sell canola directly to a handler or a processor, you know what price you’ll get right away, because you know what the futures price is and what the basis level is.”

Halstead isn’t sure how popular the canola pool will be. “In our area, we have three fairly competitive grain companies bidding for canola. one of them is parrish & Heimbecker, which is also [taking delivery of CWB canola]. everybody makes up their own mind. I’m

sure some will choose the canola pool. In other areas where people are more into producer cars, the pooling option may be bigger. and it depends on each individual producer’s cash needs too.”

producer cars – railway hopper cars that are loaded by farmers – have become increasingly popular in recent years as an alternative to using an elevator. The application procedures for a CWB producer car contract for canola are the same as those for wheat and durum. according to CWB’s website, “Due to the anticipated logistics of the canola pool, producer car opportunities may be limited in some time periods and circumstances.”

Looking ahead, White says, “Canola is a good first additional crop for CWB. We think we’ll be able to add value to farmers here and we hope to get good support from them. We also are looking at what are the next things that we as an organization should be doing in terms of marketing and we’ll assess those in terms of other crops as we go down the track. We’ll see how the canola pool goes first.”

cROppi Ng SySTEM aff Ec TS ROOT a N d c ROWN ROTS

Integrated approach helps reduce disease pressure.

by Carolyn King

By including both organic and non-organic systems in a recent study, prairie researchers have been able to add a few more pieces to the complicated puzzle of how to control root and crown rots in wheat.

root and crown rots of cereal crops have been increasing in the western prairies over the last decade. “For example in the last few years, and especially in 2012, there was a lot of root rot in the fields, particularly in durum wheat, because of the dry conditions. The pathogens are always there [in the soil], and the plant is always defending itself. But with dry conditions during plant development the plant is stressed, so the infection affects the plant and the symptoms show up above ground,” notes Dr. Myriam Fernandez, a plant pathologist with a griculture and a gri-Food Canada (aaFC) at Swift Current, Saskatchewan.

She led the study, which was published in a gronomy Journal in 2011. Her co-authors on the paper were Dan Ulrich, Stewart Brandt, Dr. robert Zenter, Dr. Hong Wang, Dr. g ordon Thomas and Dr. o wen o lfert, all from aaFC.

Wheat plants infected with root and crown rots have brown

to black roots and crowns. above-ground symptoms may include patchy emergence, stunted or dead seedlings, tillers with few seeds, dead tillers, and prematurely ripened spikes called whiteheads. Yield loss can be significant when the symptoms are severe.

Fernandez explains that root and crown rots in wheat can be caused by various fungal pathogens. o n the prairies, Cochliobolus sativus (also known as Bipolaris sorokiniana) and several species of Fusarium are the main causes.

root and crown rots, along with forming a widespread and damaging disease complex, were also of interest to Fernandez because of the link between Fusarium inoculum in the roots and crowns and the spread of fusarium head blight (FHB). FHB is a devastating disease that can produce toxins that limit the grain’s end use.

“o ne of the main Fusarium species we were seeing in the

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In 2012 sclerotinia incidence was worse than 2010 and far worse than 2011. Southeast Saskatchewan experienced much higher incidence than the south-central parts of the province. Seeding date also had a huge effect on levels of incidence.”

Dave Vanthuyne, DuPont Pioneer agronomist for central and southern Saskatchewan

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“As far as incidence and severity, 2012 has been the worst I have seen for sclerotinia since 2007. I saw ranges of incidence from less than 5% to as high as 60% in fields. Some of the fields were sprayed and still had levels in the 30% range.”

Doug Moisey, DuPont Pioneer agronomist for central and northern Alberta

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roots and crowns was Fusarium avenaceum, which has been the most common Fusarium species on heads in Saskatchewan when we do our annual disease surveys,” says Fernandez. These surveys are a joint effort co-ordinated by Saskatchewan a griculture, with commercial fields across the province sampled by Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation staff.

She notes that Fusarium graminearum, the main pathogen responsible for FHB in areas where this disease occurs at high levels, can also infect roots and crowns of wheat. However, the Scott area is not prone to FHB and Fusarium graminearum was not found there by the researchers.

Input system effects

a gronomic practices are important for managing root and crown rots because current wheat varieties do not have good resistance to the disease complex. Fernandez and her colleagues had already done some research on the effects of crop rotation and tillage system in non-organic systems, mostly at Swift Current, which is in the Brown soil zone.

“We had already determined that using reduced tillage and having pulses in the rotation increased the amount of the Fusarium species in the roots and crowns, whereas the levels of Cochliobolus sativus, which is the main pathogen in root rot, decreased. also there was very little Fusarium infection, for example, with wheat after summerfallow, but there was a lot of Cochliobolus sativus,” she notes.

Then Fernandez got an opportunity to carry out a six-year study of root and crown rots in spring wheat as part of a longterm cropping systems experiment at aaFC’s Scott research Farm, in the Dark Brown soil zone. e stablished in the mid1990s, this experiment includes three input systems – an organic system, a reduced input system and a high input system – and three types of crop rotations.

Looking at the root and crown rot problem from an organic angle interested Fernandez for several reasons. “There had not been any similar studies in north america on the effect of organic systems on root and crown rot; the only studies we found were from e urope. We also found publications indicating that fusarium head blight was less common under organic systems than conventional systems, pointing to a very likely effect of an organic versus a non-organic system on Fusarium infections in roots and crowns.”

at Scott, the organic system involved intensive tillage and no chemical inputs. The reduced input system used reduced tillage with targeted fertilizer and weed control inputs. The high input system involved intensive tillage and recommended rates of fertilizers and pesticides. o riginally it was thought that the chemical inputs for the reduced and high input systems would be distinctly different from each other, but they turned out to be fairly similar, demonstrating that the tillage system was the key difference between the reduced and high input systems. The high input and organic systems had similar tillage levels.

The crop rotations included a low diversity rotation, a diversified rotation with annual grains, and a diversified rotation with annual grains and perennial forages. “However, we didn’t really find much of an effect of the crop diversity factor on root and crown rots,” says Fernandez. “The greatest effect was in terms of the input system.”

In particular, the researchers found the input system had

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quite a significant impact on the proportions of the different pathogens.

For Cochliobolus sativus, the organic system tended to have the highest levels of this pathogen, and the reduced tillage system tended to have the lowest levels.

For Fusarium, the impact of the input system depended on the species. The organic system had the lowest levels of Fusarium pathogens, particularly Fusarium avenaceum and Fusarium culmorum. However, it had the highest incidence of Fusarium equiseti, which is a weak pathogen. o ther studies have found that Fusarium equiseti competes with the more pathogenic Fusarium species.

The reduced tillage system had the highest levels of Fusarium avenaceum, and lower levels of Fusarium equiseti.

The high input system tended to have intermediate levels of the Fusarium pathogens, but low levels of Fusarium equiseti.

Fernandez notes, “It has been suggested by other people that, because of the higher microbial diversity in organic systems, there could be more competition, and that could result in an increase

of Fusarium equiseti. But we don’t know the mechanism by which the Fusarium pathogens are decreased in organic systems, whether it’s by direct competition or some other mechanism. We are in the process of looking into that.” potentially this new research might, in the long term, lead to identification of agronomic practices that would help increase levels of Fusarium equiseti in the soil and contribute to the control of important Fusarium pathogens.

The results from the study at Scott have also underlined previous findings that Cochliobolus sativus and Fusarium pathogens seem to thrive under somewhat opposite conditions. That is, when the Cochliobolus sativus levels are high, the levels of the Fusarium pathogens tend to be low, and vice versa. In fact, some earlier studies showed that some type of competition occurs between Fusarium pathogens and Cochliobolus sativus. So Fernandez is doing some field and greenhouse trials to try to pinpoint how the various Fusarium species and Cochliobolus sativus interact and affect each other.

The study at Scott has led to yet another spinoff – it has helped inspire Fernandez and other western Canadian researchers to initiate the first organic research program in the Brown soil zone of Saskatchewan. They are working closely with organic producers to make sure the studies are relevant.

Tips for producers

Controlling root and crown rots isn’t easy, especially given the seesaw between Cochliobolus sativus and the Fusarium pathogens, with some agronomic practices decreasing one while increasing the other.

Fernandez sees the Fusarium pathogens as the greater problem. “a s I look at the spread of fusarium head blight, which was something real that happened this summer, I would be more concerned about Fusarium in roots and crowns than Cochliobolus sativus.” although Cochliobolus sativus can also cause blackpoint, that disease requires wet weather during kernel maturation to cause serious problems, and it does not produce toxins – unlike FHB.

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She adds, “In an area that is prone to fusarium head blight, you might not see FHB in a dry year, but you could still have Fusarium inoculum in the roots and crowns, which would be carried over from one year to the next. a nd it would be in the crop residues too – Fusarium species are very competitive in dead tissue, so right after harvest the fungus starts spreading throughout the residues.” a s a result, high levels of Fusarium species would be in the environment, ready and waiting for the warm, moist conditions that favour development of FHB.

a ccording to Fernandez, three key factors that tend to increase Fusariumcaused root and crown rots in a field are: using reduced tillage, growing durum in the rotation and growing pulses in the rotation. She notes that all crops, including oilseeds, are susceptible to the fungi that cause root and crown rots, but pulses are the most susceptible to Fusarium avenaceum. Durum is generally more susceptible than other wheats to root and crown rots.

Fernandez doesn’t advocate that reduced tillage producers go back to intensive tillage. But she suggests that if producers are facing high levels of root and crown rots, they might consider temporarily changing their rotation by switching from durum to some other crop and/or, by avoiding pulses, trying to reduce the levels of Fusarium avenaceum in the field.

MaNagEMENT TipS fOR SafE gRaiN STORagE

Important tips that apply to most types of small grain storage.

by John Dietz

Fans blowing air through grain in storage may, or may not, be doing the work they need to do. engineers at the prairie agricultural Machinery Institute (paMI), Humboldt, Saskatchewan, took a fresh look at the whole process of conditioning grain in storage over the past few years, and came up with some fresh advice.

Joy agnew is project manager for ag research at paMI-Humboldt. The engineer recently completed a study that began in 2007 on conditioning stored grain on farms.

Size matters

For starters, the shape of the top of the pile inside the bin does matter, agnew says. It affects the distribution of the air moving through the grain.

