WINNIPEG – Lethbridge farmer Glen Alexander has persevered with winter wheat since the 1970s, regardless of limited varieties, little research and few marketing opportunities.
Now that he’s won the Canadian Wheat Board’s first-ever Select Master Grower award for hard red winter wheat, he hopes the win will shine the spotlight on Canada Western Red Winter wheat because the class has spent too much time in the shadow of spring wheat.
“We’ve always been pushing in Alberta to get the wheat board to accept that it is (something that) could become a significant crop,” said Alexander, who farms with his wife and son.
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“I think with better varieties and more quantities, they’ll be able to market more of it into these additional markets.”
Prairie winter wheat production has slumped since the 1980s, falling to about 200,000 acres per year by the end of the 1990s. Dryness often strangled acreage in the late 1980s and disease and lodging problems with the predominant variety, Norstar, pushed most Manitoba and eastern Saskatchewan farmers out of the wheat class.
The wheat board tried to find markets for prairie winter wheat in the 1990s, but found that the few varieties available to farmers produced poor or wildly varying grain quality. Customers backed away.
“Some told us they never wanted to see Canadian winter wheat again,” said Gord Flaten, the board’s director of product development and marketing support.
Inconsistent quality was the biggest problem for buyers, he said. To fight the problem and the perception of Western Canada as a poor producer of winter wheat, the board began promoting high-quality varieties.
Flaten said that only eight percent of winter wheat grown on the Prairies was of recommended varieties only a few years ago, but now high-quality types make up 21 percent of prairie production and produced 45,000 tonnes last fall.
Overall, prairie production has risen to 700,000 acres, including 350,000 acres in Manitoba, which grew almost no winter wheat five years ago.
“We’re happy with where things are going,” Flaten said.
Alexander said winter wheat is a good fit for his southern Alberta farm because it tends to have early harvests, allowing him to seed winter wheat in early September.
The crop grows well on his farm, helps kill wild oats infestations and fits nicely into his rotation and farming schedule.
However, variety selection and markets remain the limiting factors and he worries that he might have trouble finding seed for his preferred variety, AC Readymade.
With few buyers, demand can seem less secure than for hard red spring wheat.
Flaten said the board sees a good market for CWRW wheat in Latin America, but knows it will be tough to compete with closer supplies of American winter wheat. To compete against American supplies that have lower transportation costs, prairie hard red winter wheat needs to be better and more consistent for users.
“We do need to provide some advantages.”
With quantities of the crop so low in recent years, the wheat board has only gingerly promoted its varieties to customers, hoping to attract their interest but not promise too much before there is enough wheat for large sales. It has sent samples to 30 potential buyers and “they have been telling us what we want to hear.”
With acreage increasing, the board is making its first commercial-sized sales this year.
“We’re getting to levels where we can start to make commercial shipments.”
Mike Grenier, a market development ag-ronomist with the wheat board, said he is glad eastern prairie producers can again grow winter wheat.
“There are now varieties that are better adapted to Manitoba and we’re seeing a dramatic increase in acreage.”
