RED DEER – Barley is the most competitive annual crop grown on the Prairies, but competitive ability varies among varieties.
A recently completed two-year study compared barley’s competitive ability with oats as a way to shed light on how feasible it might be to rank barley cultivars for their competitiveness.
“We know barley is a competitive crop, but the competitive ability is quite variable,” said Paul Watson of the Alberta Research Council, which collaborated on the study with Agriculture Canada and the University of Manitoba.
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He said there are two competitive aspects to consider: the ability to maintain yield, which he referred to as the ability to withstand competition; and the ability to suppress weeds, referred to as the ability to compete.
“There’s a difference in terms of these two competitive abilities. When you look at the ability to maintain yield, that’s something that puts dollars in your pockets today. When you look at the ability to suppress weeds, that tends to be a little bit longer term,” Watson said.
“All other things being equal, you’d like to choose a competitive variety. There’s less yield loss, it suppresses weeds and puts money in your pocket.”
Watson started his study with 29 barley varieties, including two-row and six-row, full height and semi-dwarf, hulled and hull-less, feed and malting. Each variety had to make up at least five percent of commercial acreage in Saskatchewan, Alberta or Manitoba.
The research included two trial sites in 2001 and four in 2002. Each site included a weed-free area and an area that included tame oats as weeds.
“I seeded tame oats at 70 plants per metre squared. I was targeting 25 percent yield loss,” he said.
Weed control included a pre-seed burnoff to allow Watson to seed into a clean field, an in-crop application for broadleaf weeds in all the plots and Achieve in all the weed-free plots, where no grassy weed competition was desired.
“Yield loss in barley ranged from six to 79 percent in the individual years,” Watson said.
“That translates into an ability to withstand competition ranging from 21 to 94, which is a lot bigger range than most people would expect in barley. Dockage ranged from 10 to 83 percent, so ability to compete scores were 17 to 90.”
He said Earl was the most competitive semi-dwarf variety and while hull-less varieties tended to be less competitive, Phoenix, Bacon and Kendal weren’t too bad.
The most competitive malting varieties included Robust, Excel and B1602, while the most competitive feed varieties were Virden, Lacombe and Ranger. The least competitive were the semi-dwarf varieties Peregrine, Falcon, Kasota and Thompson, as well as Dawn. In this group, Peregrine, Falcon and Dawn were also hull-less varieties.
Watson said almost all the most competitive varieties were six-row, although most of the least competitive were also six-row.
“Classes were different from each other,” he said.
“Hulled tended to be more competitive than hull-less; semi-dwarf tended to be less competitive than full height. However, belonging to these classes didn’t guarantee you were going to be less competitive. Within hull-less varieties, Phoenix was a (competitive) variety.”
Watson said the study also discovered that the ability to withstand competition and the ability to compete weren’t necessarily related.
“You might be more interested in yield maintenance in conventional systems, where herbicides are applied. You might be more interested in weed suppression in organic systems.”
Watson concluded that variety choice will make a difference in competitive ability.
“Yield loss between 20 and 40 percent is not too difficult to get. You can increase your yield by choosing a competitive variety. I realize this is only one of the reasons for which you choose a variety, but if you knew how competitive the varieties were, you could make some choices.”