It’s a non-issue if the grain is dry and cool, but if the grain is too warm, too damp or too dry and needs conditioning, don’t pile it up and don’t fill the bin beyond the eave. It should be close to level before the air is turned on.

generally, air moving up from the bottom forms a slow-moving “drying front” inside the bin as it pushes moisture up and out.

“When it’s allowed to cone up, that will increase the amount of time required to get the drying front to move through,” she says.

“The bin that’s filled into the top cone has the most grain, the greatest depth and the smallest surface area to release air and moisture. above the eve, the hatch at the top is the only place for air to escape.”

The depth of the grain is important. paMI found extension documents stating fan horsepower requirements in terms of volume without reference to grain depth. That’s misleading because, in fact, static pressure determines the required fan size – and depth is the primary component in static pressure.

“Tons of guidelines show the fan size based on bin size,” agnew says. “In reality, fan size should be based on grain depth. Static pressure depends more on depth than volume.”

For example, she says, a three-horsepower fan usually can provide natural air drying for a 3,000-bushel bin that’s holding 10 feet of grain. However, it takes a five-horsepower fan to do the same job if the bin is narrower and an equal amount of grain is 15 feet deep.

Manometer test

a simple device called a manometer will measure the static pressure inside a bin as a fan pushes air through the pile.

“Static pressure is fairly simple to measure yourself,” agnew says. “You can purchase manometers from fan suppliers, or you can rig one yourself.”

Building a manometer requires a piece of flexible transparent quarter-inch tubing, duct tape, a short ruler and a board. The Saskatchewan Ministry of agriculture factsheet, Natural Grain Drying, has instructions on building your own manometer.

TOP: Aeration or natural air drying is dependent on properly sizing your fan and ducting.

Fan

ABOVE: The fan was only on 45 percent of the time, and that includes the three or four days when it ran almost continuously trying to rewet the grain at the bottom. Notice that the ambient air usually had the potential to dry between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m.

The pressurized end of the tube is attached in the transition duct inside, between the fan and the distribution system. The other end is mounted outside on the board, vertically, so that the whole tube, if you could see it in profile, would be U-shaped.

Then, without operating the fan, pour water into the open end of the tube so that the tube is sealed inside by the water. p ut a mark at the base level and do one-inch marks above that for about 10 inches.

partially fill the bin. Turn on the fan, and pressure will build inside the transition duct. The pressure pushes water up the manometer and is measured in inches of water column. Count the marks to read the static pressure.

“a s you’re filling the bin keep an eye on the manometer. If you know your fan puts out 2,000 cfm at five inches of water column, then you fill the bin until you get five inches of water column pressure. You’re guaranteed to have 2,000 cfm and you can determine the flow rate depending on the number of bushels in the bin,” she says.

Flow rate confusion

There are two flow rates in use for similar purposes, which leads to a lot of confusion in discussions and documents, the engineer says.

aeration (cooling) can be achieved with an airflow rate of 0.1 to 0.2 cfm/bushel. If the air is cooler than the grain, the grain will cool. This is a slow process that’s fine if the grain is warm but dry.

natural air drying uses 10 to 20 times the fan power to actually dry the grain, at about 1 to 2 cfm/bushel.

However, the metric standard for aeration (1-2 L/s per m³) has the same numerical value as natural air drying (1 to 2 cfm/ bushel).

“people say aeration is one or two, but what are the units? When you don’t put the unit factors into a document, or discussion, you don’t know what they’re talking about,” she says.

Aeration versus natural

The pa MI team also learned that many people don’t really know the difference between aeration and natural air drying.

The fundamental different is airflow rate. aerating only attempts to cool the grain to get it to a safe storage temperature. It can be done with a very low flow rate and little fan power. The only issue of concern is that the air outside is cooler than the grain.

natural air drying uses much more power and relies on capacity to dry as air moves through the grain. The issues are more complex, with moisture content replacing cooling as the main concern.

JOy agNeW, PaMi

“Moisture movement from grain to air is very slow when the air temperature is less than 10 degrees, so natural air drying is not recommended below 10 degrees,” a gnew says.

“adding heat to ambient air will increase its capacity to remove moisture and is an effective way to extend the drying season. In some years, conditions will not result in drying without a hot air system.”

Effect of grain depth on static pressure

ABOVE Canola & Mustard - this chart illustrates the effect of grain depth on static pressure. If you want to achieve 1 cfm/bushel, you need to run at seven inches for a depth of 15 feet and only three inches for a depth of 10 feet. Depending on fan size and type (size) of canola, grain depths of 8.5 to 12 feet will result in sufficient airflow rates for NAD.

di VERSificaTiON

f OR SuccESS

Soon after they began farming about 10 years ago, the old model wasn’t working; they developed a new one.

by John Dietz

Like two plus two, the logic adds up when it comes to sustainable farming. Something had to change when andrew and Tanis De ruyck committed to becoming the next generation to own and farm six quarters in south-central Manitoba.

That was about 10 years ago. Last year, 2011, they were selected as Manitoba’s o utstanding Young Farmers. They were still on the land first farmed by andrew’s great grandfather back in the 1940s, making a go of it, raising two children, working beside andrew’s parents and getting along with andrew’s three non-farming sisters.

r ather than taking off-farm jobs, rather than trying some novel idea to mine more money from the acres, rather than going deeply into debt to finance their way out of a problem, the couple did a little two-plus-two analysis.

They saw strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWo T). The SWo T analysis was a little technique an-

drew had learned through his five years as a Farm Credit Corporation advisor.

For their situation, the analysis pointed to offering service as farm management consultants.

Background

andrew and Tanis met while they were studying toward agriculture degrees at the University of Manitoba. He was two years ahead of her. Tanis had grown up in the town of Dauphin. after being married and having their first child, they decided to make the move to the farm and raise their family.

The De ruyck farm is between p ilot Mound and Mariapolis on rolling, good quality farmland. a s a boy, andrew knew it as

TOP: The cows are gone and new machinery is paying for itself. INSET: Andrew, Tanis, Ben and Paige DeRuyck are carrying on the multi-generational farm started by Andrew’s great grandfather.

a mixed farm with about 900 cultivated acres and 40 cows. one day, he hoped, he would farm and raise a family there.

“When I was 18, or whatever, I didn’t think I could really afford to farm. I didn’t have any idea of the financial requirements, but it just didn’t seem feasible at all,” he says.

andrew got his ag degree in 1995, and began the first of four off-farm jobs over the next six years. He worked in product development with two chemical companies, then moved on to the FCC and later the CIBC.

He and Tanis started full-time farming with his folks in 2001. By then, the “hobby” herd had grown to include about 275 head and a small feedlot for finishing steers. nearly the entire farm was in a corn-canola-and-alfalfa rotation.

“I started buying my first cows as an income tax write-off. Those first couple years after university, I was paying about $2 tax on every five dollars I earned, so there was nothing left to invest. The first year was pretty tough – I didn’t get the refund I was expecting. I got my refund the next year, bought more cows, and it started to snowball,” he says.

The De ruyck farm transition was rolling along very well by May 2003, he recalls. Tanis had taken over the accounting; she was home full time with the family. Cattle prices were high. They sold 100 steers – their first big shipment.

“I was lucky,” he says. “My first crop of steers got slaughtered the day that BS e hit. The killing plant confirmed they’d been killed that morning. Shortly after, there were animals being shipped back home.”

It would be years before cattle prices would recover. The Deruyck farm enterprise, supporting two families, no longer was viable.

Transition

andrew fell back onto his financial training at the FCC.

“FCC had a really good training program and gave me a lot of knowledge about financial management. I started looking at ways to apply that, and got contracts with Canadian Farm Business advisory Services (CFBa S) program and Farm Debt Mediation Services,” he says.

In the crisis time that summer, he and Tanis analyzed their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Their strengths were in education and the financial training andrew had received. The farming operation was a weakness, at that time. It had enough working capital, but the timing for expansion was wrong for them.

“I had to find something that would make some money without a lot of investment. That’s why I used my education instead of my financial resources. I started the consulting business, got some contracts with the government and started private consulting.”

private consulting was soon a flourishing business for the cattleman. He became a go-to guy for farms in the region that were in a financial corner for taxes, cash flow, risk management, financial management, farm expansions, retirement and succession planning.

De ruyck and a brother-in-law with FCC background, Mark Sloane, partnered in a 2009 joint venture, right Choice Management Consulting. Both De ruyck and Sloane love sharing their passion, real-life experiences and knowledge with their clients. Their experience and expertise has proven invaluable

for a wide variety of clients from around Western Canada. They provide mediation services as well as farm management advice. along the way, andrew recalls, they had discovered a “market” or niche for someone to mediate for farm families internally as well as between families and creditors. They found a similar need for mediation between rural boards of directors and their business managers.

“Consulting fits our skills and really adds value to the farm. We made a conscious decision to be diversified in that way,” he says.

Giftedness

Doing financial consulting was not a “natural” for De ruyck. He was not fond of math or numbers in the classroom. He describes it as a learned skill that developed after he began working with farmers at FCC.

“I didn’t learn it at university. I didn’t learn it from a book. at FCC, I started noticing my top clients knew their numbers. They were doing their cash flows. That really helped me to determine the value of it, and once I realized the value, I started paying more attention at home, on my own farm. o nce that happens that’s what makes a consultant exceptional,” he says.

It’s good to go through a SWo T analysis for any farm, but particularly if the farm is under financial stress, he says.

Many diversification ideas are high-risk ventures – and not at all suited – for more than a small number of farms. He’s learned, diversification must “revolve around your individual strengths and opportunities” to be successful.

By grasping the consulting strength, opportunities emerged to make the De ruyck farm in this generation more sustainable than ever.

The farm has grown to 1,400 acres of grains and oilseeds. There’s different machinery in the sheds, each item paying for itself with either farmed or custom farmed acres. The cows are gone. The peaceful succession to new farm ownership is well underway. and there’s a new generation, Ben and paige, learning the ropes of integrated family farming.

MEaSuRiNg ha RVEST lOSS i N ca NOla

Losses can be surprisingly high.

by Bruce Barker

It is a fact of life that there is some harvest loss of canola seed during harvest. What may not be known, though, is how high those losses really are. research conducted by robert gulden when he was at the University of Saskatchewan in the early 2000s found that average yield losses of 5.9 percent were observed, with a range of 3.3 to 9.9 percent.

gulden, who is now at the University of Manitoba, is updating that research in a prairie-wide study of canola harvest losses. The third year of trials is being completed in the fall of 2012, and final results of the study will then be released.

