The first page of the 2010 Pulse Days proceedings contained a dire warning for growers.
“Don’t let high lentil prices tempt you to abandon sound agronomic crop rotations,” said the advisory from Saskatchewan Pulse Growers.
“Remember our Laird lentil experience? The breakdown in disease resistance due to poor crop rotation cost growers millions of dollars.”
The warning harkens back to the 1980s when producers started growing lentil on lentil stubble.
It wasn’t such a bad experience in a dry year, said University of Saskatchewan Crop Development Centre breeder Bert Vandenberg.
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But in wet years, pushing the rotation changed the biological system to the point where diseases mutated and green lentils lost their resistance to the ascochyta fungus.
“We had these years where we had terrible quality lentils. It affected everything about them, the productivity and the quality,” he said.
It took 10 years and a lot of grower check-off dollars to breed disease resistance back into lentil varieties. Vandenberg doesn’t want to start from scratch again.
“We’ll crash the whole system if we start putting lentil on lentil stubble because now we’re tilting the balance in favour of the fungus,” he said.
“If we want to break down the resistance, there is a perfect way to do it. That is to grow lentil on lentil stubble. That is exactly what I would do if I was a fungus breeder.”
Garth Patterson, executive director of Saskatchewan Pulse Growers, said the allure of 39 cents per pound lentils has some growers thinking short-term profitability instead of long-term industry sustainability.
Lentils pencil out as one of the top revenue generators in Saskatchewan Agriculture’s 2010 Crop Planning Guides.
“We’ve been hearing anecdotally from various farmers of the temptation to stray away from sound agronomic rotations. We’ve been hearing reports of lentil on lentil,” he said.
But if disease resistance breaks down, farmers will be forced to spend more money on fungicides.
Patterson also noted there is usually a yield penalty associated with growing lentil crops back-to-back instead of following the recommended practice of planting the crop on a field once every three years.
“That’s why we want to remind growers to stick to sustainable rotations,” he said.
Vandenberg said an alternative to pushing rotations is to rent land from a neighbour who doesn’t grow lentils.
“That’s a better strategy.”
