Green and yellow peas | Reports indicate seeds are being mixed during harvest or cleaning
Yellow peas are showing up in green pea fields, which has some growers seeing red.
Denis Gregoire, president of Gregoire Seed Farms Ltd. in North Battleford, Sask., has heard a few re-ports of growers upset about contamination of their green pea fields.
It is a big concern for them because of the substantial price premium for green peas over yellow peas, which Stat Publishing said amounted to $5.25 per bushel last week.
Gregoire said some farmers think the problem lies with pedigreed seed.
Tom Warkentin, a pea breeder with the University of Saskatchewan’s Crop Development Centre, said it is unlikely that it is a problem at his end because breeder seed is released with high purity.
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Gregoire said the Canadian Food Inspection Agency inspects his crops before they are sold to farmers.
Warkentin said the most likely explanation is that yellow pea seed is getting mixed in with green pea seed at the planting, harvesting, binning or seed cleaning phases of the farming operation.
It’s also possible, although unlikely, that volunteer yellow pea plants are growing in the green pea crop, he said in an email.
Warkentin said there is also a chance that a green pea variety out-crossed with a yellow pea variety in a nearby field, but the rate of out-crossing is low.
Gregoire had another possible explanation: bleaching in the field.
Pods can be split open when growers use ground rig sprayers for fall desiccation, which makes them prone to bleaching. It has happened on Gregoire’s farm.
“They’ll bleach out and look like a yellow pea,” he said.
However, he agrees with Warkentin that the most probable cause is inadvertent mixing of the two classes of peas.
Gregoire knows of one customer who originally thought there was something wrong with the green pea seed he bought but later discovered that yellow peas had stuck to the walls of a bin that had been improperly cleaned and later used to store green pea seed.
“He said he had contaminated himself,” said Gregoire.
The issue remains a big frustration for growers whose green peas are either heavily discounted or rejected at the processing plant.