Jim Bessel, former Canola Council of Canada agronomist, has spent a lot of time looking at harvest losses in canola. He worked with Les Hill at the prairie agriculture Machinery Institute at Humboldt, Saskatchewan, to develop ways to measure actual harvest losses. Bessel says harvest losses can be minimized by using proper combine settings.

“It takes a change in mindset. There is a productivity-to-efficiency ratio that farmers look at. How fast can you go and still have

By

acceptable losses,” says Bessel.

The first step, though, is to measure actual loss. Forget the combine monitor, because it doesn’t measure actual loss, and only tells you when losses are rising or falling – unless it is calibrated with actual harvest loss out the back of the combine. The only accurate way to measure loss is to spend some time actually measuring the loss by getting a little dirty.

Hill’s approach uses a drop pan of some sort to measure actual loss. He prefers a large metal pan that matches the full width of a combine’s discharge area that attaches to the bottom of the combine and can be released with the pull of a lever. agriTrac equipment in Westlock, alberta, has also developed a full-width pan that attaches by magnet to the belly of the combine. To release the pan, the combine operator unplugs the magnet cord from its power source. The

TOP: No matter the colour of the combine, canola harvest losses can average six percent.

INSET: Four toonies’ worth of canola seed in the corner of a onefoot-square catch pan equals a loss of one bushel per acre.

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full-width pan is useful because it assesses losses across the entire discharge width. a stick pan can also be made by attaching a broom handle to a pan with deep sides. another approach is to simply throw a deepsided pan under the combine discharge. a one-foot-square pan works best with the conversion charts that Hill has developed.

Calculating seed loss

STEP 1: Collect the sample. Disengage the chaff spreader and straw chopper and move them out of the way. Drop, throw or hold the pan under the discharge area. Clean the sample.

STEP 2: Calculate the concentration factor (CF): Divide the width of the windrow, or header, by the width of the discharge without choppers or headers. This is a ratio of header width and combine discharge width. For example, if the header is 30 feet and the discharge width is five feet, then the CF is “6.”

STEP 3: Weigh the cleaned sample and calculate the loss on a foot-square basis by dividing the weight by the square footage of

the drop pan. If your pan is two square feet, for example, divide the weight by two to get the total for one square foot.

STEP 4: Use the table to calculate per-acre loss.

STEP 5: repeat sampling process several times to ensure accuracy.

What is surprising about the measurement is that only four toonies’ worth of

canola seed in the corner of a one-footsquare catch pan amounts to a loss of one bushel per acre.

as Bessel mentions, whether the calculated loss is acceptable comes down to a balance of harvest speed with seed loss. Cutting losses to one percent might be achievable, but higher losses might be worthwhile if they mean getting the crop in the bin sooner. The key, though, is knowing what your losses are.

Weighing Method - All Crops

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full-width pan is useful because it assesses losses across the entire discharge width. a stick pan can also be made by attaching a broom handle to a pan with deep sides. another approach is to simply throw a deepsided pan under the combine discharge. a one-foot-square pan works best with the conversion charts that Hill has developed.

Calculating seed loss

STEP 1: Collect the sample. Disengage the chaff spreader and straw chopper and move them out of the way. Drop, throw or hold the pan under the discharge area. Clean the sample.

STEP 2: Calculate the concentration factor (CF): Divide the width of the windrow, or header, by the width of the discharge without choppers or headers. This is a ratio of header width and combine discharge width. For example, if the header is 30 feet and the discharge width is five feet, then the CF is “6.”

STEP 3: Weigh the cleaned sample and calculate the loss on a foot-square basis by dividing the weight by the square footage of

the drop pan. If your pan is two square feet, for example, divide the weight by two to get the total for one square foot.

STEP 4: Use the table to calculate per-acre loss.

STEP 5: repeat sampling process several times to ensure accuracy.

What is surprising about the measurement is that only four toonies’ worth of

canola seed in the corner of a one-footsquare catch pan amounts to a loss of one bushel per acre.

as Bessel mentions, whether the calculated loss is acceptable comes down to a balance of harvest speed with seed loss. Cutting losses to one percent might be achievable, but higher losses might be worthwhile if they mean getting the crop in the bin sooner. The key, though, is knowing what your losses are.

Weighing Method - All Crops

gETT iNg a li TT lE MORE

hE lp f ROM fa RMERS’

MaN y-l E gg E d f Ri EN dS

Learning more about non-pest biodiversity could help reduce pest control costs in canola.

by Carolyn King

Beneficial insects perform valuable tasks for farmers such as pollinating crops, parasitizing or preying on insect pests, and decomposing crop residues for nutrient cycling. a crucial first step towards enhancing the use of beneficial insects in integrated crop management systems is to find out what species we actually have in our crops. a three-year project is underway to begin that fundamental step for insects in Canadian canola crops.

“I think researchers have done reasonably well at understanding the insect pest species, and we have developed some reasonably good economic thresholds and advice to farmers on the pests. But there is a whole amazing biodiversity of insects that are poorly known or not known at all,” explains Dr. Lloyd Dosdall, an entomologist at the University of alberta, who is leading the project.

“For instance, in a study on parasitoids of the cabbage seedpod weevil in the mid-2000s, we discovered a species new to science –it had never been found before. We also found about a dozen other species where all we knew about those species were their names; we had no idea how they functioned in the canola agro-ecosystem. Some of those species have turned out to be extremely important natural enemies of this weevil.

“So I think there is a whole remarkable set of ‘resource’ insects that are waiting to be discovered and documented in canola. We’re trying to do that in this project.”

The project’s aim is to start building baseline knowledge about the biodiversity of non-pest arthropods in canola. arthropods are animals with an exoskeleton, a segmented body and jointed legs, such as insects, spiders, mites, millipedes and centipedes.

The other members of the project’s research team are Dr. Hector Carcamo with agriculture and agri-Food Canada (aaFC) in Lethbridge, Dr. John Spence with the University of alberta, and Dr. Jim Broatch with alberta agriculture and rural Development in Lacombe.

The project, which started in 2010, is funded through the Canola/Flax Canadian agri-Science Cluster, a joint initiative of aaFC and the Canola Council of Canada (CCC). Troy prosofsky, an agronomy specialist with the CCC, says the provincial canola growers groups and the Canola Council hope this study will find out more about arthropod species in canola, both the pests and the beneficials, and how they interact with each other.

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“We hope to find biological control methods that will help control insect pests when possible – some beneficial insects will reduce pest numbers low enough that pesticides aren’t warranted. a reduction in pesticide use will save growers money and will lower the chances of selecting for pesticide-resistance in insects,” says prosofsky.

according to Dosdall, canola is an especially good crop for studying arthropod biodiversity. “It’s no secret to anyone who has worked in canola that it has probably the greatest biodiversity of arthropods of any of our grain crops in Canada. For example, if you take a set of 10 samples with an insect sweep net in a wheat crop at any time of its development, you’d get maybe a dozen arthropod species on a really good day. If you do the same thing in a canola crop in flower, you’d get maybe 60 or 70 different species.”

one of the main reasons for this diversity is that canola is an abundant source of pollen and nectar, providing an immense supply of protein and carbohydrates that many arthropods feed on. as well, canola’s canopy is much more varied than the canopy of many cereal crops, so it offers a greater diversity of micro-habitats for different arthropod species.

The researchers are gathering information for the project in three ways. one is to go through all the published literature and student theses to document all the arthropod species reported in canola crops in Canada, to create a complete database of what is known so far.

Their second method involves hypothesis testing, explains Dosdall. “For example, we have some insect traps in a study of canola where the seeding rate varies, the weed population varies, and the crop rotational regime has been varied. So we’re looking at how those different agronomic practices can affect certain non-pest species.” This work could identify canola production practices that would increase the benefits from helpful species.

The third method is to go out and collect arthropods in canola fields. “as you can imagine, trying to do a comprehensive field study of all the arthropods in all of the ecoregions where canola is grown in Western Canada, from the peace region to southern Manitoba, as well as parts of ontario and Quebec, would be a huge job. So we’re just doing what we can,” says Dosdall. The field sites

are mostly in southern and central alberta. The arthropod sampling is being carried out in manageable components; for instance, in 2010 the researchers did a small study looking at spider species in the crop.

given the incredible diversity of arthropods in canola fields, identifying all the individual species the researchers are collecting is a painstaking, time-consuming but essential task.

“Species identification is the foundation stone,” explains Dosdall. “once we can put names on the species we collect, then we can look at their biology and understand how they fit into the ecosystem in a canola field. But if you try to work out the biology when you think you’ve got one species but you really have three, then you don’t have anything in the end.”

He adds, “It takes a very long time to develop a good taxonomic expertise in an insect group.” For instance, his research team at the University of alberta has developed a strong expertise in identifying the different species of carabid beetles, which are important predators of insect pests in canola. To identify species in some of the other groups, the researchers have to go to outside experts or use reference collections, like the one at the e.H. Strickland entomological Museum at the University of alberta, which has about one million arthropod specimens.

Dosdall gives one example: “When we were working with the cabbage seedpod weevil, we were looking and looking for any natural enemies of this pest and we couldn’t find anything. But one year when we were dissecting canola pods, we found a weevil larva that was half eaten by a parasitic wasp larva. We got pretty excited and started collecting weevil larvae from as many canola pods as we could, and we reared out these tiny parasitic wasps. at first glance, the wasps all looked identical to us, but as we looked closer, we could see differences. Thankfully, Dr. gary gibson [with aaFC] in ottawa, who is an expert in this field, enabled us to identify the species we were finding.”

Dosdall concludes, “our goal is to leave a legacy of a very good start on this, to make sure that learning about arthropod biodiversity gets pushed forward a whole lot further than it was when we started.” and this learning could lead to practical benefits for integrated crop management in canola.

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dON’T M ix Tall fa RM E quipMENT a N d p OWER liNES

More reports of accidental collisions with power lines prompt calls for more caution.

by John Dietz

Lesson learned. The arm in the surgical waste bin was in fine condition hours earlier. The owner knew he should have lowered the auger before moving it. not a nice story, but it’s one of many incidents that happen each year when farm workers in Western Canada have personal encounters with overhead power lines.

Sometimes, they back off without being burnt, literally. Sometimes, it’s worse.

Farm equipment that folds for transport is getting wider, and taller when folded. augers are longer and taller. Farmers are busier than ever. It’s a dangerous combination.

