SASKATOON – Two new lentil varieties have excited the “grandfather of lentils.”
Al Slinkard, a prominent pulse crop researcher, thinks so highly of a new red lentil variety, developed at the Crop Development Centre at the University of Saskatchewan, that he’s asking for its early release to growers.
Slinkard will ask the expert committee, in charge of granting registration to new varieties, to register the red lentil known as C8L32-AR-R after only two years of data collection. Three years is the norm.
The Crop Development Centre funded a winter breeding program in South America in efforts to increase breeding stock of the lentil.
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“We took valuable money out of our crop budget to go to make it available,” Slinkard told about 1,000 people at the Saskatchewan Pulse Crop Development Board seminar during Crop Production Week. “I think it has potential for 100,000 acres,” said Slinkard.
The new variety yields about 10 percent lower than Eston but is resistant to ascochyta blight, the biggest disease problem in lentils.
“The economic loss (from ascochyta) is staggering,” said Bert Vandenberg, also of the Crop Development Centre.
In an industry worth more than $100 million, the economic losses are in the tens of millions of dollars. Because of wet cool conditions in the past year much of the lentil seed available is “heavily infected” with ascochyta, said Vandenberg.
Researchers are hoping Laird, the industry standard, will also be ascochyta-resistant soon.
The other lentil variety proposed for release is Spanish Brown Mimic. It is also resistant to ascochyta blight.
Unlike the red lentil, this type of lentil is aimed at a niche market. There are about 15,000 acres of Spanish Brown grown in the United States under contract. The Spanish Brown Mimic would be Canada’s competitive seed variety in the marketplace.
It’s called a mimic because the coat on some of the seeds is darker than the original Spanish Brown.
Both varieties will be released under exclusive contract so only one company will have the right to market the lentil for five years.
