A variety of factors have discouraged farmers from planting the crop, but proponents say it is starting to gain momentum
A decade ago, winter wheat was a significant crop on the eastern Prairies.
Farmers in Manitoba and Saskatchewan routinely seeded 800,000 acres of winter wheat, with some years topping one million acres.
But around 2015, a new trend took hold. Acres began dropping every year, going from 500,000 to 400,000, then 250,000 and so on.
Growers moved acres out of winter wheat for a number of reasons, including a new variety of spring wheat, AAC Brandon.
“I think it was 2014 that Brandon spring wheat was first introduced. It was one those ‘change the game’ varieties,” said Alex Griffiths, an agrologist with Ducks Unlimited in Manitoba. “Everyone realized you could get a winter wheat yield with a spring wheat. And Brandon is still one of the most, if not the most, common variety of spring wheat grown in Manitoba.”
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The data show that AAC Brandon is extremely popular with farmers. In 2020, it was seeded on 62 percent of all spring wheat acres in Manitoba, based on figures from Manitoba Agricultural Services Corp.
Other factors also pushed farmers away from winter wheat, such as growing seasons with extreme levels of fusarium head blight, severe winterkill and terrible autumn weather.
In 2019, heavy rain or snow fell from late August to the middle of October in Manitoba, making it impossible for farmers to harvest and then seed winter wheat.
Winter wheat acres sank to 32,000, a fraction of the acres seeded in the early 2010s.
“For Manitoba we had around 600,000, as (recently) as 2013…. But I was still in high school at that time,” said Griffiths.
Griffiths and DUC have tried to revive farmer interest in winter wheat because research has shown that ducks thrive when winter wheat is available for spring nesting.
“Ducks that nest in winter wheat are 24 times more successful than those who nest in spring-sown cereal crops,” says the DUC website.
Griffiths and others have been somewhat successful in convincing more farmers to grow winter wheat.
Seeded acres in Manitoba climbed to 56,000 in 2020-21 and 74,000 in 2021-22.
DUC has an incentive program, in which growers receive $20 per acre (up to $5,000) for seeding winter wheat, fertility advice from Western Ag-PRS CropCasting, full access to FarmLink’s new grain marketing tool GrainFox and ongoing support from DUC’s winter wheat experts such as Griffiths.
The incentive has convinced a few farmers to grow it again or try it for a first time.
“First and foremost, it was the DUC rebate,” Ryan Downey, who farms with his dad near Coulter, says in a DUC press release. “(Planting it) eased up the spring workload…. This spring, we had a lot of neighbours… wishing they had done it.”
In his short time as a DUC agrologist, Griffiths has noticed a shift in perceptions and attitudes about winter wheat.
When he started, few seed dealers in Manitoba had winter wheat for sale.
“I called (in 2020) to anybody in the Seed Manitoba guide…. I probably called about 50 different retails. And in Manitoba there was eight who had winter wheat,” he said. “Now, all of those guys are sowing their own fields… and taking it off and immediately selling it back to guys.”
Interest in winter wheat is gaining momentum, largely because of better varieties. The older varieties couldn’t compete with AAC Brandon. But the more recent varieties, like AAC Wildfire, have excellent yield potential, Griffiths said.
“Wildfire, under irrigation in Alberta, they’re getting 130-135 bushel per acre. We’ve been seeing guys able to hit 80-85 in Manitoba. If the weather completely co-operated… getting into triple digits wouldn’t be out of the question.”
Newer varieties, soon to hit the market, may generate even more buzz about winter wheat.
Robert Graf, a winter wheat breeder with Agriculture Canada in Lethbridge, developed a variety called Coldfront before he retired in June. It has very good winter survival, is resistant to leaf, stem and stripe rust and out-yields previous varieties.
“(It has) pretty decent protein and it’s actually higher yielding that Wildfire,” Griffiths said.
“When that one comes out, guys are going to (say), ‘wow, where’s the drawback?’ ”
Coldfront is expected to come to market in 2024.
This fall, it’s hard to predict how many acres of winter wheat will go in the ground, but many farmers are interested.
‘Manitoba has about 700,000 acres of unseeded cropland, due to a late spring and multiple rainfalls of 50-100 millimetres in April and May.
Some of that land may go into winter wheat, but it will be trickier to seed winter wheat into canola stubble this fall.
Typically, 70 percent of the winter wheat is sown into canola stubble in Manitoba. But much of the crop was seeded two weeks later than normal, delaying the harvest and cutting the time window to seed winter wheat on that land.
Griffiths said more winter wheat will likely be seeded into pea, oat and barley stubble.
Crop Insurance’s seeding deadline for winter wheat is Sept. 25 in Manitoba.