Who’s responsible?

power line height is regulated federally and provincially. The national minimum height standard, published by the Canadian Standards association under regulation CSa-C22.3 as part of its electrical code for overhead power supply lines along driveways and yards is 4.3 metres, or 14 feet. along roadways, the minimum specified height is 4.42 metres, or more, depending on voltage.

“There is no height limit to machinery in our standards,” says Dave Shanahan, project manager for CSa Technical Committee on agricultural Machinery, Toronto. “our standards limit machinery dimensions for stability during transportation and use; they do not specify absolute equipment height.”

The CSa has more than 50 standards, addressing both powered machinery and towed implements. Familiar standards apply to marking and lighting for transport. They’re responsible for the Slow Moving Vehicle sign, and a new one.

“We recently came out with standards that allow signs for those moderate speed vehicles, going up to 80 km/h, to say this may be travelling a little faster than you expect but it is an agricultural machine. These machines often present wide and awkward loads that need to be given special attention by other vehicle operators.”

equipment height limits are set, he notes, by the CSa mining safety committee and by ministries of transport in the provinces.

Associations concerned

Manufacturers meet the CSa standards that apply, but there are none for machinery height. They have a national association, agricultural Manufacturers Canada and safety committees.

As equipment becomes larger and taller, operators need to be more cautious around power lines.

Ken ricketts, manager of safety programs for ag manufacturers in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, has friends who have learned hard lessons when connecting with overhead power lines.

“It’s an issue, there’s no doubt about it,” ricketts says. “a number of farmers get electrocuted every year, typically because they don’t follow the manufacturer’s instructions.”

Machinery makers don’t have height limits or a standard for them, he says. They may voluntarily observe restrictions for overheight ve-

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hicles from highway departments.

restrictions and standards may help, he suggests, but they can’t do anything about a careless attitude – and that’s the bigger problem.

“I’d say everybody knows about the risk. They don’t pay attention to it. They say, ‘we’re in a hurry to get this auger moved across the yard.’ We’re not going to bother to lower it the proper way, and that’s what happens. If they took the extra 30 seconds to put it down, they’d keep the arm, or the leg, or the hand,” he says.

Canada West equipment Dealers association has a safety committee for farm dealerships. employees are instructed in safety procedures, and as part of that instruction, alerted to overhead power line hazards, and are required to follow rules for safe transport.

The mandate of the dealer association does not require any training for farmers who purchase tall machinery.

Canadian agricultural Safety association executive director Marcel Hacault is aware of the hazards associated with overhead power lines. The CaSa incorporates warnings in training programs and instructional materials. Hacault says farmers can mitigate powerline hazards through careful planning. “producers need to identify any electrical risks like low-hanging wires or height restrictions, and then come up with a plan to control those hazards.” That means ensuring any low-hanging wires around the farm yard are buried or raised and ensuring all farm workers are aware of height restrictions before they move any piece of farm machinery around the yard, through a field entrance, or out onto the open road.

a Manitoba Infrastructure and Transport department regulation follows the CSa general standard of 4.15 metres for vehicles and loads. a permit is required for any equipment over this height while travelling on a Manitoba highway or provincial road, said a spokesman for the department.

Farmers can obtain a permit, at no cost, for a farm vehicle. Vehicles up to 4.6 metres tall can have an annual permit. equipment exceeding 4.6 metres can have a one-week permit or a one-move permit.

Certain routes require additional permits for tall equipment exceeding these heights: Manitoba Hydro (4.8 m), MTS allstream (4.6 m), railway authorities (5.18 m), City of Winnipeg or City of Brandon (4.15 m).

Manitoba Hydro program

Manitoba Hydro has a full Internet page on the subject of hazards from overhead power lines for farmers as well as a public awareness campaign.

“We see far too many pieces of farm equipment coming into contact with overhead power lines,” says Linda Carter, Manitoba Hydro public safety and education co-ordinator, Brandon.

“For several years, we were averaging around 70 to 80 contacts a year. Unfortunately, we had more than 100 farm equipment contacts

LEARN AND REMEMBER

Work Safe Saskatchewan suggests:

during the past fiscal year.”

Hydro attributes the rate to larger equipment. The incidents include any reported contacts, on roads, fields and yards, including people backing into guy wires or poles and bumping poles as they manoeuvre equipment. The most important contacts are with cultivators and air seeders.

Hydro has two points of reference for machinery passing under a power line. The line should be at least 17 feet above the ground. all equipment that exceeds a height of 15 feet, nine inches must have a moving permit issued by a Manitoba Hydro office. The permit is valid for 45 days.

“The application form is available at the local Manitoba Hydro office. no cost is associated with the moving permit,” she says.

When a farmer obtains a piece of equipment with a travel height of more than 15 feet, nine inches, he should visit the district office and bring a simple map showing the roads and field entrances he plans to travel with that piece of equipment. District staff will check line clearances on the roads and approaches identified before the permit is approved.

“If the lines don’t currently meet our minimum standard, then Hydro will raise them at no cost to the farmer. If the situation requires the line to be higher than the minimum standard, there could be an associated cost.

It’s now common for cultivators and seeders to exceed 18 feet in height. Some sprayers and combines also can be higher than 17 feet. For example, the transport height for a folded toolbar on a 45 Series Seed Hawk can be 16 feet, eight inches,, or 17 feet, eight inches, for a Versatile ML series drill, or 18 feet,11 inches, for a Bourgault 5810 drill.

“Farmers should give the Hydro office as much notice as possible to approve a moving permit. The workload of district staff changes daily. They are conscious that farmers need to make hay while the sun shines,” Carter says.

On the radar

The overhead power line safety issue is on the radar for Keystone a gricultural producers, says Chuck Fossay, public affairs committee chair.

It’s a more frequent problem in Manitoba than in Saskatchewan, he says, because Saskatchewan has fewer overhead lines. In many places, the lines have been buried to avoid problems.

Kap recommends, for insurance and safety, that farmers make sure they have all the permits they need.

“We don’t want any members having accidents, and there’s a liability and insurance factor. people need to protect themselves from liability. It’s up to you to apply in most cases to be sure you have all the correct permits and licences.”

• If contact with a live line occurs, get the line de-energized immediately.

• If you are in a vehicle that contacts an electricity source, STAY in the vehicle and do not make contact with anything metal.

• If you MUST exit the vehicle (in case of fire), jump clear of the vehicle with your feet together and hop away quickly.

For more information, visit: www.hydro.mb.ca/safety_and_education/farm/overhead_lines.shtml

Pod for pod, Cargill Specialty Canola will make you more money. Cargill

Choose Cargill Specialty Canola for premier, high-yielding hybrids — from VICTORY® and InVigor ® Health — that generate unparalleled profits. And enjoy the convenience of a simple program that saves you time and hassle. Want the proof? Go to cargillspecialtycanola.com.

® The Cargill logo, VICTORY and VICTORY Hybrid Canola logo are registered trademarks of Cargill Incorporated, used under license.

InVigor® is a registered trademark of the Bayer Group.

Genuity®, Genuity and Design®, Genuity Icons, Roundup Ready®, and Roundup® are trademarks of Monsanto Technology LLC, used under license. Always follow grain marketing and all other stewardship practices and pesticide label directions. Details of these requirements can be found in the Trait Stewardship Responsibilities Notice to Farmers printed in this publication. ©2012 Cargill, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

www.victorycanola.com www.cargill.com

WhaT i S NEW iN ca NOla?

Top Crop Manager’s annual look review.

by Bruce Barker

Top Crop Manager has assembled a list of new varieties and hybrids that are being introduced in commercial quantities for the 2013 growing season, including new clubroot and sclerotinia resistant varieties. We also review new canola breeding initiatives. The information is provided by the respective seed companies. g rowers are encouraged to look at third party trials, such as the Canola Council of Canada’s Canola performance Trials, for further performance and agronomic information. Talk to local seed suppliers to see how new varieties also performed in local trials.

Bayer Crop Science

InVigor Health L156H is a LibertyLink hybrid that is part of Cargill’s Specialty Canola program. It yielded 138 percent of the checks 46 a 65/Q2 in the 2008/2009 WCC/ rrC co-op trials.

InVigor Health L156H has all the yield potential of an “L Series” InVigor hybrid combined with a simple contract premium of -

By

fering growers greater returns. Contact your Cargill retail for more details.

Brett Young

6056 C r is a new clubroot resistant variety. It is a roundup ready hybrid that yielded 133 percent of Q2 and 46 a 65 in the 2010 and 2011 Coop Trials. 6056 C r is resistant to blackleg and has excellent standability for easy harvest. 6056 C r will be a valuable asset in the clubroot affected areas.

6050 rr is a new mid to early maturity roundup ready hybrid that has excellent yield performance across the three canola production zones. 6050 rr is resistant to blackleg and has very good standability. Its earlier maturity (1 day less than

TOP: Plant breeders continue to introduce new, higher performing canola hybrids.

INSET: 74-44 BL is one of the new generation of blackleg resistant canola hybrids.

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Q2 and 46 a 65) combined with top yields make it a great choice across all zones. 6050 rr is best suited for the mid and short production zones.

Both varieties are available from your local BrettYoung retailer.

Canterra

C an T erra 1999 is a g enuity roundup ready hybrid that yields 103 percent of 45H29. It was rated first for yield, standability and oil percent in the 2011 Monsanto FaCT performance trials. It has an r rating for blackleg and fusarium wilt. CanT erra 1999 will be available in very limited quantities this fall from your independent crop supply retailer.

Dekalb

74-44 BL is a g enuity roundup ready hybrid with a yield potential of 107 percent of 45H29 & 100 percent of L150. It has a strong r rating for blackleg. 74-44 BL is D eKa LB brand’s newest broad acre product that offers not only outstanding yield potential but also our next generation multi-genic blackleg resistance to pathogenic groups 2,3,4, & T. When you combine yield, enhanced disease package, acceleron seed treatment, superior weed control and powerful agronomics, 74-44 BL offers growers the complete package.

74-47 C r is a g enuity roundup ready hybrid with a yield potential of 103 percent of 45H29. It has an r rating for blackleg and an r rating for clubroot. 74-47 C r is our second generation clubroot resistant hybrid with resistance to pathotypes 2,3,5,6, & 8 for those growers at risk. 74-47 C r provides good early season vigour with great standability and high yield potential.

