HIGH BLUFF, Man. – Steve Meister can give an hour-long pitch about what he sees as the benefits of hybrid canola.
But the communications manager for AgrEvo Canada Inc. is the first to admit that farmers have to see the benefits for themselves before they’ll embrace new, expensive hybrid varieties.
“No one’s going to go out and pay double the seed price unless you go out there and demonstrate to them that it actually puts more money in his pocket,” said Meister.
That’s why the company seeded acres of test plots and trials of Invigor hybrid canola across the Prairies this summer, said Meister, as he strolled around the company’s research farm near Portage la Prairie, Man.
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The chemical company got into the seed business with herbicide tolerant varieties in 1995. This year, with more than two million acres seeded, its Innovator variety is the first or second-largest Argentine variety seeded on the Prairies, Meister said.
But when AgrEvo bought the Belgian company Plant Genetic Systems last year, it inherited new technology for creating hybrids.
Its plant breeders have linked the herbicide-tolerant gene to sterility in male plants. They can then spray out plants incapable of producing hybrid seed.
“In a hybrid, every plant in the field is the same, genetically,” Meister said, explaining the crop ends up uniform.
AgrEvo sold all of its small supply of Invigor seed in Manitoba this spring. Farmers planted about 200,000 acres of two longer-season varieties
By this fall, it will be selling shorter-season hybrid varieties in Saskatchewan and Alberta as well.
So far, the hybrid is making the best of a less-than-ideal growing season in the southwestern part of the province, said Rob Bahry, field research and development specialist for the company.
“It seems that the hybrids are performing better under drought stress than the open-pollinated varieties,” Bahry said.
“We certainly saw that once you get the crop out of the ground, the hybrids really take off quicker than the open-pollinated.”
But Meister said farmers are most interested in yields. In trials, Invigor varieties have yielded 15 to 20 percent higher than check varieties.
“I think the rubber will hit the road, so to speak, with yields,” said Meister.
He thinks higher yields justify the cost of Invigor – $4.75 a pound compared to $2.25 a pound for herbicide-tolerant, open-pollinated varieties.
One-time use
Because hybrid seed is only uniform for the first generation, farmers will meet with disaster if they hold some back to plant the next spring, or try to pass it off as common seed.
During a mid-July visit, hybrid canola didn’t look much different from its open-pollinated cousins.
Bahry said the company is comparing how the yields react to different levels of nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus, as well as different seeding dates and rates.
AgrEvo hopes to publish preliminary results in the fall.
While Meister said hybrid canola varieties will dominate the fields of the future, AgrEvo is hedging its bets by continuing to develop new open-pollinated varieties.
“Maybe there’s always going to be a segment of the population who doesn’t want to pay the high inputs that hybrid farming may entail,” added Bahry.
In its research facilities in Saskatoon, the company is adding bT genes to canola to make it resistant to diamondback moths and bertha army worms.
Meister said researchers are also looking at anti-shattering genes and oil modifications.
“These particular advances will most likely only be put in hybrids,” said Meister.
“If we’ve spent millions of dollars developing these seeds, we want to collect revenue from someone who is making a profit from … our intellectual property.
“Hybrids is a very elegant way of doing that, because he gets higher yields, and he can’t reseed or sell the seed again.”
