Good cropping option | Manitoba acreage is rising as more growers look to a break from their canola-wheat-canola rotation
It wasn’t a great year for buckwheat on Marc Durand’s farm near Notre Dame de Lourdes, Man., yet his buckwheat outperformed a crop with a much higher profile.
“In a year like this year, I was further ahead with my buckwheat than I was with my canola,” said Durand, who runs Durand Seeds and is president of the Manitoba Buckwheat Growers Association.
“The canola this year I sprayed for flea beetles, blackleg and sclerotinia. All those costs add up, and your fertilizer is double the cost it is for buckwheat.”
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Durand’s buckwheat crop, which was harvested in September, had the look of an excellent crop two months ago.
However, hot weather and a lack of rain in August and September knocked it down to an average crop.
“The seed set this year was very good. There was lots of seed there, but it ran out of moisture at the end (of the growing season),” Durand said.
“Volume wise, it was there, but it’s awfully light, so dockage will be high … a lot of unfilled seed.”
Manitoba producers insured 11,500 acres of buckwheat in 2012, more than double the 5,000 acres that had become the norm in the province in the late 2000s.
This year’s buckwheat crop will likely be slightly below average, said Rejean Picard, a production adviser with Manitoba Agriculture. The average buckwheat yield in Manitoba is 20 bushels per acre.
“If we would have had some nice rains in August during the maturing portion of the buckwheat crop, they would’ve had a tremendous (crop).”
However, Picard said buckwheat crops could yield more this year in southwestern Manitoba, where soil moisture reserves are high thanks to excessive precipitation in 2011.
The increase in acres has led to a decrease in price because Manitoba growers produce most of the buckwheat in Canada. Nestibo Agra, a processor in Deloraine, Man., was offering buckwheat contracts at $15 per bushel this spring.
“Right now … I’d be at that $13 to $14 per bushel (range),” said Mike Durand, sales manager with Nestibo Agra. “So it’s backed off a little bit, but I’m still looking for some.”
Though it varies from year to year, about half of Manitoba’s buckwheat crop goes to Japan for the soba noodle market and the remainder is sold to North American millers.
Marc Durand would like to cultivate demand for buckwheat in North America so producers don’t have to rely on the export market.
However, buckwheat hasn’t fully capitalized on booming demand for gluten free food in North America, he added.
“People nowadays want to use foods that are easy to work with. They just don’t know how to use buckwheat,” he said. “That’s one thing we (the Manitoba Buckwheat Growers Association) have to do is get North Americans to eat more of it.”
Prairie growers who rely primarily on canola to pay the farm bills might have another cropping option if the association is able to generate more buzz about buckwheat.
“There’s a lot of canola being grown,” Durand said. “Canola-canola or canola-wheat-canola and that’s going to cause some disease pressures down the line. Buckwheat is a very nice break from that (rotation).”
