Today’s prairie farmers have seen many changes in their crops in the last 15 years thanks to breeding breakthroughs and developing markets. What can their children expect to see by 2025?
Western Producer reporter Sean Pratt talked to experts who expect some new crops and some that will look new because of genetic changes. But most will be the familiar standbys we see today. The big change will be in the mix of crops farmers will seed, the uses for them and where they are grown. New oilseed types will be used for fuel and industrial products, soybeans will push west and north, pulses will expand while cereal area might shrink.
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Statistics Canada still considers rye to be one of Canada’s principal field crops in its acreage and production estimates, but its days on the list could be numbered.
A crop once occupying a million acres has dwindled to 225,000 acres.
Canada’s lone rye breeder doesn’t see the freefall reversing. Grant McLeod, who works at Agriculture Canada’s Semiarid Prairie Agricultural Research Centre, thinks rye will further decrease to 100,000 acres by 2025.
Rye gained popularity after the 1930s as a fall-seeded crop to control soil erosion.
Farmers appreciated the agronomic benefits of a low-input crop they could sell into food, feed and alcohol markets.
Improved varieties with better fertility and fewer ergot problems helped the crop reach the one million acre mark in 1989.
That was rye’s heyday.
Since then, it has been beset by a series of setbacks.
“There are a number of things that have really gone against this crop,” McLeod said.
Bread makers abandoned labour intensive practices such as the sour dough process in favour of mechanized processes. As a result, rye bread that was once all rye is now at most 30 percent.
Most rye whiskey makers use only five percent rye, the legal minimum. Instead, the main ingredients are corn, potato or sugar cane.
The crop also suffered from the rapid adoption of reduced and zero till seeding practices, which negated its soil erosion benefits.
Rye has lost ground to winter wheat, which can be grown almost anywhere there is stubble and has better market prospects.
Researchers have found that rye as a feed grain causes high viscosity and low nutrient absorption in poultry.
The final blow was the general adoption of hybrid rye varieties in Europe, leading to increased production there and the displacement of Canadian rye in the Japanese feed market.
McLeod experimented with Canadian rye hybrids, but the increased yields were offset by increased amounts of ergot infection.
If there is a future for rye it may be in organic rotations. Rye produces compounds that act as natural herbicides.
It also has potential as a healthy food ingredient. The fibre that makes it a poor ingredient in poultry diets is exactly the type of fibre that should be incorporated into human diets.
“In the area of human nutrition, it would seem to be one of the world’s best kept secrets,” McLeod said.
Wilf Keller, president of Ag-West Bio Inc., worries flax may become the next rye of the Prairies.
“Flax is in the danger zone unless we do value-added processing.”
Farmers planted only a million acres of flax in 2010, largely because of the Triffid contamination incident. That is about half of its peak acreage.
Keller said a crop loses the critical mass needed to attract research investment once it drops below one million acres.
“I’d be worried about flax.”
Barry Hall, president of the Flax Council of Canada, agreed the crop is at a critical point but it has shown tremendous resilience.
“I would not necessarily predict its demise. If you go back over the history of flax, it has died many times before.”
He said there is strong research interest despite the Triffid incident. Genome Canada has invested in an $11.8 million project to sequence the flax genome and develop tools to accelerate breeding and research.
The council is partnering with Cibus Global to create non-genetically modified lines of herbicide tolerant flax, which could lead to other projects such as developing lines with better oil quality and quantity.
Flax is also making headway as a healthy food ingredient.
“These are all things that speak well of the future of the crop,” Hall said.
