SASKATOON – When Eric Pankratz seeded his entire canola acreage with the popular new high-yielding variety Cyclone last year, he expected to get a bumper crop.
What he got was a disaster, and now Pankratz and a number of other farmers are trying to figure out what went wrong and who is responsible for the financial losses.
The people who sell Cyclone say it’s not them.
“No compensation is being discussed because the seed met certified standards,” said Gary Bauman, Saskatoon-based sales manager for Pride Brand Seeds.
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Pankratz said he first tried Cyclone two years ago. It’s an Argentine variety, late maturing with high yield and good blackleg and lodging resistance.
“In 1992 it was great,” he says. “So we went whole hog in ’93 and seeded every acre of canola we had with Cyclone.”
It quickly became clear he had a problem. Emergence was “very poor,” with seed planted in mid-May not coming up until late June.
Land rated at 27 bushels an acre on stubble yielded less than 15 bushels, and the crop he did get had green seed content as high as 35 percent. He said the crop competed poorly, so spraying costs were high, as was dockage.
Pankratz aired his frustrations at last week’s annual meeting of the Saskatchewan Canola Growers Association. In an interview later, he said there’s no doubt Cyclone has a lot going for it, but he thinks there was such a strong demand for it that some sub-standard seed got on the market.
He said a group of about 15 Foam Lake-area farmers who had similar problems is considering its options, and he didn’t rule out the possibility of going to court to gain compensation.
Bauman said farmers had high expectations for Cyclone and so those who had poor results in 1993 are understandably upset. He said the cool spring and summer put a lot of stress on emerging crops and if a particular batch of seed didn’t have good vigor, it was bound to do poorly. But he said Cyclone fared no worse than other varieties.
Certification provides a guarantee that the seed is alive and will germinate, he added, but there is no standard test or measure for vigor, which is the ability of the seed to grow and produce a seedling.
Vigor varies
Phil Thomas, oilseeds specialist with Alberta Agriculture, said good germination does not guarantee good vigor. Tests have shown 12 lots of certified seed had vigor ranging from 10 to 90 percent.
Bauman said the company recognizes the need for some kind of in-house test for vigor and how a variety reacts to stress.
Nick Underwood, crop production co-ordinator for the Canola Council of Canada, said the whole industry is concerned about the lack of a standard test for vigor, especially with so many new varieties appearing on the market.
Cyclone definitely has a place, Underwood said, because of its good blackleg resistance and high yield, but it requires careful management. It must be seeded early and the plant is slow to shut down if fertility is high, creating green seed problems.
Bauman said he was disappointed that Pankratz aired his concerns in front of a group of “progressive” growers.
The company acknowledges the variety’s green seed risk and says farmers should take that into account in deciding whether to grow it and then apply careful management.
But he maintained that Cyclone does have a place in the market, if for no other reason than its blackleg and drought resistance.
“If we had had two years of hot weather with blackleg, then Cyclone would be seen as the saviour of the industry,” said Bauman. “Instead its image has been tarnished because of the green seed problem.”
Thomas said results at 10 test plots in Saskatchewan showed Cyclone averaged 16.4 percent green seed, compared with 10.8 percent for Legend and eight percent for AC Excel. He said Cyclone is a multi-branched, healthy plant that produces seed quite late, resulting in more green seed.
