A main obstacle in expanding canola acres on the Prairies is the difficulty farmers have harvesting it.
The dry pods have a tendency to shatter, spilling seeds onto the ground before they make it into the combine.
At Manitoba Ag Days, two producers presented their approaches to this problem.
“For years, I used to swath canola like all my neighbours. In 2001, we had a terrible windstorm and all of the swaths blew away. I was thinking, in Austria and Germany, they all straight cut their canola. They don’t even know what a swather looks like. So why can’t a guy straight cut his canola here,” said Robert Breckner, who moved to Canada from his native Austria in 1997 and now farms near Grandview, Man.
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He went to Europe and looked at the options on the market there, before deciding to become an importer of the Austrian-made Biso header in 2002.
“I brought one over for myself and it worked very well. So I thought that there might be a market for them here,” he said.
Breckner seeds his crop from north to south, and sprays east-west. He desicates his Invigor canola at 65 percent seed colour change.
“At that stage, you hardly lose anything, just where the tire hits the plant,” he said.
Fourteen days later, the crop is ready for straight cutting. The best varieties are ones that lodge well, such as the Invigors and RR Dekalb 7145.
Breckner said that trials conducted with the Canola Council of Canada in the United States and Saskatchewan found that straight-cutting yields an average of five bushels more per acre than swathed canola.
“You gain the yield mainly because you have plumper seeds, which gives heavier bushel weight with no shriveled kernels,” he said.
One study found weight per thousand seeds was 2.7 grams for swathed canola, while straight cut was 3.1.
“That’s where we get the yield from.”
The Biso header, with its own hydraulic pumps and reservoir, is attached by two turnbuckles, and features a 28-inch table extension. That means that the pickup reel is running inside the table, which has steps built-in that keep the seeds from dribbling out onto the ground.
“When the reel hits the plant, all the shelling happens over the table.”
With no hoses to attach, the header can be removed in 15 minutes, said Breckner. Short vertical cutterbars on the sides help it to cut through thick stands. A 30-foot header sells for less than $20,000.
Dennis Janzen, who farms 4,000 acres in the Red River Valley near Arnaud, Man., has been straight combining canola for eight years.
“On our farm we straight cut all our crops and dump on the go into a cart,” said Janzen, who prefers Invigor varieties. “Swathing one crop just didn’t fit into the program.”
He started straight cutting 25 percent of his canola, then increased that figure each year as he became more confident. Initial results showed a five to seven bushel yield increase, mainly due to the seed size and reduced harvesting loss.
“Straight cut canola usually has a very low green seed count. It is also very black, black as tar,” he said, adding that this has paid off, with some of his canola selling into the human consumption grade market.
Advantages over swathing include quicker harvest time, no “beaver huts” and reduced seed loss.
“Typically, when we had a heavy canola crop, we had very poor swaths, with beaver huts, lumps and moist swath bottoms. All of this affected our seed loss and harvest speed,” he said. “Crisp, dry standing canola harvests very nicely.”
Ten-inch spacing often means spraying with fungicides, he noted.
An experiment with 30-inch row spacing, which allowed the wind to blow through the plants and prevent disease, was cheaper at 1.75 pounds of seed per acre, but header losses were higher due to thicker stalks and poor lodging rates. He plans to try 20-inch spacing in the future.
He has used both John Deere Hydro Flex and MacDon 36-foot draper headers.
“The auger header is faster in the standing, lighter canola, while the draper head is faster in the lodged canola.”
A desiccant is necessary for good results, he added. He uses Reglone, applied by air at a full rate when the pods are 40 percent brown. It costs about $21 per acre. Spraying in the morning dew speeds up the chemical. Dry down takes five to eight days.
“An actual dry down is too slow, and desiccation seems to tighten the pods up.”