In July of 2012, Monsanto opened up its expanded Dekalb canola seed processing plant in Lethbridge, alberta. a total investment of $14.7 million included the installation of seed cleaning equipment, the automation of bulk storage and blending equipment designed to ensure a high quality hybrid canola seed product for farmers, and installation of a new computerized control system that manages the entire plant. The Lethbridge site also hosts the company’s parent seed plant and warehouse. Monsanto also invested $1.7 million to expand and upgrade their field research farm in Carman, Manitoba.

Nexera

nexera Hybrid 2016 CL is for canola growers in the long-season zone of western Canada who are looking for hybrid yields and higher profit than other canola. nexera Hybrid 2016 CL offers yield potential equivalent to any competitive canola hybrid, an r rating for Blackleg, the advantages of the Clearfield system, excellent lodging resistance for easier swathing, and provides excellent harvestability. Contracts are available through richardson p ioneer, Viterra, LDM Foods, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus and selected independent retailers.

nexera Hybrid 1016 rr offers yield potential equivalent to any competitive canola hybrid, the convenience and weed control of the roundup ready system, excellent lodging resistance for easier swathing, excellent harvestability and the shortest days to maturity of all nexera hybrids. nexera Hybrid 1016 rr is for canola growers in the mid- and long-season zones looking for hybrid yields and higher profit. nexera Hybrid 1016 rr Contracts are available through richardson p ioneer, Viterra,

LDM Foods, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus and selected independent retailers.

Pioneer Hi-Bred

45S54 is a roundup ready hybrid with the p ioneer protector Sclerotinia resistance trait built-in. Yield is rated at 126 percent of 46 a 65/Q2 . e xcellent disease resistance package –rated r for sclerotinia, blackleg and Fusarium wilt. – and with very good standability. available exclusively through p ioneer Hi-Bred sales reps. Seed supply is good for 2013.

43 e 02 is a very early hybrid with the roundup ready trait and very good early growth. g ood performance with yield potential 117 percent of 46 a 65/Q2. r ated moderately resistant for blackleg. available exclusively through p ioneer Hi-Bred sales reps. Seed supply is good for 2013.

D3154S is a roundup ready hybrid with built-in p ioneer protector Sclerotinia resistance trait. Yields 126 percent of 46 a 65/Q2. r ated resistant for blackleg. Seed supply is good for 2013 and is available through Du pont at Co-op and select Independent retailers.

Du pont p ioneer has recently made significant investments in its research facilities located in Western Canada. In august, the company opened a new centre in the e dmonton, a B area. This facility focuses on early and mid-maturity canola development including p ioneer protector disease resistance traits. It also conducts corn research focusing on silage and grain hybrids adapted to the prairies. o ver the last year, p ioneer Hi-Bred has also expanded their facilities in both Saskatoon, SK and Carman, MB. These stations are part of a network that is delivering corn, canola and soybean products for Western Canada.

These investments are part of a larger commitment that p ioneer Hi-Bred has made in research across Canada. o ver the past five years, p ioneer Hi-Bred has invested nearly $10 million in new facilities and infrastructure to deliver industry-leading products and traits to Canadian farmers. additional investment and facility upgrades are also planned for the coming years.

SeCan Association

Fusion is a roundup ready composite hybrid with a yield potential of 123 percent of Q2 and 46 a 65. It has an r rating for blackleg and fusarium wilt, and matures two days earlier than the checks. Fusion offers hybrid performance at an op price. The variety will be grown by SeCan members - processed and distributed locally.

aC Synergy is a synthetic conventional polish canola with a yield potential of 117 percent of the polish checks aC parkland and aC Sunbeam. It has a Vg rating for white rust. Maturing two weeks earlier than most argentine canola products aC Synergy will be an excellent risk management tool for canola producers.

Experience the complete picture with WR859 CL

You won’t miss a single detail when you choose WR859 CL. You’ll get higher protein, excellent yield and a very strong disease resistance package including the best rating for Fusarium head blight resistance available in a CWRS wheat variety. WR859 CL is only available at your Richardson Pioneer Ag Business Centre.

PIONEER® FOR THE SALE AND DISTRIBUTION OF SEED IS A REGISTERED TRADE-MARK OF PIONEER HI-BRED INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND IS USED UNDER LICENSE BY THE UNAFFILIATED COMPANY RICHARDSON PIONEER LIMITED.

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WiTh iMpROVEd qualiTy

Breeding hybrid and synthetic condiment mustards.

by Carolyn King

Take me out to the ball game. Canada is the world’s largest exporter of condiment mustards, including yellow, brown and o riental. With a new focus on mustard genetic development, our players in the game are well positioned to go into extra innings.

“g iven the market for condiment mustard, high-yielding varieties with improved quality traits, such as high protein content, will directly benefit mustard producers, processors and consumers and also ensure Canada’s leading position as a major exporter of condiment mustard in the world,” says Dr. Bifang Cheng, a mustard breeder with a griculture and a gri-Food Canada (aaFC) at Saskatoon.

Since she joined aaFC in 2009, Cheng has been using some innovative breeding techniques to develop higher-yielding condiment mustard varieties with enhanced qualities for different target markets.

Brown and Oriental mustard hybrids

“For brown and o riental mustard, we inherited some older

breeding projects and we also started a new breeding program,” notes Cheng. Breeding strategies in the new program include developing high-yielding hybrids and adding some desired traits found in mustard cultivars from other countries.

Brown and o riental mustards, which are both types of Brassica juncea , are self-pollinating – the pollen from a plant can fertilize the eggs of that same plant. This type of reproduction system also occurs in argentine canola, Brassica napus, and it’s possible to develop Brassica juncea hybrids with the techniques used for developing argentine canola hybrids.

Hybrids are created by crossing two breeding lines. If the two lines are different enough, then the resulting hybrid seed will be significantly more vigorous and higher yielding than either parent line. This effect is called heterosis, or hybrid kick.

When crossing two lines to develop hybrids, breeders don’t

ABOVE: Dr. Bifang Cheng is developing yellow mustard varieties with higher yields as well as such traits as higher protein contents, lower oil contents, and larger seed sizes to meet the needs of processors.

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want the plants to self-pollinate. So they create a male-sterile line that doesn’t produce functional pollen. The breeders cross that male-sterile line with a different pollen-producing line to restore the fertility in the resulting hybrid seed.

Cheng is using the o gura system to create male-sterile lines for Brassica juncea hybrids. “The o gura hybrid system was found in radish but it has been transferred into Brassica napus and then from canola into condiment B. juncea. In this system, the male-sterile line is 100 percent stable [so it’s a reliable way to produce large amounts of hybrid seed].

“However, the fertility restorer line needs to be improved because it contains a large fragment [of D na ] from Brassica napus and from radish,” she explains. So Cheng’s mustard breeding team is working to make that restorer line better for Brassica juncea breeding.

She notes, “another challenge in developing improved brown and o riental mustard varieties is that the genetic base is very narrow. although there is a wide variety of Brassica juncea germplasm, most of it is not condiment mustard quality. So we need to increase the genetic diversity [in our breeding lines] because for hybrid breeding we need diversified lines to exploit the heterosis.”

To expand the genetic base, her breeding team is crossbreeding favourite condiment varieties for the Canadian prairies with cultivars from other countries such as China, India and russia. The initial crosses have both desirable and undesirable traits from the exotic cultivars. So the breeders repeatedly backcross each generation of offspring with the elite prairie varieties to eventually develop lines that have the good qualities of the elite varieties plus desirable traits from the exotics.

along with higher yields, Cheng’s breeding goals for brown and o riental mustards include improving disease resistance and enhancing quality characteristics, like increasing the protein content, decreasing the oil content, and increasing the seed size. She hopes to develop speciality varieties suited to the needs of different mustard processors.

“For brown and o riental mustards, there are different processors involved and different companies have different requirements,” says Cheng. “For example, some companies would like to have higher glucosinolate contents in the mustard seed so their mustard will be as hot as possible, while other companies might prefer the present glucosinolate levels.”

Yellow mustard synthetics

Cheng’s yellow mustard program also involves a new approach. “In the past, yellow mustard breeding used a different breeding method, which resulted in improved quality traits but not yield improvements. So we are trying to develop synthetic varieties, using heterosis to increase the seed yield.”

Unlike brown and o riental mustards, yellow mustard ( Sinapis alba ) cannot self-pollinate. “Yellow mustard has a self-incompatibility reproductive system. It is an obligate out-crossing species – it must cross with another yellow mustard plant,” explains Cheng. Therefore, the strategies used to create heterosis in her brown and o riental mustard program can’t be used for yellow mustard.

So she’s developing synthetic varieties, a breeding strategy developed by aaFC for use with polish canola, Brassica rapa , which is another self-incompatible species. This strategy in -

volves seeding a mix of two or three parent lines in a field. For example, if a mixture of parent a and parent B is seeded in a field, then the resulting crop would produce some a seed, some B seed and some a-B hybrid seed. Yields of synthetics tend to be higher than yields of conventional varieties and lower than hybrid yields. Synthetics also have better yield stability than conventional varieties.

Currently Cheng’s team is developing high-quality parental lines to use in making synthetic varieties of yellow mustard.

Her team faces two other challenges in developing higheryielding yellow mustards. Cheng says, “o ne challenge is that yellow mustard has only five to six seeds per pod on average. In comparison, for canola, Brassica napus , the average number of seeds per pod is about 20 to 30. The second challenge is that it’s more difficult to fix desirable traits in the yellow mustard breeding lines because it is an out-crossed species.”

In addition to improving yields, Cheng is aiming to enhance several quality traits to better meet the needs of mustard processors. Those quality objectives include higher protein contents, lower oil contents, larger seed sizes, and mucilage contents suited to different mustard processors. She explains, “For yellow mustard, there are dry milling and wet milling uses. For dry milling uses, processors want varieties with low mucilage content, but for wet milling they would prefer a high mucilage content.”

It’s a long process to create improved varieties of any crop. To speed things up in her breeding programs, Cheng is sending some lines to a winter nursery in Chile. “For example, in the last few years we have grown some of the inbred lines of yellow mustard in the field. Then we selected lines with desirable qualities and good agronomic performance and sent them to Chile for seed multiplication. So we have enough seed to make synthetics in 2012, rather than taking another year to multiply the seed here.”

If everything goes well, Cheng hopes to have improved condiment mustard varieties available for growers by about 2016 or 2017.

