Barry Taylor lost more than a dollar per bushel on his barley two years ago after the grain sat in a bin and gradually lost the quality needed for malting.
Taylor had signed a contract compelling him to keep the grain in storage until it was needed, but almost a year passed before the call came. In the meantime, quality ebbed to the point where he was told the grain was good only for livestock feed.
“The germination was good in the winter and the germination was good in the spring and then when they tested it in July, it was no good,” said Taylor, who farms near Earl Grey, Sask.
Read Also
Going beyond “Resistant” on crop seed labels
Variety resistance is getting more specific on crop disease pathogens, but that information must be conveyed in a way that actually helps producers make rotation decisions.
“This made a real big problem for me because in the meantime what happened is this BSE thing came about so feed barley went through the floor. It wasn’t worth anything.”
After that experience, Taylor vowed he would never grow malting barley again. So far he has kept his pledge.
His experience might have been different if there had been a way to better gauge the germination capacity of his barley as it went into storage. That measure would have told him his barley needed to be shipped for malting sooner rather than later.
The Canadian Grain Commission, with the support of industry partners, thinks it has found a way to prevent the kind of disappointment Taylor experienced. It recently announced it has developed a way to predict the long-term storage potential of individual lots of malting barley.
The method uses rapid visco analysis, which can detect the early onset of germination in grain, something that escapes visual detection.
Pre-germination can occur before harvest, reducing barley’s ability to keep its germination energy.
The result can be the loss of the high, uniform germination rates needed to produce good quality malt extract.
According to the grain commission, barley needs to retain 95 percent of its germination energy to be suitable for malting.
“Barley may have very good germination energy after harvest, but there is a possibility this germination energy is going to be lost during storage,” said Marta Izydorczyk, program manager of barley research at CGC’s grain research laboratory in Winnipeg.
“One of the reasons barley may lose germination energy during storage is if the sample is pre-germinated, if the germination process has started before harvest.”
Izydorczyk said rapid visco analysis, or RVA, should benefit producers, grain handlers and malting companies, allowing them to tell which lots should go for malting immediately and which ones can stay in storage longer.
“The producer will know whether his or her sample is pre-germinated and how it should be handled,” Izydorczyk said.
“The producer will avoid the disappointment of being told initially it is selected for malting purposes and then three or four months later being told it is not good because it lost germination. The handling companies will be able to basically segregate samples of barley which should be used for germination purposes immediately versus barley that can be stored for malting later on, without discovering later on that it’s not good for germination.”
Rapid visco analysis measures the viscosity of starch in the grain and indirectly measures for alpha amylase, an enzyme synthesized during the germination process. The presence of the enzyme affects viscosity.
The method was one of four technologies evaluated during a two-year research project funded by the grain commission, Automated Quality Testing Inc., Canadian Wheat Board, Agricore United, Cargill Limited and Saskatchewan Wheat Pool.
The commission is offering a free seminar about rapid visco analysis on June 23 and 24 in Winnipeg. It will give details about RVA research and explain how to conduct the test. Interested participants are asked to pre-register.
Taylor said such a test could have merit, but he reserves judgment until learning about the experiences of other producers who he trusts.
“It would be something else I’d want to know, assuming this test is worth a damn to begin with. Maybe it is and probably it is, but there’s so many tests coming out now and so many things they do you might as well just ignore it and go about it like the old fellas did and they did just fine.”
