SeCan expects a high yielding, hard red spring wheat it is introducing
commercially next year will soon displace AC Barrie as the standard of
the prairie wheat industry.
SeCan, a grower-owned seed company, has the marketing rights to AC
Superb, from the breeding program of Fred Townley-Smith at Agriculture
Canada’s cereal breeding program in Winnipeg.
It outyielded AC Barrie by almost 15 percent in co-op trials.
The cross between AC Domain and the American wheat Grandin has created
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a wheat with a strong, short, hollow stem and large kernel size.
“Lodging won’t be one of the production challenges in this variety,”
said Dale Alderson, marketing manager of SeCan.
Canadian hard red spring wheat varieties traditionally do not have
awns, but Superb, like some other new varieties, is awned. The beard
comes from its American parentage. Alderson thinks if Superb catches on
like he believes, Canadian wheat fields will look more like their
United States neighbours.
“It’s all bearded wheats down there and we are going to be looking that
way.
“Most wheat in the U.S. is straight cut and this one is going to be
suitable for straight cut too. It doesn’t shatter. I think it is going
to change the outlook on wheat production.”
AC Superb, which was registered in 2000, takes a couple of days longer
to reach maturity than Barrie and it has one half of a percentage point
less protein on average.
According to the Saskatchewan Seed Guide, it has good resistance to
stem rust and bunt, fair resistance to leaf rust, loose smut and
fusarium head blight, and poor resistance to leaf spot.
The breeding effort to create a new variety of higher yielding bread
wheat was partly fuelled by the controversy over Grandin in the early
1990s.
Grandin is a high yield American variety that many Canadian growers
wanted to produce.
But it did not receive registration because, although it looked like a
hard red spring wheat, it increased the dough mixing time by as much as
30 percent over the upper limits for that class of wheat.
Superb captures Grandin’s yield advantage but meets the quality
characteristics of the hard red spring class.
Alderson said the yield leap found in AC Superb is rare and will
present a new option for farmers who have grown wheat in the Canadian
Prairie Spring classes.
Superb’s yield promises to be only slightly less than CPS, and the HRSW
class pays more than the CPS class.
“I think Superb will play havoc with CPS wheats …. If you are a
rational thinker you’d say ‘I should grow less of this and more of
that,’ ” he said.