Her condiment mustard breeding programs receive funding from the Developing Innovative agri-products initiative of the growing Canadian agri-Innovations program (DIap), Mustard 21 Canada Inc. and the Saskatchewan agriculture Development Fund.

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Maki Ng ThE BuSi NESS ca SE f OR g ROW iNg TREES

Canadian Wood Fibre Centre provides the science.

by Tony Kryzanowski

Everyone remembers the alpaca craze that promised farmers huge profits. Is growing trees as a cash crop another fly-by-night fad?

not according to Canadian Wood Fibre Centre (CWFC), an organization funded by the Canadian government, consisting of an army of experts in fast-growing woody fibre on plantations, and decades of experience building business cases for growing trees for profit.

CWFC is a division of F p Innovations, Canada’s forest product research institute, and is one of four divisions within the organization. The other three divisions are focused on research and technology transfer related to the solid wood industry, the pulp and paper sector, and technical forest management and logging.

CWFC has offices and satellite centres located in Canadian Forest Service (CFS) laboratories across Canada. CWFC regional co-ordinator for the prairies Derek Sidders is headquartered in the CWFC office in e dmonton. Because CWFC is embedded within the CFS even though it is part of F p Innovations, it can also access CFS scientists focused on particular areas of research that help advance the CWFC program. o ne part of its program is Short rotation Woody Crop Systems Development, or growing fast-growing trees for profit.

“During the evolution of developing the Short rotation Woody Crop Systems initiative over the past 10 years, the Canadian Forest Service and CWFC, through the silviculture and af-

forestation innovations group, have developed a national partnership network and a network of technical development sites across Canada,” says Sidders.

He adds that without this network, CWFC researchers and developers would not have been able to maintain their focus, thrust and movement forward.

“We wouldn’t have been able to justify the investment and maintenance in the infrastructure, and we wouldn’t be getting this nice balance between practical and theoretical research and development,” Sidders adds.

a good example is the e llerslie Short- rotation Woody Crop Technical Development Centre and demonstration site in edmonton. e stablished in 2002, the 18-hectare site leased from the University of alberta was the first of over 150 technical development sites now established and monitored by CWFC in various geo-climatic zones across Canada. It was the template that CWFC used to establish sites that demonstrate different species, clones and plantation management regimes. The e llerslie site has test plots featuring hybrid and clonal aspen, hybrid poplar, mixed wood, and willow under high yield afforestation and concentrated biomass regimes. For comparison and study

The CWFC Ellerslie demonstration site shows not only growth of fast-growing hardwoods, but also how valuable softwood species such as white spruce can be planted with hybrid poplar crops, resulting in two commercial crops that grow at different rates.

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purposes, so do the many other development sites managed by CWFC across Canada.

“The whole goal is to create regimes that grow the most amount of biomass for the cheapest cost,” says CWFC wood fibre development specialist Tim Keddy.

He says the three most popular questions that CWFC gets when they offer tours through the e llerslie demonstration site are, “how old are those trees,

how much does it cost to establish a similar plantation, and how quickly can you put those trees on my land?”

o ne area where landowners interested in growing short rotation woody crops can profit is in the sale of carbon offsets. It’s important to have the scientific data to accurately predict how much carbon a plantation will sequester over its lifespan above and below ground.

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To achieve a high degree of validation, CWFC has partnered with carbon sequestration experts at CFS to develop models that will accurately predict how much carbon short rotation woody crops planted on specific land bases, with specific soil types, under various growing conditions and with various management techniques throughout Canada, will sequester above and below ground during the approximate 20-year growth cycle of that crop.

Dr. Carmela arevalo, visiting fellow with CWFC, is conducting studies on many CWFC development sites to quantify carbon inputs and outputs and the carbon credits that the various plantations and management regimes will produce.

Speaking about the e llerslie site, arevalo says, “We know that carbon is lost when we cultivate the land [to plant trees]. But because we are planting trees, creating biomass above and below the ground, the amount of carbon is paid back to the ecosystem in very short order. We have found that in a span of only one year, this type of land can fully recover the amount of carbon lost and start acting as a carbon sink in its second year.”

That’s one of the potential income streams for landowners down the road, as is growing short rotation woody crops for a specific end use, such as wood pellets, feedstock for pulp and paper manufacturing, production of oriented strandboard panels, bioenergy, methanol, etc. Before landowners make any financial commitment, they can take advantage of CWFC’s Fibre Value Simulator program. This is an economic modelling initiative, where CWFC modeling experts combine fibre attributes from field operations, input costs, and product options into a simulation that identifies what products have the best potential return on investment, including potential new products tied to the bioeconomy.

“Basically, it gives you the ability to direct your operations to maximize value,” says Sidders.

o nce landowners are prepared to dedicate a portion of their cropland toward production of short rotation woody crops, CWFC should be their primary resource for clonal selection, planting and crop management, which are all keys to establishing a successful short rotation woody crop plantation.

c au TiON ON ThE ROad TO RET i REMENT R ich ES

Manage your retirement wealth the way you manage your crops, carefully.

by John Dietz

Call it farm succession or farm transition, or retirement planning, the process connects at some level with every farm in every generation. ownership changes hands. afterwards, value has been transferred to a new generation and bills have been paid.

advisors with Mnp and TD Waterhouse, Winnipeg, prodded audiences to think about farm transition, and welcomed questions, at the 2012 Manitoba ag Days event in Brandon.

Ken W. Wilk is a portfolio manager, investment advisor and certified retirement planning specialist with TD Waterhouse private Investment advice, and a former chairman of the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce. peter Manness is a farm management consultant for Mnp.

The advisors didn’t try to offer a simple one-size-fits-all solution. They did say transition planning is important, takes time and requires a careful approach to keep the business viable for the next owners.

It’s a bit like farming, and there’s no shortage of advice being

offered. The fee for the professional advice can be hidden or requested up front. advisors can collect $10,000, at a minimum, for handling a million-dollar title transfer.

Manitoba has approximately 27,000 licences to sell investments and insurance. There are about 2,000 accountants, as well.

“a modern mid-size farm has a net worth of $1.5 to $4,000,000 today,” Manness says. “Most farmers aren’t real comfortable with that number. They see it on a page. It’s in their land, and they’ve fought tooth and nail their entire farming career to get to where they’re at, but now it’s almost an embarrassment of riches.”

Inevitably, two to four generations of a farm family get involved in the transition along with a few professional helpers.

Two or more years before any serious steps are taken, Wilk and Manness say, families should be talking about the goals and process. every farm is its own complex puzzle. Many pieces need to

ABOVE: When considering expert opinion, review their fees as you would crop input costs to ensure you get maximum return on your dollar.

be turned over, lined up and fit into place in the right order to carry through to a happy ending.

“It’s really important to understand how everyone fits into the puzzle, to make sure you get what you need, and don’t end up doing things you shouldn’t be doing,” Manness says.

Management focus at Mnp, he says, a team of advisors focus on farm management for transitions.

“Transition is about lining yourself up to sell your business,” Manness says. “We’re making sure there’s adequate management in transition and that everybody’s on the same page for goals. You won’t talk to me about structure or investment options, but we help to quarterback that to be sure everybody’s on the same page. You will want to engage your accountant when you’re talking about structure. Then, as we need external advice we bring in other specialists.”

Many families need to discuss, early, whether the farm can afford a transition to the next generation. Some can’t.

Ultimately, he says, farm equity has to fund retirement plans – so those need to be decided early – and that equity needs to fund the new owners so they can achieve their personal goals. again, decisions need to be made early to achieve effective results.

“It’s better to have the discussion now, rather than 10 years down the road when blood, sweat and tears have been poured into a business that won’t enable the two generations to achieve their goals,” he says.

example: It may seem simple today to set up a partnership for two sons to farm together. It’s a reasonable business structure, but it may not be a good one three to five years later if one no longer wants to farm.

“If you can understand up front what everybody’s goals are, it will save you time and money on the planning,” he says. “a few years down the road, it can become very costly to unwind those decisions.”

example: perhaps the children left but one came back from the city recently to farm full time; if the parents’ only assets are in the farm, and if the assets need to be divided in an estate settlement,

the estate may or may not be able to fund a transition while splitting the farm assets.

“Most farms could not afford to buy the farm back from the nonfarming kids. But, life insurance could relieve some transition pressure,” he says.

Where to start

Insurance, investment and other plans need to be put in place early if you want to leave a family farm legacy for the next generation, says Ken Wilk.

perhaps the biggest tragedy in farming today, a banker told Wilk, is the sight of a family losing a farm because they didn’t account for the tax liability. next to that, is the loss of a farm because the cash flow spiralled out of control.

“If you don’t have a plan and don’t pay attention, you’ll learn that your grandparents were right, the money does go really fast,” Wilk says.

Transition will need good advisors from several disciplines. Farm owners should be aware of the system behind the scenes as

they go into the planning process.

“It’s what you’re not told about that is going to sneak up on you,” Wilk says. “Understand what those advisors are trying to accomplish and how they are being compensated. no question is too stupid to ask.”

Most accountants-planners-investors have a partnership network and one or two primary forms of expertise. They depend on commission income, annual management fees, or hourly service fees. If they hit a question that’s out of their expertise, they can refer the client to a “buddy” in the network or to another financial institution, but there’s a problem.

“once they pass people off, they lose those people and they lose the revenue from that relationship. all they can offer to solve your problems is what they are licensed to sell, so that’s what they promote,” Wilk says. “people expect advisors like me to have all the answers and play it straight, but you have to be vigilant for the services you need and that your advisors can provide.”

example: Think about making a non-farm investment as part of a transition. It’s a risk today for a reward tomorrow, and is a lot like

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farming. The reward is the net that remains after the crop inputs and other costs. You live with the crop decision until harvest, and hope.

Wilk points to two lessons. First, spread the risk. Second, watch what’s going on (receive regular updates) during the growing season.

“When you deal locally for finances, insurance or investment, have a discussion about how they’re compensated and the fees you’re paying. The fees are often hidden in the products you buy, and only disclosed in sales material which few bother to read,” Wilk says.

“If you can save 25 to 75 percent on crop inputs, or fees, would you do it? If you come to an advisor who’s a portfolio manager and insurance-licensed, you can get a more comprehensive review and the same kind of money management advice at considerable savings,” he says.

Developing a successful business transition, in the end, requires wise investments and insurance as well as advice from bankers, accountants and lawyers, according to Wilk.

