The Canadian Wheat Board is expanding a market development project to prove to pasta connoisseurs that Canadian durum can make luxury spaghetti that is “molto buono.”
And to ensure it has enough durum to meet the demand raised by last year’s efforts, the board will offer an identity-preserved delivery program for AC Melita durum this year.
The durum, registered in 1994, joins AC Karma, a Canada Prairie Spring white wheat, and Glenlea, an extra strong wheat, in the board’s stable of special delivery contract program grains in 1998.
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Earl Geddes, head of market development for the board, said the durum marketing plan is designed to capture a share of the high strength gluten market.
“The marketplace for this type of durum wheat is difficult to measure, but globally there is probably a market for 200,000 tonnes out of a total durum market of six million tonnes … . It tends to be used in high value products and we are interested in being in that market,” he said.
Some pasta manufacturers want higher gluten strength durum so they can run the machines that extrude spaghetti and other long pastas at high speeds and quickly dry the product without appearance-damaging checking on the product surface.
Protein affects gluten strength and AC Melita has high protein and high gluten strength, Geddes said. Internationally it will compete with so-called desert durums grown in Arizona under irrigation and durums grown in Australia and France.
To get a contract, farmers must use pedigreed seed. Given the stock available, Geddes expects production of AC Melita this year could be about 30,000 tonnes.
The contracting program allows the board to know exactly how much grain it will have to sell so that it won’t offer buyers more than it can get.
It is good for farmers, he said, because the board guarantees acceptance of all of the top two grades of AC Melita grown under the contract.
“So you have a guaranteed delivery contract and there is a storage payment scale that is similar to what is used in malting barley.”
Breeding work continues at Agriculture Canada’s Swift Current research centre to develop new varieties that are even stronger.
Small samples from the more promising lines will be sent to 14 customers around the world for testing this year, Geddes said.
He is not sure how many more years the special contract programs will run for Glenlea and AC Karma.
There had been some thought to ending the Glenlea program because of its success.
“Then just as you’re doing that we get a couple of new customers who bite on the market development work we’ve done in other parts of the world … so we need the program to make sure that if we execute a commercial test in those customers’ mills, we have the Glenlea available for them.”
The Karma program has successfully developed markets in Asia and the Middle East where it is often used as a component in the grist, along with harder wheats. Its superior agronomic characteristics could result in it accounting for most of the class’s acreage in 1999, making a contracting program needless, Geddes said.
