Dave Mallough Helped speed canola development by finding winter breeding sites for seed multiplication
Long before canola was king on the Prairies, Dave Mallough delivered the seed to producers in California.
His efforts helped reverse the fate of the oilseed north of the border, bringing new varieties to market, improving the oilseed’s oil and meal quality and diversifying its use beyond industrial oil.
In 1970, the fatty acid composition of rapeseed oil had come under the scrutiny of nutritionists, which jeopardized its place in European and Japanese markets.
Work was already underway on Polish and Argentine varieties with a lower erucic acid composition, which was the source of nutritionists’ concern.
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However, only a small amount of breeder’s seed was on hand, and Agriculture Canada officials had to be convinced that the seed needed to be multiplied over the winter so that enough would be available for seeding the following spring, said celebrated plant breeder Keith Downey, whose work breeding canola helped shape the province’s landscape and economy.
It was Mallough, a graduate of the University of Saskatchewan’s agriculture college and a longtime crop inspector and Agriculture Canada employee, who was given the responsibility of taking the seed south to find suitable growers and land, as well as someone to combine and clean the seed.
Mallough died last month at the age of 87.
“He had to scramble to find land because we were a little late getting it down there,” said Downey. “Quite a bit of the land had already been contracted or seeded. Not every farmer wanted to grow this crop that he had never seen before.”
There were problems. It was a cold winter in California, with the risk of frost, and it wasn’t easy to transport it back, said Downey. There was even talk of the Canadian Air Force flying it back for Canadian producers in the spring.
The rapeseed crop, then numbering five million acres, would be completely turned over to these lower erucic acid varieties — Oro and Span— over the next two years, said Downey.
“The multiplication and changing over of the crop in an extremely short time was pivotal,” he said. “There was a possibility that if we didn’t have that, that we could lose our markets.”
Glen Beck, a relative of Mallough’s, said Agriculture Canada played an important role in the crop’s development.
“If, for example, that had been partnered with Monsanto, farmers would be buying their seed from a private company and of course the entire distribution of proceeds from the project would’ve changed somewhat more dramatically,” he said.
“You’d have a very wealthy private company and some less wealthy farmers.”
Mallough would again contribute to a winter increase project in California during the latter half of the 1970s.
This time it was to help produce a seed that would allow crushers to produce meal with a lower glucosinolate content for livestock feed without blending it.
“You could use it directly, which changed the equation in terms of how much oil they could produce,” said Downey.
“Because before that time, the amount of oil they could produce was really limited by how much meal they could sell. Now that lid was taken off.”