It all gets back to financial insurance, investment and planning. accountants and lawyers will defer taxes and demystify planning. Insurance and investment people have the tools to solve the transition needs for money, liability and ongoing income for the business.

“It’s actually never too late to start planning, but farming is multigenerational. If you don’t structure the transition right, it doesn’t make it through the generations,” Wilk says.

For the family that’s wondering where to start with a professional discussion on a farm transition, help is available through internal divisions of the major banks and credit unions, through Mnp and other accounting firms, and from members of the Canadian association of Farm advisors.

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Tigh T ca NOla ROTaTiONS

iM

Yield

pac TiNg yi E ld

losses range from five to 10 percent for canola grown every second year.

by Bruce Barker

The price of canola over the past several years has motivated canola growers to tighten rotations, but at what cost? oilseed specialists in alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba looked at crop insurance records to determine the trends in crop rotation in each province, and compared yields across rotation.

not surprisingly, the numbers show canola is being grown in tight rotations much more frequently than 10 years ago. In alberta, Murray Hartman, provincial oilseed specialist with alberta agriculture and rural Development says that in the black and grey/black soil zones in central alberta, canola every second year is the most popular rotation and the trend of shorter canola rotation continues. His analysis covered the period from 2001 to 2009. Because of the massive job in analysing the data, he has not updated his data to include the most recent years, but says the trends are likely the same, based on seeded acreage.

The recommended rotation interval of a three-year break between canola crops is declining, and there is more canola on canola than the

long rotations except in the Dark Brown soil zone of alberta.

“We’ll know if the trend towards tight rotations change back to the recommended break when canola acres drop by 30 percent,” says Hartman.

Hartman has posted the results of his analysis on the arD website, and it provides detailed breakdown of rotation frequency and yield by soil zone. In the report, Canola rotations in alberta and Yield performance, he states: “although the yield comparisons fluctuate from year to year, canola on canola is consistently the lowest yielding. Canola with one or two year breaks had similar yield, and the recommended three-year break is often best overall. on average over the six years in the major canola growing zones, canola on canola yielded 16 percent less than canola with one or two year breaks while canola with three year breaks yielded five percent higher than one or two year breaks.”

ABOVE: A risk premium should be factored in to short term profitability analysis.

I

think more than ever it’s got to be run with a business plan and a sharp pencil.”

“I’m really excited about what the future is in agriculture as a whole.

– Doug Seland, Alberta

It’s time to tell the real story

Canadian agriculture is a modern, vibrant and diverse industry, filled with forward-thinking people who love what they do. But for our industry to reach its full potential this has to be better understood by the general public and, most importantly, by our industry itself.

The story of Canadian agriculture is one of success, promise, challenge and determination. And the greatest storytellers are the 2.2 million Canadians who live it every day. Be proud. Champion our industry.

Share your story, hear others and learn more at AgricultureMoreThanEver.ca

Canola Yield Relative to Rotation Breaks of 1 and 2 years

*Limited data, only 3 out of 6 years.

Manitoba has similar trends

Manitoba provincial oilseed specialist anastasia Kubinec looked at crop insurance records from 2000 to 2010, and saw similar trends. The most common rotation in Manitoba is canola every

Saskatchewan results slightly different

In Saskatchewan, provincial oilseed specialist Venkata Vakulabharanam says that trends in crop insurance data from 2001 through 2010 show that canola rotations are also shortening at the same time that canola production is increasing in the Brown and Dark Brown soil zones. Still, there are many growers in Saskatchewan following a four-year or more rotation.

Like a lberta and Manitoba data, canola on canola usually resulted in a yield penalty. In general, a one-year break between canola produced similar yields to longer rotational breaks.

Canola Yield by Rotation Break in Manitoba

“a one year break wasn’t that bad on yield, but the one thing we don’t know from the records is the type of input regime the growers followed for the shorter rotations,” says Vakulabharanam. “With the shorter rotations, growers may have been using higher inputs, such as fungicides or increased fertility programs, so even if the yields are similar, the profitability might be lower with shorter rotations.”

Vakulabharanam’s comments highlight issues that both Hartman and Kubinec also raise. Shorter canola rotations likely means increased disease and pest pressure, more pressure on herbicide resistance selection, and declining soil fertility. He says that the increase in sclerotinia over the past several years is likely related to shorter rotations because the inoculum is still in the soil to reinfest a canola crop when weather conditions are conducive for disease development.

second year. Kubinec’s analysis found canola on canola suffered a yield loss of 15 to 20 percent but canola yields were very similar between one-in-two, three and four year rotations.

Hartman says that the development and spread of clubroot in central alberta is a symptom of shorter canola rotations. He is also concerned that shorter rotations are putting high selection pressure on blackleg resistance in canola varieties, and some areas have seen resistant varieties succumb to blackleg.

all three oilseed specialists acknowledge that short term economics are hard to overlook, and caution that a risk premium should be factored in to short term profitability analysis.

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Planning your grain storage system - Spreaders, Cleaners.

Grain spreader

There are two major benefits to installing and using a grain spreader in your bin, and both are associated with even distribution of grain in a gentle pattern throughout the bin.

The first advantage to spreading the grain is that it eliminates the densely packed column that often forms where the grain lands if loaded from a single source – as would happen when the grain is discharged from an auger, conveyor or leg discharge tube. In these instances, the densely packed column is often located off-centre in the bin, and when this happens, the air in the bin cannot move up uniformly through the grain and create a proper drying front. The dense column can also be difficult for air to penetrate, so it will take the path of least resistance around the column, which will prevent the grain from being properly dried or conditioned.

The other benefit of a grain spreader also lies in its ability to create an even distribution of grain in the bin. If the grain being loaded into the bin has a relatively high concentration of fine particles such as immature kernels and weed seeds, the

mature kernels will tend to pack densely into the middle of the bin where the grain lands, while the lighter, fine material will tend to flow towards the outside perimeter of the bin. This will create a dense core on the inner portion of the bin and a less dense concentration of fines around the outside perimeter. In this scenario, the air would once again take the path of least resistance, and would completely bypass the grain mass in the centre of the bin. The use of a grain spreader, however, is an easy solution for preventing this conundrum as it creates a proper distribution of grain to allow the air to reach it all.

Grain cleaner

If we expect to achieve optimal, uniform drying throughout our bin, the cleanliness of the grain and uniform kernel size are details not to be overlooked. a s previously mentioned, the air forced through a bin will take the path of least resistance,

ABOVE: Grain spreaders, cleaners and supplemental heaters can help ensure efficient natural air drying or aeration.

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and will therefore tend to travel through areas where chaff and fine particles are higher in concentration, while avoiding the main target – the mature kernels themselves. The use of a grain cleaner prior to loading grain into the bin will guarantee a separation of grain from foreign material and will go a long way in helping your grain conditioning system perform as intended.

Supplemental heaters

You might think that additional heat means faster drying, but that isn’t always the case. There is a fairly wide range of air temperatures at which natural air drying can and will occur, but it’s a temperature of exactly 10 C that will provide the ideal drying conditions. If the ambient air temperature is at or above that level, then additional heat is unnecessary. However, if the ambient temperature falls below that level, running a supplemental heater quickly becomes a smart decision.

Maintaining the air temperature going into a bin at or just above 10 C will allow you to achieve a reduction of between one-quarter and one-third of a percentage point in the moisture content of your crop per day. air that is going into the bin at any temperature below that, on the other hand, will not allow for anything more than a decrease of about one-eighth of a percentage point of moisture per day. The addition of a heater, therefore, can help keep the air going into the bin at the optimal temperature regardless of the outside temperature, and can ensure that drying occurs as quickly and effectively as possible.

During the fall harvest season, it is not unusual for daytime temperatures to rise to 10 C or above; however, nighttime tem -

Trait Stewardship Responsibilities Notice to Farmers

Monsanto Company is a member of Excellence Through Stewardship® (ETS). Monsanto products are commercialized in accordance with ETS Product Launch Stewardship Guidance, and in compliance with Monsanto’s Policy for Commercialization of Biotechnology-Derived Plant Products in Commodity Crops. This product has been approved for import into key export markets with functioning regulatory systems. Any crop or material produced from this product can only be exported to, or used, processed or sold in countries where all necessary regulatory approvals have been granted. It is a violation of national and international law to move material containing biotech traits across boundaries into nations where import is not permitted. Growers should talk to their grain handler or product purchaser to confirm their buying position for this product. Excellence Through Stewardship® is a registered trademark of Excellence Through Stewardship.

ALWAYS READ AND FOLLOW PESTICIDE LABEL DIRECTIONS. Roundup

Ready® crops contain genes that confer tolerance to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup® brand agricultural herbicides. Roundup® brand agricultural herbicides will kill crops that are not tolerant to glyphosate. Genuity and Design®, Genuity Icons, Genuity®, Roundup Ready®, and Roundup® are trademarks of Monsanto Technology LLC. Used under license.

peratures can, and often do, fall below that crucial point. With the addition of a supplemental heater, the temperature of incoming air can be maintained around the clock for a 24-hour drying cycle. This means you can keep your drying system at work, while enjoying a stress-free sleep knowing your crop is on its way towards the perfect moisture content!

Join us again in the next edition of The g rain g uardian, where we’ll look at the science behind grain drying.

For further information, got to www.grainguardian.com.

–Vern Schaab

iNNOVaTi VE M ET hOdS

f OR Ma Nagi Ng flE a

B EET l ES i N ca NOla

Get a jump on flea beetle control.

by Juliana J. Soroka and Bob elliott, agriculture and agri-Food Canada

Flea beetles are among the most chronic and economically damaging insect pests of canola in western Canada. They are a challenge to manage because they are difficult to forecast and can cause significant crop losses very quickly. Several cultural practices, including reduced tillage and the use of large-sized seed with high vigour, can lessen the impact of flea beetle feeding, but insecticide-coated seed dressings remain the primary method of control. The possible decreased toxicity of neonicotinoid insecticides to striped flea beetles makes investigation of other forms of management paramount. Host plant resistance through elevated plant trichomes (hairs) offers an alternate means of flea beetle management, although commercial development of such resistant lines is still several years away.

Flea beetles (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae) are small oval-shaped beetles (2-3 mm) with enlarged hind femurs. The common name reflects their habit of jumping or hopping when disturbed. There are three main species that attack canola in western Canada. The crucifer flea beetle is the most common species in central and southern regions of canola production. The striped flea beetle is most common in the northern parkland and peace river regions. The hop flea beetle occurs in low numbers throughout the prairies.

