It has a reputation as a resilient crop, but canola is struggling to rebound from June’s wet growing conditions in southwestern Manitoba, southeastern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta.
Many canola fields south of Manitoba’s Riding Mountain National Park are bolting prematurely because the crop was sitting in soaked soil this spring, said Elmer Kaskiw, a crop production adviser with Manitoba Agriculture.
“Canola is the one crop that hasn’t recovered, as of yet, from the excess moisture,” Kaskiw said.
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Much of the canola in southwestern Manitoba went in the ground before spring rain waterlogged the region’s already wet soil. The rain compacted and pushed the remaining air pockets out of the soil, making it difficult for canola plants to establish healthy roots.
“The soil couldn’t breathe… so you’ve got poor root development and (the plants) couldn’t find the nutrients in the soil,” Kaskiw said.
The stress impelled the plants to reproduce, which is why many canola fields in southwestern Manitoba were bolting in early July, even though they were only 15 to 20 centimetres high.
“It didn’t canopy … so there is poor ground cover,” Kaskiw said.
Without a canopy, the canola crop in southwestern Manitoba could actually use a rain because hot weather is drying out soil and plants.
However, Kaskiw hasn’t given up on the crop.
“Canola has that amazing ability to compensate and recover,” he said.
“I think the potential is there to recover, as long as we don’t go into an extended period of time where we get hot temperatures … and no rain.”
Murray Hartman, oilseed specialist with Alberta Agriculture, isn’t as confident that canola in southern Alberta will recover from the wet spring.
In an article he wrote for the Alberta Canola Producers Commission, Hartman said experiments and data on waterlogged canola are limited, but he estimated that yields could be cut in half in some regions.
“Spring seeded crops, once they’ve been flooded a week, the average is almost a 50 percent yield loss,” he said.
“Often these (areas) don’t get sprayed for herbicide because it was too wet to go in there…. I don’t anticipate these areas to come back and be very productive at all.”
Research from China shows that adding nutrients can help canola recover from early season stress.
However, with such a tight growing season in Western Canada, adding nitrogen and phosphorus to a soaked and yellowing canola crop isn’t feasible because of the likelihood of an autumn frost, Hartman said.
“At some point, for our tight season, anything flowering past the end of July isn’t going to be economic.”
On the positive side, most of the waterlogged crop is in southern Alberta, which isn’t the province’s primary canola region.
“The main growing area, central Alberta and the Peace River region, it was OK to dry and then it got wet. So we might lose a bit in the low spots, but (we) should get better yields in the high spots…. So we could still end up with above average yield (in Alberta).”