In western Canada, flea beetles have one generation a year and overwinter as adults along shelterbelts and headlands. emergence begins with the first extended period of warm weather in april and May. emerging beetles initially feed on winter annual weeds or volunteer canola and fly to newly seeded canola crops when day-time temperatures exceed 14° C. adult flea beetles make small circular pits in leaf tissue as they feed. The tissue surrounding the feeding site desiccates, creating a shot-hole appearance. Canola plants are most vulnerable to injury at the cotyledon and early true leaf stages, with damage past the fourth leaf stage having little impact on subsequent crop performance. Feeding at the early seedling stage can cause seedling mortality, reduced plant growth, delayed and uneven maturity and lower seed yield or grade. Damage is often most severe at field edges as flea beetles emigrate from overwintering sites. The nominal economic threshold for control is when 25% of the leaf surface is eaten.

Flea beetle numbers can be very high in ripening canola in the fall. If crops are very late in maturity, extensive feeding on pods can lower yields and increase green seed content. However, seed yields are usually not affected when crop maturity is more advanced than growth

Plant breeders are developing hairy canola lines that will help plants resist flea beetles.

stage 5.2, when the seeds in lower pods are turning green.

Flea beetle damage to oilseed Brassica crops is estimated to reduce production by 10%. Losses are estimated to exceed $300 million annually in north america.

Management of flea beetles

Cultural. agronomic practices that promote good stand establishment and rapid seedling growth will reduce the impact of flea beetles on canola seed yield. emergence and growth can be improved

Western Barley Growers Association

Leadership after the Single Desk

For years the Western Barley Growers Association (WBGA) and other producer groups have been working towards the day when producers in Western Canada would have marketing freedom for their wheat and barley sales. This finally came to fruition this past year and as of August 1, 2012 we are in a whole new world of marketing all the crops we grow on the Prairies. This debate is over – now the future is upon us, and the success of our farms and our industry is finally back in our own hands.

We have been asked many times since December’s Bill C-18 received Royal Assent “What is the WBGA going to do now that this fight has been won?”. The fight to return the CWB back to Voluntary status involved reining in a government entity that far exceeded its mandate and branched out into areas it felt it needed to control like transportation, car allocation, varieties and classes of cereals, and farmer advocacy. It has been a long and an all-encompassing fight, and everything in the grain-farming arena seemed to be touched by the single desk. Now that the new CWB is concentrating on its real mandate - the selling of grain, we at the WBGA can concentrate on all the other things that affect farmers. It’s not that the WBGA hasn’t been active in these other areas in the past, it’s just that they were overshadowed by enormity of the monopoly. The WBGA was formed 35 years ago to help farmers reduce their costs and represent themselves in matters that affect them in their grain industry. Over the years we have punched far above our weight when it came to taking farmer’s ideas and opinions to the politicians that affect our industry. As one of our members is fond of saying, “you need skin in the game to understand what is best for your industry”, and farmers who are dealing with the system on a day to day basis, making their living from agriculture, are the ultimate ones affected by both good and bad programs that politicians come up with.

Our first concern in this new market reality has been to come up with a structure that better represents the barley industry, with the producers’ needs and input at its’ core. Along with the Alberta Barley Commission, we are well down the road to a national barley organization called the Barley Council of Canada (BCC) that is similar to the successful Canola Council model already in place. It puts Canada-wide producers, researchers, buyers, end users and customers at the table developing and promoting barley and the barley industry. It recognizes that barley is a unique and under-represented grain whose interests cannot be served by being lumped in with all other cereals for the purpose of convenience. It does not mean that the Council won’t be cooperating with other cereal groups such as the new Wheat Commissions and the WCWGA or the Canada Grains Council on issues that affect all grains. It just means that we refuse to let barley get lost in the shuffle as the industry scrambles to adapt to the new realities of the Canadian grain market. We are very supportive of a stronger and better-funded Canada Grains Council now that we can talk freely at the table with all the participants without them having to watch what they say for fear of angering the former monopoly CWB.

When the monopoly disappeared, a number of organizations who were funded by producers’ money indirectly needed a new way of funding, and that will be accomplished by visible check-offs now so farmers can see where their money goes and how much it is. It puts more pressure on organizations like the WGRF, CIGI, etc. to deliver what farmers want for their investment, and that’s a good thing. The WBGA will continue to make sure farmers get their money’s worth.

Detractors of the WBGA in the past have tried to make the case that because we were not in favor of the single desk, that meant we were shills for the big elevator companies. That is ironic since the WBGA started as a group of farmers who showed other farmers how to load their own rail cars and properly fill out the paperwork to save handling and elevation fees, and took a lot of flak from grain companies for levelling the playing field. We will continue to fight for farmers’ interests first and foremost in agriculture. Everyone in the system has to make money, or the value chain will fail, but if something doesn’t work for farmers, who are the most important link in the chain, then it doesn’t work; period. The WBGA will continue to advocate for farmers, which is our primary priority, just as we always have done.

This includes things like Risk Management programs, both for Crop Insurance, and Business Risk Management. With the new Growing Forward II program coming into force there are challenges for farmers in covering identifiable risks as the government struggles to cut their budget across the board. Farmers should not be punished for being successful - that is a positive thing for the agriculture industry and the more we can do to encourage growth and profit in agriculture the better. That said, farmers know that Mother Nature can be brutal and arbitrary, and we need a way to better cover risk that comes with premiums that fairly reflect the value of what they cover. In the past the WBGA has been a leader in helping to develop innovative and useful programs that work for farmers, and we will continue to do that.

T his year is an evolutionary year, and there will be a learning and adaption curve we will all have to go through as an industry. The WBGA commissioned a study last year that has now been presented to the Federal and Provincial Ag Ministers which identified areas where there could be some gaps that industry will not be able or willing to fill that would improve the grain industry as a whole and make it work better for everyone such as mandatory reporting of export sales, as happens in the U.S.. It also identified opportunities for the industry that will help us compete better in the future. We intend to press all levels of government and the industry to adopt these useful recommendations.

T here is as big a need for the WBGA as ever, even without a monopoly to fight. The important battle is to encourage and foster an environment in agriculture that allows farmers to be successful. That is a battle the WBGA will continue to fight.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

WBGA 36th Annual Convention – February 13, 14 & 15, 2013, Calgary, AB @ the Deerfoot Inn & Casino

Agriculture Centre, 97 East Lake Ramp N.E., Airdrie, AB T4A 0C3 Website: www.wbga.org • E-mail: wbga@wbga.org

AIRDRIE OFFICE

Phone: (403) 912-3998

PRESIDENT – Doug Robertson

Phone: (403) 337-2077

by planting seed lots with higher seed weights and germination above 95% in the standard germination test or pre-chill test. Flea beetle numbers and damage levels are lower when plants are grown in zero- or no-till plots than in tilled plots. reduced tillage or direct seeding appears to provide a microclimate that is cooler, moister, and less favourable to flea beetles.

In southern alberta, canola planted in april has fewer flea beetles and suffers less damage than canola planted in May, while the opposite is true in central and northern alberta. producers are urged to seed canola as early as practical to maximize seed yield.

Seeding rates can affect flea beetle damage levels. University of alberta research found that damage to individual plants was lower with a 10 kg/ha seeding rate than with a 5.0 or 7.5 kg/ha rate. Higher seeding rates and plant densities are believed to dilute and reduce damage to individual plants. However, the benefits of higher seeding rates for flea beetle control need to be tempered by the costs, which include increased production costs and pesticide load to the environment, and the possibility of increased lodging and susceptibility to diseases.

Chemical. The principal means of flea

beetle control in western Canada has been and continues to be chemical. Because flea beetles emerge early in the spring and can migrate into seedling canola fields rapidly, insecticide-coated seed treatments are the most effective means of flea beetle control. Since 2001, all seed treatments registered for control of flea beetles in Canada contain a neonicotinoid insecticide. This insecticide class has systemic activity in plants and inhibits nervous conduction in insects by blocking the nicotinoid acetylcholine receptor. Currently over 90% of the canola grown in western Canada is treated with an insecticide. application of foliar insecticide may be required when feeding damage encompasses 25% of the leaf surface. If damage around field edges is high but flea beetles have not dispersed throughout the field, limiting insecticide application to the field perimeter may be sufficient.

In a recent greenhouse trial, when crucifer flea beetles were exposed to seedlings of canola grown from neonicotinoidtreated seed, they fed less and had higher mortality than striped flea beetles in the same trial. The differential toxicity of seed treatments to the two species may result in

a shift in their geographic distribution and economic importance.

Host Plant Resistance

Host plant resistance is an alternative method of flea beetle management. Canola germplasm with increased numbers of hairs on young true leaves displayed resistance to flea beetles in field trials at Saskatoon and Lethbridge, in some cases surpassing the protection level provided by neonicotinoid seed treatments. although the cotyledons of the tested canola lines with elevated trichomes were hairless, they also experienced less feeding than did the parental less hirsute lines, possibly because of the presence of hairs on the stem below the cotyledon and on the cotyledon petiole, sites where trichomes do not occur in the parental lines. These hairs may have discouraged flea beetles from walking up hairy stems. advanced canola lines with further elevated numbers, lengths, and complexities of plant trichomes are currently in trials and may achieve levels of resistance to flea beetles at present seen only with insecticide use.

Integrated Management Practices

Currently, most farmers manage flea beetles in canola crops on the Canadian prairies by using insecticide- coated canola seed. as this review notes, there are several other practices that could reduce our dependency on chemical control of this insect. observation of the levels of flea beetle populations in canola during fall harvesting operations can forewarn producers of potential populations in the next spring. activities that encourage rapid, even germination of the crop will mitigate flea beetle effects. Seeding large- sized seed with high vigour and germination rates into minimally or zero tilled fields can effectively reduce flea beetle feeding injury, and can reduce the impact of the injury that does occur. By integrating management practices we can lessen our need for chemical control of flea beetles while maintaining canola productivity.

The complete, unedited version of this Journal article can be found at www.prairiesoilsandcrops.ca. Prairie Soils & Crops: Scientific Perspectives for Innovative Management is a “peer reviewed” e-Journal that provides agronomists, producers, agrologists and certified crop advisors with current perspectives on various issues pertaining to soil and crop management on the Prairies.

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